Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Novels

Character lists and the use of bold
See discussion Talk Great Expectations and Project Novels. I suggest modifying the guideline for characters to read as follows:


 * 3.3 Characters
 * If appropriate, a character section would consist of brief character outlines, as opposed to a simple list. Characters' names should only be indented (though subsections may be used for lengthy descriptions); bold should not be used. Most articles do not need this section. Instead, a finely crafted plot summary is used to introduce the characters to the reader.

Publication dates for serialized novels
I suggested this here but just to check. I'd like to change the section on publication date to read:

The novel's earliest release, or publication in book form; if it was previously serialized, do not give the date of serialization. If not formally published, use the date written; this would be highly unusual for writing of notability.

CohenTheBohemian (talk) 04:21, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Proposal to replace "pages" for most books with a "words" count
The pages count for books, at the moment, is a near-useless way to gauge how long a book is, as pages aren't standardized and can have different amount of words depending on the text size. Dune (novel) for instance, is listed as having 896 pages, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is listed as being 766 pages. This is in contrary to the fact that Dune is actually a shorter work of fiction, being 187,240 words while the Harry Potter book is 257,154 words.

I will make the argument here that, for the most part there exists no encyclopedic value for how much pages the first edition of a book has, and thus should be mass-removed from all pages about novels. After all, the page counts for novels vary widely depending on the edition, and for books like Dune or The Lord of the Rings which get reprinted dozens of times in different formats, it can vary by hundreds of pages. However, there does exist encyclopedic value in the word count for the first edition of novels, as this isn't bound to font sizes and usually only changes if the author makes edits or changes to the content of the novel themselves.

Functionally speaking, this will entail adding a new "word count" parameter for the Books infobox. This word count will probably be rounded down to the nearest 100 amount of words, to account for minor variance. The majority of novel pages as they exist right now will have to be changed to remove page counts and introduce word counts, but I believe this will be useful for readers and introduce more encyclopedic value to the Wiki.

There will be an exception for some books- such as those that lack good E-Book versions, comic books that are standardized to appear similar across editions, and books like House of Leaves where a word count would be simply infeasible. These books should, of course, retain the page counts as they currently have them.

Note: Amended following a reasonable objection by @LEvalyn.

HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 21:36, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * @HadesTTW, how are you going to get word count? Schazjmd   (talk)  21:51, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I would expect that it could be done by just counting the words of an e-book, after verifying that it doesn't contain any textual differences from the first-edition. Starting from the first line to the last line.
 * Editors would then cite wherever did they get the e-book from- for example, if it was from Amazon. I know that's citing a primary source, but keeping WP:ALLPRIMARY in mind- even if we used secondary sources for word counts, they must have gotten the word count by just counting themselves.
 * I am aware that getting word counts for books will therefore be more complicated than getting page counts- which secondary sources currently just do by opening the last page and writing down the number. However, I'm sure that it isn't a hard enough process that we couldn't do it for most novel pages- barring the ones that don't have e-books or reliable word counts on the internet. HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 22:05, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * 1, A very large number of books would be functionally impossible to find word counts for, e.g., my most recent article A Spy on Mother Midnight; see the ebook here. 2, Even for works with plaintext ebooks, different word-counting software will produce different numbers based on, e.g., hyphenation, rendering one "true" wordcount difficult to determine.
 * I have no overwhelming objection, I suppose, to adding word count as an option (rounded to the nearest 100?) if folks find that a meaningful piece of information, but it's certainly not a replacement for page count. ~ L 🌸  (talk) 00:35, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

usual order of sections
I was surprised to see that there isn't a section on the typical order of sections with a novel page. For example, usually the background section comes first, then the plot summary, and afterwards themes, analysis, and then reception and adaptations. Does another page in the MOS address this? Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 19:55, 1 May 2024 (UTC)