Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Novels/Science fiction task force/Archive 1

Graphic

 * Please, please, please, make us a different label for WikiProjectNovels banners! I'm trying to fight editors who deny that "sci fi" is anything but witless UFO crap, and what do I get if I tag a novel as science fiction? A green UFO alien!
 * Above copied from main page
 * I'm not sure I can find a better one at present - does anyone have a better recommendation. I have been looking in here [] for samples. :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  08:15, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The planet Saturn? Even a simple "SF" (in Caslon Bold, perhaps) would be less embarrassing. -- Orange Mike 13:54, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
 * How about [[Image:Saturn, Earth size comparison.jpg|40px]] as an alternative. :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  14:33, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm down with that. I have a somewhat similar image on the "I read SF" userbox for my userpage, crafted at my request so fans could proclaim their SF readership without any UFO alien imagery. -- Orange Mike 14:51, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I have changed the main template and also the Userbox image to suit. Hope that answers the question. Would you like to signup to the WikiProject and the Task force and get more envolved.! :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  15:26, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Anthology category?
Looks like you could do with an anthology category.--Pleasantville 13:18, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
 * There is one, here: Category:Science fiction anthologies. There is a lot to be done to improve the anthology pages though. - Reaverdrop ( talk /nl) 01:30, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I have covers for some of our books on Flickr, though not all in resolutions desirable for WP. Also, for purposes of author and novel entries, there are many author photos and cover scans in my Ascent of Wonder site. The cover scans we did ourselves from books in our own collection and the photos are also scanned from our own pix. (There is a photo and a cover for each author in the book.) I can license those under the GFDL. --Pleasantville 12:12, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a good idea, when you talk of resolutions, do you mean too high or too low. :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  08:06, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Categories
Should there be a category for science fiction books by subgenere? --Pleasantville 19:40, 6 September 2007 (UTC)


 * First we need to get the "science fiction books " one sorted out so that novels, short stories etc are distributed. but yes you are probably right. What had you in mind and we should debate this as widely as we can get across the Novels Project to get comment. :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  07:23, 7 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Frankly, no; it's hard enough when many Wikipedia editors won't accept that a book is SF at all. I think it would be a vast waste of our time, as we'd inevitably end up arguing over whether a given book is "hard SF" vs. "cyberpunk" vs. "space opera" vs. "feminist SF"; after all, are we not fen? -- Orange Mike 16:37, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Winston Science Fiction
Hey all! I'm working on creating a parent article for the Winston Science Fiction set and a corresponding complete set of articles for each novel in the set. Most of you probably remember the "Winston Classics" from your early days as SF fans. I do believe this is a notable encyclopedic entry given the following facts:


 * The Winston set served as an introduction to SF for a lot of future fans
 * The set includes works by many famous authors
 * The first edition of the set was illustrated (dust jackets) by many famous SF artists
 * The set has become a fairly rare collectors item and now has significant monetary value

Please check out my user page where you can find drafts of these articles. I will continue to plod along on my own, but some enthusiastic help from the SF task force would be appreciated! Thanks! FusionKnight 16:35, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Subgenre definitions
It seems to me that there could be a productive discussion on how to better structure entries on literary subgenres. Most of such pages are pretty bad and devolve into ongoing skirmishes on what computer games do and do not fit the marketing label or on how long lists of representative works or writers should be.

Though I have some substantial expertise on subgenres such as hard sf and space opera, I gave up trying to contribute a few months ago because of what are essentially structural problems with how genres get defined when an ad hoc group does it without guidance.

Could we make it better? Is this worth a discussion? Should there be a project on the subject? Or is this a lost cause? Or am I just way off-base? Thoughts? --Pleasantville (talk) 19:57, 6 December 2007 (UTC) aka Kathryn Cramer
 * Personally think this is highly worthwhile - not that I have any particular expertise in this area. One observation I have is that the naming of these genres appears haphazard and often against the natural meanings for the words used. "Science fiction" itself is a case in point. Often writing considered SF may have no "science" elements at all. :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  09:34, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Never mind the naming of New Weird . . . --Pleasantville (talk) 22:49, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Donald Keith
I just created a very stubbish article for Donald Keith, author of Mutiny in the Time Machine and Time Machine to the Rescue. Would it fall under the purview of this task force, or would it be better over at the Biography WP?--uɐɔlnʌɟoʞǝɹɐs 22:33, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Strickly speaking our scope ends with the prose itself - so it would go to the Bio project.:: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  11:39, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Richard C. Meredith
Hello, does sbdy have more info than what I could find? I did not know about this writer, then I just read At the narrow passage and I think it is a great sf story, and suggest you read it. Then I discovered he died when he was only 41... --Frankesko (talk) 20:05, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Is anybody from the Task Force still alive? --Frankesko (talk) 23:44, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes but consider no one might have a comment to make on your question. Most are focused on the business of editing the articles. :: Kevinalewis  : (Talk Page) /(Desk)  09:06, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, sure, to be honest I was not talking of my question only. --Frankesko (talk) 13:25, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * If you check the contributions for the members of the task force, you'll find that many of us have been busy on SF stuff (I had to create an article on Virginia Kidd from scratch, for example), but don't hang on this page much. -- Orange Mike  |  Talk  14:37, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Collaboration of the Month: Cities in Flight
The new Novels Collaboration of the Month is Cities in Flight, by James Blish. However, the novel currently redirects to the author's article. Please help to create and develop an article on the novel. Cheers. – Liveste (talk • edits) 01:19, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Undersea Trilogy
Hi, the Undersea Trilogy article looks a bit unencyclopedic. The plot summaries look as if they've been copied from marketing blurbs. --Kjoonlee 10:10, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I trimmed the plot summaries to make them more npov, added some links, and fixed up the See Also section. Since I haven't read these books, however, I don't think there is much more I can do.  Zombie Hunter Smurf (talk) 14:45, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Also I think someone should check out Attack from Atlantis. Its linked to the Undersea Trilogy article and was created by the same who guy who wrote that article.  Zombie Hunter Smurf (talk) 01:21, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme
As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.
 * The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
 * The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
 * A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot  ( Disable )  21:11, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Science fiction novels
Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 23:01, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Article alerts
This is a notice to let you know about Article alerts, a fully-automated subscription-based news delivery system designed to notify WikiProjects and Taskforces when articles are entering Articles for deletion, Requests for comment, Peer review and other workflows (full list). The reports are updated on a daily basis, and provide brief summaries of what happened, with relevant links to discussion or results when possible. A certain degree of customization is available; WikiProjects and Taskforces can choose which workflows to include, have individual reports generated for each workflow, have deletion discussion transcluded on the reports, and so on. An example of a customized report can be found here.

If you are already subscribed to Article Alerts, it is now easier to report bugs and request new features. We are also in the process of implementing a "news system", which would let projects know about ongoing discussions on a wikipedia-wide level, and other things of interest. The developers also note that some subscribing WikiProjects and Taskforces use the  parameter, but forget to give a link to their alert page. Your alert page should be located at "Wikipedia:PROJECT-OR-TASKFORCE-HOMEPAGE/Article alerts". Questions and feedback should be left at Wikipedia talk:Article alerts.

Message sent by User:Addbot to all active wiki projects per request, Comments on the message and bot are welcome here.

Thanks. — Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}<sub style="margin-left:-4.0ex;">κοντριβς – WP Physics} 09:39, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)

World War Z
World War Z is currently under review to become a Good Article. Any help you can provide to improve the article would be greatly appreciated. Zombie Hunter Smurf (talk) 23:32, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Dune character merge
Is there anyone familiar with the Dune books who could merge Erasmus into List of Dune characters, as per the AfD closure? Fences &amp;  Windows  01:25, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Could someone provide guidance to those writing the article Fantasy Magazine?
The article is too promotional as it stands. I have left suggestions on the Talk page, but since I consider their material for the Year's Best Fantasy I don't want to be involved in specific tweaking of the article to get the tone right. --Pleasantville (talk) 13:01, 24 November 2009 (UTC) aka Kathryn Cramer

Can someone look at ? Someone wants to roll Enemy Mine (film) onto it. I think it was improperly merged away, since someone merged it into a new anthology The Enemy Papers (2005), while this novella was published in 1980, and republished in longer novel form in the 80's; and it is a Hugo and Nebula award winner so should have sufficient notability to stand on its own. I don't think the anthology has sufficient notability to survive a deletion challenge. 76.66.197.17 (talk) 07:05, 2 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Someone moved it to Enemy Mine (novella) and I've restored the article. 76.66.197.17 (talk) 07:23, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Request for comment on Biographies of living people
Hello Wikiproject! Currently there is a discussion which will decide whether wikipedia will delete 49,000 articles about a living person without references, here:

Requests for comment/Biographies of living people

Since biographies of living people covers so many topics, nearly all wikiproject topics will be effected.

The two opposing positions which have the most support is:
 * 1) supports the deletion of unreferenced articles about a living person, User:Jehochman
 * 2) opposes the deletion of unreferenced articles about a living person, except in limited circumstances, User:Collect

Comments are welcome. Keep in mind that by default, editor's comments are hidden. Simply press edit next to the section to add your comment.

Please keep in mind that at this point, it seems that editors support deleting unreferenced article if they are not sourced, so your project may want to pursue the projects below.

Tools to help your project with unreferenced Biographies of living people
If you don't already have this and are interested in creating a list of articles which need cleanup for your wikiproject see: Cleanup listings A list of examples is here
 * List of cleanup articles for your project

If you are interested in moving unreferenced blp articles to a special "incubation page", contact me, User talk:Ikip
 * Moving unreferenced blp articles to a special "incubation pages"

If you are interested in watchlisting all of the unreferenced articles once you install Cleanup_listings, contact me, User talk:Ikip
 * Watchlisting all unreferenced articles

Ikip 02:14, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Help request for improving the Lensman article
I'd like to do a thorough re-write of the "Lensman" article to improve the quality, but I have not a regular contributor to Wikipedia, and would prefer to do this in collaboration with one or more who are part of the WikiProject Novels/Science fiction task force.

Is there an online forum where I could consult with the Task Force? If not, I invite anyone who is a member to contact me directly at []--Lensman003 (talk) 23:27, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced living people articles bot
Okip  02:49, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Do some people have author specific bibliographies (or even good more general SF bibliographies) to share information from?
I have 2-3 excellent bibliographies for Philip K. Dick plus a lot of reliable biographical material, interviews and other information sources. I don't have anything nearly so extensive for other authors and can't seem to locate some good SF reference works (like SF encyclopedias) I know I have packed away somewhere. PKD has been my favorite SF author for about 45 years but I'd certainly like to branch out to editing articles on some of the many other F&SF authors and their works. Particularly interested in info on bibliographical first publications in the 1950s and 1960s so I can make definitive statements about works in the public domain and perhaps contribute scans/stories for other Wiki projects (Commons and Wikisource) from magazines or anthologies. Amazing amount of good quality, very rare public domain material from that period including a lot by notable authors that may never have even been reprinted. I've been away from Wikipedia for awhile but should be getting more active again and learning how to create the .djvu format from scans needed for proofing references of PD stories submitted to Wikisource.

I don't seem to have much talent for plot synopsises and themes but apparently more interest or willingness to reference than many editors judging by articles I've been looking at. In addition to bibliographical info, scans of tables of contents and copyright notices uploaded to Commons would be nice to verify first publications and help in copyright renewal searchs. Of course, I'd be happy to share information I have and pre-1978 to early eighties anthologies tend to have good information about original publications of contents. Once I've got the scanning and conversion to .djvu down I'd probably be happy to contribute the occasional .djvu scan with a UC OCR of a requested public domain story that someone else has enough interest to proof and improve the OCR from UnCorrected to a very high quality scan. Scanning is far faster and easier than proofing and correcting a scan. ;-)

Authors and works from about 1940 to present are of interest also. The 50s and 60s are mainly a focus because I have a lot of magazines and books from then and that is a period where I may be able to combine my interests in SF and restoring public availability of public domain works during the lifetimes of people who will be interested in reading them. BTW, some of the short story synopsises I've read have had serious factual errors. I urge people to review some for stories they are familiar with and have copies of for reference. Refrigerator Heaven (talk) 10:25, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Category:Science fiction themes and Category:Science fiction concepts
FYI, these two categories have been proposed to be merged, see Categories_for_discussion/Log/2010_May_22

70.29.210.155 (talk) 04:41, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Portal:Speculative fiction nominated to be featured portal
Portal:Speculative fiction is now a Featured portal candidate. Please come participate in the discussion here. Thank you for your time. ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe ·  Join WikiProject Japan ! 07:51, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
 * For anyone who is interested, Portal:Speculative fiction is now a featured portal! Thanks to everyone who participated and helped in any way. I really appreciate it. ··· 日本穣 ? · 投稿  · Talk to Nihonjoe ·  Join WikiProject Japan ! 19:27, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Stub tagging and out of date assessments
Recently I have been auto-tagging articles about novels which have been assessed as stubs by WPNovels, some of the assessments of these pages are out of date, please help sort the articles and screen for out of date assessments at Category:Novel stubs, Thank you, Sadads (talk) 15:50, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Dune stubs
Greetings! A stub template or category which you created has been nominated for renaming or deletion at Stub types for deletion. The stub type most likely doesn't meet Wikipedia requirements for a stub type, through failure to meet standards relating to the name, scope, current stub hierarchy or likely size, as explained at Stub. Please feel free to make any comments at WP:SFD regarding this stub type, and in future, please consider proposing new stub types first at WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals! This message is a boilerplate, left here as a courtesy, and should not be considered personal in nature. Dawynn (talk) 15:44, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Invasion (Russian Novel)


The article Invasion (Russian Novel) has been proposed for deletion&#32; because of the following concern:
 * A search for references (Invasion "Mihail Ahmanov") failed to find suffifient support for this article to meet the requirements of WP:N and WP:V

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:50, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Peer review/volunteers
There are no volunteer peer reviewers listed as specializing in science fiction. If anyone is interested in helping review science fiction-related articles, please add your name to Peer review/volunteers. Viriditas (talk) 08:52, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Stub type
Greetings! A stub template or category which you created has been nominated for renaming or deletion at Stub types for deletion. The stub type most likely doesn't meet Wikipedia requirements for a stub type, through failure to meet standards relating to the name, scope, current stub hierarchy or likely size, as explained at Stub. Please feel free to make any comments at WP:SFD regarding this stub type, and in future, please consider proposing new stub types first at WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals! This message is boilerplate, left here as a courtesy, and should not be considered personal in nature.

See discussion for Dawynn (talk) 15:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

The Clone Republic Series
I would like to ask some help on the discussion of the creation of articles about the books in The Clone Republic Saga.

There is one single article about the first book that talks a little about all the other books. It's not very well written and has a lot of plot problems and unnecessary spoilers.

I tried creating an article for the second book in an atempt to have one objective article for all the 7 books but user Blanchardb thinks the page shouldn't exist and insists on putting it up for deletion. There is a discussion going on at this link.

I would appreciate any help. Thanks

--Frank (talk) 16:38, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Why does this article exist?
While Venus Equilateral may be one of the best examples of classic hard science fiction ever - in fact I am about to order the series, which is how I came to find the article - there does not seem to be any reason for the article Venus Equilateral (collection), which doesn't seem to add anything - or if it does, it should be folded into the main article. This seems to be what you guys do, and is rather outside my expertise, so I thought I'd bring this up.Mzk1 (talk) 22:15, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

New Wave science fiction
I've already posted this on the science fiction wikiproject page, but it can't hurt to put it here as well. I'm engaged in a complete restructuring of the article for New Wave science fiction which, while it has been extensively referenced and is very detailed, is a terrible mess in terms of structure of layout. I'm a little concerned about the amount of unilateral action this seems to involve, so I'm working slowly - one change per day, or thereabouts - and I would appreciate any feedback or assistance you might care to give.Euchrid (talk) 03:58, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Black Man's Burden
Hello. I have added an article for Mack Reynolds' novella Black Man's Burden and plan to continue working on his North Africa series by creating articles for both Border Breed nor Birth and The Best Ye Breed. These are among some of Reynolds most popular and innovative works, and he himself was a remarkably popular author during the 60s and 70s (he was voted most popular author in several science-fiction magazine polls). In the long run (2013), I would like to create a Wikipedia school project that covers his most popular short stories.

While I attempted to follow the style guidelines for novels, I did include a character section because it was quite hard to include one key fact--that the black fieldworkers are all highly educated (especially for the 1960s)--as part of the plot; it got too cluttered. Since Reynolds goes out of his way to point out each character's educational attainment, I thought it was something that should not be left out of the article. Also, I do not refer to the fieldworkers as "African-American" because that is not the term Reynolds uses since it was not in vogue until the 1980s. --Drx (talk) 22:31, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

UPDATE: I have added an article for Mack Reynolds' novella Border, Breed nor Birth. Coming up is The Best Ye Breed.--Drx (talk) 14:57, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

UPDATE : I have added an article for Mack Reynolds' novella The Best Ye Breed.Drx (talk) 20:30, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

UPDATE: I have revised the article for Mack Reynolds' short story "Black Sheep Astray."Drx (talk) 23:40, 19 November 2012 (UTC)