This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Watership Down article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1Auto-archiving period: 365 days |
Watership Down has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
Current status: Good article |
This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I find it shocking that this article deals with a few complaints against Adams about misogyny in rabbit culture in detail, but doesn't mention at all the many proposed allegories about political structures which are often analyzed, whether Adams intended them or not; the warren of the shining wires as communism, Woundwart's warren of fascism, or the idealized socialism of Hazel's new warren. Not even a whisper about WWII allegory, with Kehaar the air force and Woundwart the Hitler.
I'm not saying that these are clear cut or even crucial, but that there is considerably more debate and discussion about such allegories in a wide sense than there is any discussion about the does' place in the warren.
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Fiver(WatershipDown) and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 22#Fiver(WatershipDown) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Steel1943 ( talk) 05:35, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
So I love this book, and have done every since I first read it in the 80s, so I'm not super excited about pointing out the issue I am about to raise, but I think it may be the simplest single thing to quickly and significantly improve the WP:READABILITY of the article: we need to drastically cut down the character section, I think. This article is already well over the WP:LENGTH advisory for a standalone article, and about a fifth of it is the character section alone. I appreciate that the way the story summary is structured is to delay the character section, do a bare bones summary of the overall plot, and then fill in the detail in the character specific entries. It's an interesting approach and I do think it serves the article well in this case.
But the section is still far too long. We don't need a standalone paragraph for virtually every last named character in the book--35 such characters listed in the section, with 34 paragraphs (for some reason Acorn and Speedwell have to double up--are they the Watership Down equivalent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?). It's just way too much. That said, there's little besides quasi-subjective assessment of the presence of characters in the book to inform a firm line of where a necesary vs. unecesary character resides, but I'd like to suggest removing the following (I'll also asterisk edge cases where perhaps a simple reduction of the content dedicated to them might be a better option):
Most of these might warrant a single sentence, either listed (admittedly awkwardly in such short form, compared against the others) in the character section or worked into a revised story summary. The edge cases might warrant 2 sentences, maybe 3. But others might easily be removed altogether; afterall, there are a very small handful of other unmentioned characters of similar levels of tertiary importance already (Lucy and the doctor; the cat; the faithful but cretinous dog from the El-ahrairah culture tales, forget his name; some additional rabbits at Cowslip's warren). In any event, this would still leave a robust number of characters with minimal to no trimming of their descriptions (I'll add the edge cases in here with asterisks again, for overlap):
That's still potentially well more than 20 paragraphs for a character section, which would still make this one of the largest such sections for any novel on the project, I think. Any thoughts on this? SnowRise let's rap 10:18, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Shouldn't the prologue be added to the plot summary? I have a feeling that it should be included... Visokor ( talk) 19:50, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Watership Down article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1Auto-archiving period: 365 days |
Watership Down has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
Current status: Good article |
This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I find it shocking that this article deals with a few complaints against Adams about misogyny in rabbit culture in detail, but doesn't mention at all the many proposed allegories about political structures which are often analyzed, whether Adams intended them or not; the warren of the shining wires as communism, Woundwart's warren of fascism, or the idealized socialism of Hazel's new warren. Not even a whisper about WWII allegory, with Kehaar the air force and Woundwart the Hitler.
I'm not saying that these are clear cut or even crucial, but that there is considerably more debate and discussion about such allegories in a wide sense than there is any discussion about the does' place in the warren.
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Fiver(WatershipDown) and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 22#Fiver(WatershipDown) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Steel1943 ( talk) 05:35, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
So I love this book, and have done every since I first read it in the 80s, so I'm not super excited about pointing out the issue I am about to raise, but I think it may be the simplest single thing to quickly and significantly improve the WP:READABILITY of the article: we need to drastically cut down the character section, I think. This article is already well over the WP:LENGTH advisory for a standalone article, and about a fifth of it is the character section alone. I appreciate that the way the story summary is structured is to delay the character section, do a bare bones summary of the overall plot, and then fill in the detail in the character specific entries. It's an interesting approach and I do think it serves the article well in this case.
But the section is still far too long. We don't need a standalone paragraph for virtually every last named character in the book--35 such characters listed in the section, with 34 paragraphs (for some reason Acorn and Speedwell have to double up--are they the Watership Down equivalent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?). It's just way too much. That said, there's little besides quasi-subjective assessment of the presence of characters in the book to inform a firm line of where a necesary vs. unecesary character resides, but I'd like to suggest removing the following (I'll also asterisk edge cases where perhaps a simple reduction of the content dedicated to them might be a better option):
Most of these might warrant a single sentence, either listed (admittedly awkwardly in such short form, compared against the others) in the character section or worked into a revised story summary. The edge cases might warrant 2 sentences, maybe 3. But others might easily be removed altogether; afterall, there are a very small handful of other unmentioned characters of similar levels of tertiary importance already (Lucy and the doctor; the cat; the faithful but cretinous dog from the El-ahrairah culture tales, forget his name; some additional rabbits at Cowslip's warren). In any event, this would still leave a robust number of characters with minimal to no trimming of their descriptions (I'll add the edge cases in here with asterisks again, for overlap):
That's still potentially well more than 20 paragraphs for a character section, which would still make this one of the largest such sections for any novel on the project, I think. Any thoughts on this? SnowRise let's rap 10:18, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Shouldn't the prologue be added to the plot summary? I have a feeling that it should be included... Visokor ( talk) 19:50, 18 March 2024 (UTC)