Blood War and other "Wars" articles on Wikipedia

[Voadam]

For the Reckoning, The tome of horrors books have stuff expanding on that initial Dragon article including Satan and portions of his exile court. Also that initial citation needed should link to a cite for the dragon article I believe.

At the end where the link asks if the geryon vestige story is original research there should probably be a link to either Tome of magic or the WotC web enhancement where the geryon vestige shows up (I forget whethere it was in ToM or an enhancement).

 

[JohnRTroy]

Personally, I think The Blood War is a horrible WP article.

I'm of the belief that you should not catalog everything from every piece of fiction into it's own WP. I think we need to catalog the game, it's famous creators, and it's most famous products lines.

WP should not be a replacement for the actual books and/or sourcebooks. I think the worst examples of WP articles about D&D are stuff that's just paraphrased from various TSR/WoTC products. I hate the fact that people want to create an article for every D&D monster or deity, for instance.

The Superman article is a good example (IMO) on covering a fictional character--these entries should not be "in universe" but rather cover the impact on society. Cthullu is a good article about an archetypical character.

BOZ, in cleaning up WP, I think you should look at an article like this and just say "let's delete this". In some areas, I don't think you should fight the battle and work on figuring out what's a high priority. The Blood War should just be a paragraph or two under Planescape or a larger D&D article or something like that.

 

[JohnRTroy]

I'm really unclear on their sourcing policies. The page you link to seems to say they want only written non WotC/TSR commentary on the source material to establish notability? Actual cites to the D&D products are not wanted? What about reviews of the books containing blood war issues?

The whole reasoning for this is WP frowns on presenting "in universe" styles of writing. Since this is an encyclopedia, it's meant to be a research tool to find out information about a subject and what impact it has on culture, etc. Put it this way, if you article on a character reads like a handbook or gaming entry it's not likely to satisfy the nebulous "notability" requirement.

Mr. Collin's request for third-party sources unrelated to the source is to figure out notability. That is, is this well known enough to warrant an entry, or is it fancruft. Do scholars and news media talk about these specific subjects, for instance? Gary Gygax and D&D qualify as something the general public has discussed, for instance. A character like Drizz't is notable since the character is featured on NYT bestseller lists.

 

[BOZ]

I could do a comprehensive rewrite of the Blood War wiki article, and the sources exist to make it up to snuff for mainstream wiki standards of sourcing, but having the time to actually do so is something else. And I'm loathe to put in a ton of work on wikipedia when a week later some deletionist (or one specific accountant from Britain) may spam it with random tags and try to nuke it because they don't like the topic. Plus, I come close to pushing the edge of wikipedia policy on conflict of interest on planar D&D topics because I've worked on some more recent things that while relatively small in scope, would be ammo for random deletion.

Understood, man. Too bad!

I don't know, maybe BOZ or someone else that might have a similar set of material might be helped with some pointers which dragons or supplements contain information?

That would solve the problem.

 

[BOZ]

At www.rpg.net there is a review of faces of fiends with a brief reference to the blood war.

Another one in the review of Warriors of Heaven

Probably most relevant is the review of Hellbound the Blood Wars

Thanks, I'll look into everything you posted when I have a chance.