Forum:Canon & Books

Forum: The Situation Room > Canon & Books

Over at Talk:Bullpen I was wondering about a change to the wording of the canon policy, and also how we classify the 24 books. Basically, the canon policy currently states that only information from novels is allowed in IU articles, and yet lots of stuff from the 24: The Official CTU Operations Manual has been included, despite it being listed as a 'reference book'. Now I think books should be split into 'fiction' and 'non-fiction', and that wording be placed into the canon policy. But not owning the books myself, I'm not entirely sure where each one fits, so may need a hand sorting them - for example, it seems that 24: The Ultimate Guide contains both IU and OOU material - am I right in this assumption? Anyway, I just wanted to run the canon change and book pages change past the community, and also if anyone can help me sort them, cheers--Acer4666 18:18, March 19, 2011 (UTC)

The only fiction books are Findings at CTU, the Declassified novels, and the Operations Manual (other than the comics, of course). Everything else is strictly OOU information. Your suggesting of a rewording of the policy is an extremely good idea, Acer. --proudhug 00:53, March 20, 2011 (UTC)

Ok, just so everyone is clear on what I'm proposing before I go do it: every time the phrase "novels/comics/games" pops up (not just in the canon policy, also in places like On-screen kills by Jack Bauer), I'm gonna replace it with "fictional books/comics/games". Then I'm gonna re-name the Novels page "Fictional books" and the 24 reference books page "Non-fiction books". Also gonna move 24: The Official CTU Operations Manual from the non-fiction to the fiction page. Any problems with the wording, titles, etc., I'm open to suggestions, but if there's nothing in a few days I'll go ahead with this.--Acer4666 18:22, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

Haha, it's "fiction books" not "fictional books." The latter implies the books themselves aren't real. We don't want people trying to add David Palmer's unfinished autobiography here. Also, we should keep the OOU article titles OOU by calling them "Fiction 24 books" and "Non-fiction 24 books." --proudhug 18:41, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

Haha oh yeah, stupid me! yeah, inclusion of "24" sounds good to show they're OOU in the title--Acer4666 18:46, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

Oh actually I have a question about fiction books vs fictional books - is the "CTU operations manual" seen to be a book IU? ie in the Militära_underrättelse_och_säkerhetstjänsten article, it says that it was "mentioned" in the manual. So in some way it is a fiction book, and a fictional book, in some strange piece of meta-fiction?--Acer4666 19:00, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I guess that's another issue we haven't really dealt with. It is both IU and OOU, but separate items, not the same item. And by that I mean, the IU version wouldn't have references to "24" or "20th Century Fox" etc. at the beginning, while the OOU version does. And really, this is the exact same issue with [[Findings at CTU]. Findings even incorporates Marc Cerasini into the IU canon. Technically these should have separate articles, but since they're pretty much the same content, it would only be for the sake of completeness.

On a similar, yet completely off-topic note, I've been advocating for years that we have separate articles for "Season 1" and "Day 1" etc., since the actual Day itself is a specific IU series of events. No one's argued against it, but at the same time, no one has yet stepped up to create the IU pages. --proudhug 19:12, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

Am I right in thinking the terms "Day 1", "day 2" etc, are the one concession we make when writing IU pages to make them understandable for the everyday OOU reader? I don't think IU articles for them would quite work - what IU encyclopedia would chronicle a particular 24-hour period, focussing on a set of people who had a few interactions during the day? I think the events pages are the best way to handle season-wide story arcs.

I think the only season it would work for would be the first, as A) it all happens on one day, B) that is a significant, noteworthy day, the 2002 (or whenever) california primary, which could feasibly have an article about it.--Acer4666 19:51, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

We already have pages like "Jack Bauer on Day 1" so this would just be an all-encompassing "Events of Day 1" IU article, but merely named "Day 1" of course.

Well yeah, we split up character articles into sections for different days, and for articles where this would be too large we split into multiple articles for one character. We pick splitting it by days as the one concession we make. But we don't have a page called "events" that needs splitting into "events of day 1", etc. I think that sort of IU page, one that chronicles everything that happens in 24 ever, would be an IU equivalent to the 24 page. I'm considering whether I'm favour of that or not--Acer4666 20:23, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

Let's not do this. (It's madness.) The events of each day are outlined in the plot summary at each Season page. And as Acer says, we have amazing Category:Events articles which already fulfill this task. Proudhug if you want to make a strict line of separation between iu/oou, why not just create 2 different wikis, or 2 different namespaces? If the point is to be strictly IU, then Acer is correct: nobody can logically surmount the obstacle presented when you try to rationalize an iu encyclopedia article with an oou name. We have compromises — like linking to Season pages from IU stuff, and naming IU articles with "on Day #" for characters — and these compromises are good and necessary things.

Making matters worse, someone (I think I remember who, but I'm not 100% sure so I won't point my finger) went around awhile back without asking anybody and piped pretty much every [[Day #]] link to [[Season #|Day #]] merely because they were redirects... as if redirects were undesirable things. My point about bringing that up is, before that change was made, one could have merely rewrote the content for the Day # pages to fulfill your goal and they would have ceased being redirects. Now everyone would have to visit every single article on the project, determine which Season links are IU and which are OOU, and alter the links accordingly. Ignoring that needless drudgery, it doesn't accomplish anything. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 20:39, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid I really don't understand your argument, Rook. I'm trying to include both IU and OOU into one wiki, not separate them. I'm merely talking about including more information, or rather existing information in an additionally useful manner. Currently, there's no IU chronicle of the events of Day 2, for example. I agree the Events pages are amazing, and these would merely be an addition to those. Of course there'd be some overlap, but there's overlap all over the place. --proudhug 21:01, April 20, 2011 (UTC)

What I mean is, I don't see how an argument can be construed to validly make IU Day # pages. It's the same thing as Acer expressed: "what IU encyclopedia would chronicle a particular 24-hour period" that randomly starts at whatever odd time it might be. Perhaps before these Events articles started appearing, I would have supported IU Day # pages, but look how high we've raised the standard with work like the Nuclear fuel rods recovery crisis. Ultimately, we can be incredibly specific at those articles' details. The more useful goal would be to focus our energies on the specific Events/plot arc articles, and then have the "Day #" redirect to the Synopsis at each OOU season page, which will contain links to the appropriate number of overall plot arcs per season and a brief description. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 04:52, April 21, 2011 (UTC)

Well, they're obviously not random, though. A lot happens during each 24-hour "Day", much more than is offered in any of our current "event" articles (or at the very least, it's a different selection of information). Each season is a comprehensive 24-hour story on its own, and all of the events during that 24-hour period usually have significance to each other, otherwise the creators wouldn't have written/filmed them. Although it's never addressed on the show itself, it's an undeniable fact IU that every once in a while, there's an extremely high amount of crazy shit that goes down over the course of exactly 24-hours. In-universe, each of these "Days" has to have some significance to the world. And since we've already set the precedent of marking the events of these days for specific characters, it doesn't seem absurd to me in the least that the highlights and significance of each of these extremely eventful periods should deserve their own article. --proudhug 05:33, April 21, 2011 (UTC)

You may be ignoring my original point. Covering those 24-hour periods is not manageable because of all the stuff that happened before those Days as the set up to the events. One cannot suddenly go into a long digression about the past, explaining why all this stuff just happened, in an IU article. It would sound insane. It's an equally unworkable option to ignore the background events, because that's leaving a reader in the dark about major Okay but why is this stuff happening? questions that always come to mind. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 05:44, April 21, 2011 (UTC)

I know there's plenty of you who don't care for these books and find them a burden regardless but I can help with that once I'm done finishing all the Declassified books and they're simple to layout because unlike what reviewers will tell you, it all adds up due to being all before Day 1 and the authors working closely and organizing the timeline together.

Same with the comics (save for one which would've had to had been prior to Day 4 as it includes Bill prior to him ever meeting Bauer, which makes sense since Bauer is never in the same room as Bill). People deserve to at least see snapshots of the work, just like the Star Wars wikia. --Gunman6 19:20, June 18, 2012 (UTC)