Talk:The Lord of the Rings (1978 film)

Featured articleThe Lord of the Rings (1978 film) is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.
Main Page trophyThis article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on November 15, 2011.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
March 31, 2006Peer reviewReviewed
November 30, 2006Peer reviewReviewed
December 22, 2006Featured article candidateNot promoted
January 20, 2007Featured article candidatePromoted
September 28, 2007Featured article reviewKept
January 9, 2021Featured article reviewKept
Current status: Featured article


FA in need of review edit

This is a 2007 FA promotion that needs to be checked against current FA standards. Problems:

  • Do we need all those character actors listed? We have more than 40 names there, most of them are not notable;
  • There are several unsourced sentences in the text;
  • This is a blog, is it a reliable source?
  • The article needs significant citation clean-up, several of the citations don't mention the author or the publisher or a page range.

Article needs work to rise to current FA standards. RetiredDuke (talk) 23:00, 9 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

Addressed all those. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:47, 21 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Warren 1979 edit

Added as a ref. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:08, 2 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Nice, I wasn't sure if it would be usable at all for the article, but since it's a rare find and related to the movie I wanted to make sure others knew about it. Even more rare are non-English LOTR comic adaptations illustrated by Luis Bermejo, even references to them are few (i.e. http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/985-Tolkien-Comics.php )... Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 13:44, 3 June 2021 (UTC)Reply
Good work! Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:47, 3 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

Bakshi wasn't contacted before the Jackson film edit

This fact is mentioned so often, at some point I thought it was like a running joke. This clearly needs some copy editing. I am not saying this is unimportant, it and his reactions shows a lot. I just think it is mentioned far too often.--91.64.37.225 (talk) 10:03, 21 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

It's only put like that once, and it does not dominate the article. If you have specific suggestions for copy-editing, feel free to state them here. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:26, 21 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

reasons for deleting additions edit

On 9 January, User:Chiswick Chap reverted a small addition by an anonymous editor to the section on differences between the film and book that read `Legolas meeting the hobbits and Aragorn as they travel to Rivendell is a substitution for the character Glorfindel who likewise does not appear in the film.' The grounds for reversion were that it was an uncited addition.

I don't understand how this stated reason was consistent with policy. WP:NOCITE says that unsourced claims may be removed if contentious, and should otherwise be tagged, or have references added by the complainant. In this case, the claim is hardly contentious, and can be sourced directly from the plot summaries of the film and book (which, by convention, are not themselves sourced).

JCBradfield (talk) 13:28, 11 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Deriving such a statement from watching the film and reading the book would require making inferences about the differences, something we're not allowed to do under the original research rules. Such a claim would therefore have to be supported by a reliable source. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:12, 11 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for the reply. However, you have not addressed my queries: (1) the differences between plots are no different from a plot summary, (2) the appropriate response to an unsourced claim is to tag it (if dubious, which this isn't) or source it yourself, not to delete it. Morever, WP:OR is about drawing unsourced conclusions, or other analysis and synthesis. With regard to verifiable facts, it says

The prohibition against original research means that all material added to articles must be attributable to a reliable, published source, even if not actually attributed.

— WP:OR
So is it the (easily verifiable) observation of the difference that you objected to, or is the use of the word `substitution', which you understand as imputing a motivation to Bakshi, rather than being a description of a simple verifiable observation that Legolas(film) performs actions done by Glorfindel in the book? (The reason I'm curious about this is that countless Wikipedia pages, particularly in maths and the sciences, have vast amounts of common knowledge, or even rather specialized knowledge, without explicit citation, and that the dispute here (which I came across because I saw the other editor ranting about it) seems a far more stringent interpretation of OR than I see anywhere else. As a very occasional editor, I like to learn from more active editors how things work here.) JCBradfield (talk) 17:22, 11 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
JCBradfield I also saw the IP's rant, and figured I'd take a look. To start, the IP's original edits are a pretty clear violation of synthesizing material to reach a conclusion about "substitution". The IP didn't include a source saying Legolas was a substitution for Glorfindel, so even granting that each individual observation could be sourced to the material wouldn't allow a conclusion to be made about one standing in for the other. But there's one additional factor here that the IP completely failed to mention--the article has already made it to featured status, meaning it's gone through an exhaustive peer review process and is expected to maintain a much higher level of quality than other articles. You can take a look at WP:FACR to see the specific criteria, but suffice to say that every sentence is expected to be comprehensively sourced and anything that even faintly smells of WP:OR or WP:SYNTH will be removed. I'll also add that even in a world where this wasn't a featured article, articles about fictional properties like this tend to attract editors who want to add their own favorite factoid to the article. Over time this bloats those articles and so it's extremely common for experienced editors to revert those kinds of additions immediately, even given what you said about WP:NOCITE allowing for tags instead of removal. Alyo (chat·edits) 17:52, 13 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
Alyo Thank you, that's helpful. Though I still don't understand why plot summaries can be magicked out of nowhere! JCBradfield (talk) 16:16, 19 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

extensive documentation about that movie by folding ideas edit

I'm not used to english and customs of how to add to a page in wikipedia, but I would like to someone to add a link to

Folding Ideas - An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr_rb_pitHk — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.249.123.29 (talk) 17:03, 17 July 2022 (UTC)Reply