Talk:Extrasolar planets in fiction

This article was nominated for deletion on 13 April 2024. The result of the discussion was keep.

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Extrasolar planets in fiction article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1, 2, 3: 30 days

Popular Culture (inactive)

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Popular Culture, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Popular CultureWikipedia:WikiProject Popular CultureTemplate:WikiProject Popular CulturePopular Culture articles

Science Fiction Mid‑importance

	Speculative fiction portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Science Fiction, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of science fiction on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Science FictionWikipedia:WikiProject Science FictionTemplate:WikiProject Science Fictionscience fiction articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Cleanup Proposal - Why bother with this page at all? edit

Latest comment: 5 days ago17 comments7 people in discussion

I've just now stumbled across this page and skimmed the discussion on cleanup. One thing I don't think I've seen mentioned - Why is this a separate Wikipedia page at all? Most other Wikipedia pages I've seen have an In Fiction or In Popular Culture section listing references like these. I in fact got to this page from Tau Ceti, where the In Fiction section redirects to "Tau Ceti in Fiction" which then redirects here.

Why not just move each system's section to its own page, and let the relevance of any given reference be decided by editors of that page? This would seemingly solve many of the problems and be a good compromise on a lot of the proposals being thrown around on this talk page for the past 15 or so years. 2607:FEA8:7B63:D00:555F:6BE4:810A:F617 (talk) 15:11, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Gonna also tag in @Tarl N. and @Piotrus since you two seem to have been the most involved in the (relatively) most recent discussion. 2607:FEA8:7B63:D00:555F:6BE4:810A:F617 (talk) 15:14, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

(edit conflict) That is the precise opposite of what we should do. You may have noticed that the majority of those "in popular culture"/"in fiction" are absolutely atrocious pieces of junk. It's embarrassing, really. xkcd poked fun at this back in 2008. What we could (and, y'know, should) do is start enforcing Wikipedia's WP:Core content policies and remove the vast majority of this article for reasons including but not limited to misrepresenting sources and plagiarism. It's not like we cannot have high-quality articles on topics like these—Mars in fiction, Venus in fiction, and Sun in fiction are all WP:Featured articles—the decision has just been made not to in this particular instance. TompaDompa (talk) 15:24, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

That cartoon portrays the very extremes of "In popular culture", which are usually removed. In most cases the In popular culture sections are "popular" additions and, on good pages, are well presented and relevant to the page topic. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:32, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Whether or not that is true in the typical case—and I don't believe it is—moving the mess on this specific page to a bunch of others would not be an improvement. In my experience, the editors who maintain those articles are rather happy to have the garbage sequestered here, as it were. TompaDompa (talk) 15:57, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

I think having this giant article is kinda the reason a lot of this page is "garbage" - It's just so big and the format doesn't really incentivize keeping things organized. If the sections were on the much more frequently viewed and carefully edited pages for individual star systems it would be easier to keep a more organized and relevant list per-page. 2607:FEA8:7B63:D00:555F:6BE4:810A:F617 (talk) 18:18, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

The reason it is in such a sorry state is that cleanup has been deferred and, unfortunately, reverted. Bringing this up to at least a decent standard of quality would not be difficult or even that time-consuming, it just needs to be done and not reverted. TompaDompa (talk) 18:29, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

@TompaDompa Can youu link the revert? Perhaps we need a TNT-by-AFD? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 23:55, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

@Piotrus: It was back in December 2021, back and forth a bit. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stars+and+planetary+systems+in+fiction&date-range-to=2021-12-31&tagfilter=&action=history. This was the version I came up with, and this was the revert edit. TompaDompa (talk) 07:36, 13 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Most separate pages would fall afoul of WP:GNG and be deleted... I doubt anyone really wants this here. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 23:52, 12 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

I'm late to the party here, I've retired from Wikipedia, just noticed the notification. In the last go-around, a "cleanup" was attempted here, consisting of deleting all but six lines of the article. Many readers objected to that. The article was restored, and the same editor then proceeded to make several hundred edits, each deleting a few lines, ending at the same point of no meaningful text left. I made an attempt at creating a "list" article in table format based on the previous contents of the page. The reaction was that it was a non-starter, every single line in the table would be deleted. I don't know what motivated them, but deletion was very evidently the intent - the entire contents here were considered offensive and the only solution was to remove everything. I gave up and walked away, and others ended up reverting the article to the status quo ante. Tarl N. (discuss) 02:15, 13 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Ah. I see TompaDompa in this discussion was the original editor who wanted everything deleted. I'll walk away again. Tarl N. (discuss) 02:19, 13 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Had I wanted it deleted I would have brought it to AfD rather than cleaning it up. What I wanted—and still want—is for the article to abide by Wikipedia's WP:Core content policies and guidelines such as MOS:POPCULT and be, y'know, a good article rather than an outright terrible one. I daresay that the approach I took has a proven track record of working, inasmuch as it has produced no fewer than three WP:Featured articles on similar topics and several additional WP:Good articles. TompaDompa (talk) 08:27, 13 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

I am sorry to hear you retired. I hope you'll be back. That said, I've glanced at this mess of an article and I think it needs an AfD discussion - this is a terrible WP:NOTTVTROPES violation of mostly unferenced fancruft and OR :( Yes, we need to blow it up, and based on past experiences, I expect whatever TompaDompa was trying to do here was a good idea and it needs to be endorsed by the community discussion (at AfD probably, to also confirm there is no support for keeping the current version). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:20, 13 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Salutations all, I will say as a person of the internet, I find the current state of this article disappointing coming over from a different article and finding that this article has been 'cleaned up'. In its original format as a composite listing of stars appearing in fiction and the works in which they appear, messy though it may have been, it was a useful and interesting thing which could be explored or act as a means to move to related fiction and material. Want to hyperfocus nearby stars... adventure. I'd suggest that we move this article back to an earlier revision which included the vast number of stars with related media and other options or as an alternative, restore that list to a dedicated page off of this one. Of additional note, what is popular does change as subcultures shift and trends change. Many of the early popular fiction was not popular by mainstream standards but popular within its own scope. -Will update this later when I have more time and can sign in. 8:80 PM, 29 April 2024 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 169.237.221.56 (talk)

Hello person of the internet, I recommend you read Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stars and planetary systems in fiction, where this article was kept because of the improvements made during [that] discussion. Just to summarise the problems with the previous articles it was because it was an WP:IPC-violating, WP:INDISCRIMINATE collection of WP:V/WP:OR failure (The sort of thing better suited to TVTROPES than Wikipedia). Content on Wikipedia doesn't tend to be kept because WP:ITSUSEFUL or WP:ITSINTERESTING, when it fails other WP:PAGs.

And as a final point, the balance of content on this page shouldn't be decided based on its popularity but on a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. -WP:PROPORTION, Which I believe the TompaDompa's new version does.Cakelot1 ☞️ talk 06:46, 30 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

In particular, if you haven't, read the NOTTVTROPES essay, which has a list of examples. Nobody is denying the old version wasn't "cool" or "useful", but it also wasn't encyclopedic. Such content belongs on TV Tropes, and anyone, yourself included, dear anon ("person of the Internet"...), can copy it there. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:35, 30 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Just echoing the other comments here. There's lots of neat stuff on the internet, but it doesn't mean that Wikipedia should host it. Write an essay. Make a webpage. Edit TV Tropes. Wikipedia is based on a summary of what reliable, independent sources said about a subject. It serves this project to remove original research and other tangential, unreliable information. But it might serve other parts of the internet to put it there. Shooterwalker (talk) 16:01, 30 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Scope edit

Latest comment: 12 days ago3 comments2 people in discussion

We should probably clarify that this article is about real locations, not fictional? Ex. List of Star Wars planets and moons, etc. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:20, 22 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

I might change my mind down the line—I'm reading through the literature and expanding the article—but right now it seems to me that the best approach here might be to split the article into one about extrasolar planets in fiction and another about stars in fiction, with the table from List of planets in science fiction merged into the former. Sources on the topic don't really distinguish between fictional planets like Arrakis that are ostensibly in our galaxy (in that case, supposedly orbiting Canopus) and those like Tatooine that explicitly are not. TompaDompa (talk) 09:36, 22 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Alright, an update: My impression has been that the decision to use a real star is a rather arbitrary one and as such not a particularly significant aspect of the topic. I just found an article in the Journal of Science Communication which appears to bear this out: of the 142 fictional exoplanets analysed, roughly 30% orbit a real star, but the variable for whether or not they do is not linked to the other analysed variables, which the authors summarize as showing an absence of influence of whether or not the planet setting is in a real star system on other worldbuilding characteristics. TompaDompa (talk) 12:58, 23 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Split edit

Latest comment: 2 days ago9 comments5 people in discussion

I give a lot of credit to the editors cleaning up this article. Many of the old issues have been fixed. I see there's already some discussion about the scope of this article. A fundamental problem with this article is the "X and Y in Z" construction, which scatters the focus and makes it a dumping ground for a lot of different ideas. There's a real risk of WP:IINFO and WP:SYN, but it's completely fixable if we change it to two articles of the form "X in Z" and "Y in Z". I suggested a possible split in the template, but I am not too picky about what the two articles could be. Shooterwalker (talk) 01:33, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

It might be possible to split it into three articles: Stars in fiction, fictional exoplanets, and real exoplanets in fiction. That said, I'm not sure how many stories there are that actually have real exoplanets, given how recently we discovered most of them, so maybe only the two. Regardless, it's definitely a good idea to split the article. Ships & Space_(Edits) 23:54, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Probably we don't need two articles for expolanets. Might be tough to argue they'd meet GNG separately. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:55, 25 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

PS. See also comment by TD in the section just above. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:56, 25 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

No need for a split. And per Piotrus. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:55, 25 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

I don't know if anybody else has taken a look at the sources, but I have, and based on what I have read so far I think it's fair to say that this is indeed two topics—stars in fiction and extrasolar planets in fiction—that have some overlap. I reserve the right to change my mind further down the line as I keep reading the sources and expanding the article, but I think the best approach, as stated in the #Scope section above, is to split this article into those two and merge the table from List of planets in science fiction to the extrasolar planets one (and then redirect). I would really prefer deferring the actual split until the current expansion is further along, however, as I think we (or more to the point, I) will be able to do a much better job of it that way. TompaDompa (talk) 17:39, 25 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

This sounds reasonable. I think we can tentatively commit to a split down the lines of stars in fiction and extrasolar planets in fiction", but also see how the article shapes up before we fully implement it. Shooterwalker (talk) 21:17, 25 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

I went ahead with the split. I'll see if I can figure out how to make sure the talk page archiving doesn't break. TompaDompa (talk) 23:40, 1 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

It looks more focused around a single topic now. Thanks for doing this. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:13, 3 May 2024 (UTC)Reply