User:Jc37/Sandbox/Fictional characters categories

Can in-universe information be "defining" for a character?

The features, attributes, skills, abilities, powers, opinions, preferences, behaviours, conditions, and events in the history of fictional characters are all "in-universe" information.

Who decides what is "defining" for a character? An opinion of a Wikipedia editor? An opinion of a source?

Starting at Wikipedia:Reliable sources, one key sentence is: "Opinion pieces are only reliable for statements as to the opinion of their authors, not for statements of fact" - This is enboldened on that page. And since categories must be about facts, not opinions (due to WP:NPOV, among a myriad of other policies), opinion pieces are not adequate for categorisation. (See also #7 at WP:CAT.)

And that's a problem with fiction in particular. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (writing about fiction)#The problem with in-universe perspective.

A key concern of that page is Original research.

And so when we go look at WP:OR, much of that is explained, but I'll focus for the moment on a section concerning the usage of primary sources:

To the extent that part of an article relies on a primary source, it should:

• only make descriptive claims about the information found in the primary source, the accuracy and applicability of which is easily verifiable by any reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge, and
• make no analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative claims about the information found in the primary source.

Now when we start to try to apply a particular "label" to a fictional character, we run into this particular problem. With a "real live" human being, this is fairly clear, and only is called into question regarding the scholarship of the source in question (did they check their facts, and so on).

Well with a fictional character, who do we ask? Who's considered a reliable source as to whether a character has (for example) a particular medical condition?

Did the author state it while using third-person omniscient voice? (Typically the voice of the author or narrator - presuming that that person isn't also an in-universe character - "Call me Ishmael"). Or is it another character, which could mean that the information may be biased based upon that character's point-of-view? Is there only one author, with a single vision, who is not likely to overturn basic concepts in the universe, and not likely to see such things overturned by another author later? Have there been retcons already in the history of the character? (Something fairly common in serialised fiction, soap operas, comics, film series, book series, and so on.)

How about someone watching Felix Unger on television, who may have this opinion based upon the symptoms they have witnessed? How about someone who is an activist for people with this disorder? Would they perhaps be considered to be pushing an agenda? One of the myraid of writers on The Odd Couple? What if the writers' opinion are contradictory?

Fiction is clearly an interpretive art. And as illustrated by the questions above, it is subject to various points-of-view and interpretations of content. And as editors of this encyclopedia, we're not allowed to make those interpretations. To do so is original research.

Now we can go find secondary sources who have made an interpretation, and present that information in a scholarly article. But as WP:CLN (and most of the links I've provided already) indicate, a category is simply not the format for presenting such interpretive information.

Present tense

• Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 July 11

jc37's argument regarding this category has to do with the perpetual present of fictional narratives. The argument is that we cannot say that something is true or false of a character if it is something that they do or that is done to them during the course of a fictional narrative. As the entire narrative exists in the real world as a singular thing, all parts of it perpetually exist as equally valid states of the character, and all real life descriptions of fictional events are therefore written in the present tense. Ok, that still sounds esoteric... But the example of a character death is the best illustration to make the point. Saying that Darth Vader is dead is a nonsensical statement; instead, Darth Vader dies in Return of the Jedi. Categorizing him as a dead character would be inappropriate because he is depicted as a living character through the rest of his depictions, and unlike in the real world, later events in fiction do not supersede prior ones. We cannot flip back a couple days to when Harvey Pekar was still alive, but we can always watch Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back again. Pekar is dead, even though there was a time he wasn't, but whether Darth Vader is dead depends on within what work of fiction you're talking about (and at what point within that work of fiction). jc37's argument was that the same thing may apply to a character's dietary habits, that vegetarianism may be adopted or rejected over the course of a narrative, thus making an absolute statement of whether a character is or isn't a vegetarian similarly nonsensical when it isn't tied to a particular place within a specific fictional narrative. That wasn't the basis for my deletion !vote in the prior CFD, but anyway, that's the argument jc37 was making. postdlf (talk) 17:04, 13 July 2010 (UTC)