User:Josiah Rowe/TVnote

Advice to interested editors

This is a boilerplate bit of advice to editors of television episode articles which have come under Wikipedia:Television episodes/Review.

There is fairly widespread consensus that not all television episodes are sufficiently notable to merit articles of their own in Wikipedia. In the interest of fairness, the Wikipedia:Television episodes/Review process has been established, to determine whether it's possible to establish out-of-universe importance and real-world context for television episode articles. For example, after uncontroversial discussion here, articles on individual episodes of The Simple Life were turned into redirects to List of The Simple Life episodes.

If you're interested in keeping episode articles, the key thing is to find reliable sources discussing individual episodes. Sources which may help establish notability for these episodes include reviews in newspapers, discussion in specialist magazines, and detailed episode guides. (Some of my fellow editors feel that episode guides aren't sufficiently independent of the subject to establish notability, but I disagree, especially for professionally published episode guides.) The key thing for improvement of these articles is to include some real-world content (ratings are a good start) and information beyond plot summaries and cast lists. If there are any books published about this series, see if the production or impact of individual episodes are discussed, and add that information to the episode articles. If someone used sources like these books on a handful of these episode articles, to indicate that the episodes of this series have received sufficient coverage in reliable sources that any episode of the series could have encyclopedic coverage, I'd support leaving the other articles as they are, because the potential would have been demonstrated. I hope that interested editors will take up this challenge, and improve the articles so that they won't be redirected.