Talk:List of This American Life episodes

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This page was voted on for deletion at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of This American Life episodes. dbenbenn | talk 22:59, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] External links

Why have hundreds of external links returned? As I recall many people did say in the VfD that the links should be removed, as they violated a wikipedia policy that WP is not a collection of external links. Adding minimal context does not change that that is what this page has returned to being. -R. fiend 05:32, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There's an ongoing discussion about this between Leif and myself. You might have to dig through a bit of talk page history. In a nutshell, I see it like this: Is the article encyclopedic in principle? Yes, per the VfD result. If we take this as solidly established, the article should contain as much useful information as possible. I don't see how adding information (such as external links) can render an otherwise desirable article undesirable. However, I did not mean to pull a fast one here: I removed the external links based on some of the feedback from the VfD. Leif, who originally nominated the article on VfD, recently restored the external links. I agree with that decision. Given that we have a list of episodes and URL targets, why force a cricuitous route on our readers (going to the official archive page, which is organized differently from the present list, namely by broadcast date, whereas this article is by episode number), when there is a direct way? --MarkSweep 09:26, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Can we make it so the title itself is not an external link? Have the external link separate and not as conspicuous. This would also allow someone to make a wiki link out of a specific title if they wanted to create a whole page about one show. And while I'm here, do we need the year, (ie '05) in every title? Because they are arranged under year headers, it seems unnecessary... unless it was replaced by the exact original air date. BTW, MarkSweep, thanks for all your work on this page. -Redjar 19:03, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Ok, all of those changes are straightforward to implement now. Don't want the title to be an external link, or the year to show up? Change Template:TAL episode (done). Want the possibility of creating a wiki link for the main title? Say
{{TAL episode|05|282|[[DIY]]}}
which will appear as
Episode 282 – DIY
Templates are our friends. --MarkSweep 22:27, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Show information format

Below is a template describing how each show should be formatted. Replace uppercase text and # symbol with appropriate information. Using consistent format allows any future global changes to the format to be updated easier. Note the first line, "Episode SHOW-NUMBER – EPISODE TITLE" is a template. Please look at other entries for examples of use. -Redjar 23:23, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

  • Episode SHOW-NUMBER – EPISODE TITLE
    • Show description: SHOW DESCRIPTION HERE
    • Prologue: PROLOGUE DESCRIPTION HERE
    • Act #: ACT TITLE — PRODUCER/REPORTER
      • ACT DESCRIPTION HERE
    • Music interlude: MUSIC PERFORMER, SONG TITLE
    • Act #: ACT TITLE — PRODUCER/REPORTER
    • Music interlude: MUSIC PERFORMER, SONG TITLE
      • ACT DESCRIPTION HERE
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