Talk:List of Railway Series Books

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page has been flagged as being within the scope of WikiProject Thomas. WikiProject Thomas aims to develop and expand Wikipedia's content relating to the TV Series Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, as well as the original book series The Railway Series.

Planning and discussion for this project can be found on the Project page. Wikipedians are quite welcome to join us in improving the quality of this article, and others.

Contents

[edit] Page Title

Should this be at List of Railway Series books (reversing the redirect) or possibly List of books in The Railway Series?

Just a thought - does anyone know more about WP naming policy? Mdcollins1984 20:30, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Don't know about policy, but the former might need to be changed - I'll leave this to someone who's sufficiently bothered by it :o)
As for the second alternative, reordering the words like that strictly reduces the list to a set of 40 books, as would the addition of 'The' after 'of' in the present title. Alternatively, adding the word 'canon' at the end would restore the meaning to cover what is currently on this page (List of books in The Railway Series canon is slightly more precise than the present title) but is a bit long-winded!
EdJogg 17:20, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Directly-derived works - The M&S 'The Railway Stories' series

The following section was created within The Railway Stories.

Unhelpfully, when M&S re-published these versions (as described below) they also used the title 'The Railway Stories'.

Since the article describes the audio versions of the original books from The Railway Series, coverage of these derived works is inappropriate there.

The section has been copied here pending a decision on whether (and where) these and other directly-derived versions should be described. (All relevant articles ignore their existence at present.)

[edit] Marks & Spencer - 'The Railway Stories' Books

In the 1980's, Octopus Books published several paperbacks containing stories from The Railway Series for Marks & Spencer, under their "St Michael" label. Unhelpfully (for the purposes of this article), the series was also titled: The Railway Stories.

Each book contained all the stories from three of The Railway Series books using the original text and illustrations. The book format was different from the original books: a more conventional 'portrait' shape, with a picture on each page above its text. The cover background was a distinctive 'brick' pattern. The Rev. W. Awdry was identified as author, but the preface to each book was omitted.

Curiously, only six of the first eight books of the Series were covered; the two books omitted being the two specifically about Thomas. This choice could not have been influenced by the Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends TV series, whose first season covered the same eight books, as the TV programme was not aired until two years later.

Two books were published:

The books were available individually, or as a boxed set (of two).

[edit] Ladybird books

I've just remembered (and seen on Amazon) the Ladybird books that were published as a spin-off from the TV series. I 'believe' these are the original books, albeit containing stills from the TV series, and rebranded (book one is Edward, Gordon and Henry [1].

There seem to be many other books etc available: should they be placed in merchandising articles? Mdcollins1984 11:28, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Oh dear...

This page is exploding. It's getting way too much to have every single book with a link to The Railway Series listed in detail.

I propose the following:

  • All 40 Railway Series books remain, of course
  • The three books currently listed as "non-fiction" also remain, as they are often-referred to sources, and their relationship is very direct
  • All other books either be removed completely, or listed without headings, with minimal detail.

Any thoughts before I enact this off my own bat?

Gonzerelli 00:17, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

For once I disagree with you. For example, I found the newly-added information about the Bad Days for Thomas... books to be helpful, as I have not (yet) encountered these books. It was interesting to see the safety messages Christopher Awdry had attempted to cover.
In terms of just listing the books; that can be done anyway on the authors' own pages – as is already the case (especially with C. Awdry).
However, if you are concerned that the page is getting too long, I would propose splitting into two:
  1. List of The Railway Series books – for the forty books directly from the series
  2. List of books related to The Railway Series – for any others we care to add, starting with the three non-fiction works at the top of the page.
I think we've been quite restrained so far; for example: each of the 33+ books in the Asterix series has its own article in WP! The level of detail is probably about right, although none of us has got round to linking all the characters properly.
EdJogg 01:22, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use images

The use of images not in compliance with our fair-use criteria or our policy on nonfree content has been removed. Please do not restore them. -Mask? 23:40, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

At present, these images do not meet the requirements for non-free images since they do not state a 'fair-use rationale' -- this is not surprising since this was not a requirement when they were up-loaded. This issue is being addressed, but will take a while to complete.
However, on this page the images provide a valuable aid to navigation: for anyone not using the TOC, it is much faster to identify the pictures concerned than to read the titles. They are certainly not merely 'decorative'.
Also please note that this is more than 'just a list'. This page was created to discuss all of the the books in one place, rather than having separate articles for each book. If the latter situation prevailed, it would be perfectly permissible to use the fair-use images, since each page would be describing a single book. If necessary, this article may be split into 45 sub-articles, so that the book images may be re-used. However, I trust that common sense will prevail, and the former page layout may be restored once the images meet the necessary 'rationale' criteria. (They appear to meet the other nine criteria already.)
EdJogg 00:56, 5 June 2007 (UTC) (for WikiProject Thomas)
They also fail to give adequate critical commentary on the images, which can really only exist on an article about that specific book, and valuable aid to navigation for those who dont want to read sounds a lot like "decoration". The removal of them from this page was just clean up from the more massive removal last month. here is a list of other straggler pages if you want to lend a hand.-Mask? 05:12, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
This poses bigger issues for the other WP:THOMAS articles. I have posted a number of questions at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content#WikiProject Thomas and use of non-free images to try and clarify the way forward for this Project. Advice and contributions would be welcome.
EdJogg 10:17, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thomas and Victoria Cover Art

I have found the Cover art for Thomas and Victoria [2]. Felt I should let people know - Bladez636 3:12, 15 August 2007 (UTC)