Talk:List of female stock characters

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This article was nominated for deletion on 4 May 2008. The result of the discussion was keep.

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the List of female stock characters article.
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Contents 1 Merger proposal 2 Cleanup

Where's the list of male stock characters? :) -- Kittenheel ^{(Contributions)} 12:47, 8 Jul 2007 (UTC)

Please create a different description for "Wannabe Gangster". I think the Wannabe Gangster type is entirely different from Ugly Sidekick. -- Kittenheel

[edit] Merger proposal

I think there is considerable overlap between the List of tomboys in fiction article and the tomboy section in this article and they could easily be merged. --neonwhite user page talk 17:54, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

• This article seems to be original research and has no sources. The tomboys list is potentially huge but is growing slowly as sources are demanded. The problems of this article need to be attended to before any merger is contemplated. Colonel Warden (talk) 07:17, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

True but i still think it would help both articles. Or maybe it should be merged with Tomboy? --neonwhite user page talk 02:46, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

If you want to merge list of tomboys with something then that discussion would be best done at that article. This is not the place since we have no reason to give undue weight to tomboys here. I am therefore removing the tag. Colonel Warden (talk) 03:15, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

I have made a major cleanup by boiling this down to a list of stereotypes for which there are articles. Listing such articles is the main purpose of a list - helping readers to the detailed information. We don't need to list examples since they will appear in the target articles and will tend to overwhelm this one.

When the list was reduced, many omissions became obvious such as Mother-in-law and Pantomime dame. It seems best to work at this high level while there are still many gaps.

We might go on to list an outstanding example of each type once we have the master list down, for example Mrs. Hudson as the archtypal housekeeper, Widow Twanky as the archetypal pantomime dame or Mary Poppins as the archetypal nanny.

Colonel Warden (talk) 08:07, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I have been continuing this programme but there is a disconnect with editors who cling to the unclean version. We should try to converge these formats to eliminate the flip-flops. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:18, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

The page as it exists is of little to no value. You've deferred to the "target articles" by linking, simply, to "Bride," "Aunt," "Virgin," etc? How does that give any information about the stock character types and how they're used in fiction? The target articles are irrelevant to the subject, and this article has no useful information. Cnanninga (talk) 21:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

The article is a list. The competing version tries to go into too many directions - listing stock types, describing them, listing examples. It does a poor job because it does not include well-known stock types such as the Bond girl and it is completely unsourced. The way I see it, if a stock type is not notable enough to have its own article then it doesn't belong here. And if it does have its own article then we should not duplicate that. The list should therefore just be a series of links.

I take your point about links to articles like Aunt being debatable. I'll prune my version to try to ensure the links go to articles or sections with some focus on fiction. Colonel Warden (talk) 07:22, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the whole concept is debateable, and this article could be accused of being based on a synthesis of different sources. Unless you can present a reliable test for stock characters, I would say this list is likely be deleted as it runs contrary to WP:OR and WP:NOT.--Gavin Collins (talk) 11:09, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

The test is, of course, to cite sources which describe them as such. This does not seem necessary in cases where the linked article obviously describes such a stock character as Pantomime dame. In other cases, such as an (over) protective mother, I have started citing. But you are welcome to take the matter to AFD as I 'm keen to draw in other editors so that the conflict may be resolved. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:19, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

:::*Au Contrare! It is just that I have used the description of stock character to describe certain Dungeon & Dragons characters, I wondered where you got the idea for the overall concept. However, if you have sources to unify the list. Then I am sure you will not encounter any problems. --Gavin Collins (talk) 20:20, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

• Forget my last comment, I have had an ephiphany. I think is article is a prime deletion candidate. The reason why I say this is that there is no reliable test to identify that any of these character types are stock characters. Even if Colonel Warden can cite a source which says "Alcoholic Mother is a typical stock character", the lack of definition for "stock character" casts doubt on the relevance of that source to this list. Since this article is likely to be objected to my editor who would claim this list is a misogynist construct designed to denegrate female kind, you might want to come up with a definition of stock character that would suggest that these stereo types genuinely fit the description of a fictional category, rather than being a WP:COATRACK for mysogony or Anti-Semitism. I recomend that Colonel Warden liquidate this list as soon as possible, lest he find that a lot of people will drop opprobrium on him from a great height. --Gavin Collins (talk) 22:01, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

• We had an AFD and the article is still here. Colonel Warden (talk) 00:13, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

• The cleanup continues but there are anonymous editors who cling to their old material despite the consensus in the AFD discussion that we were on the right track. We might have the article semi-protected to prevent their disruption but I am content to use their reversions as the opportunity to make another improvement to the new format. Colonel Warden (talk) 00:13, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

• I'm not one of the people reverting it from the just plain list version to the more informative version but I think that the list version is as pointless as making a Dinosaur article that's just a list redirecting people to each article this encyclopedia has on dinosaurs & the version that tries to explain the stock characters is superior. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.177.140.37 (talk) 03:29, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

• Please see List of dinosaurs for a counterexample. This has a preamble which explains the naming structure and then has a long alphabetical list of blue links to articles about each dinosaur. It does not attempt to explain each dinosaur because that would duplicate the content of the linked articles. Colonel Warden (talk) 07:33, 7 June 2008 (UTC)