Talk:Thrud the Barbarian

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Good article Thrud the Barbarian has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
An entry from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on April 18, 2007.
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[edit] Legacy?

I don't really understand the "Legacy" section. I've checked out the references given but they cast no extra light on the matter. (Emperor 19:24, 16 April 2007 (UTC))

The references are reviews of the comics in question which comment on Critchlow's developing artistic style which, as mentioned previously in the article, he first experimented with in Thrud. See the review of Out of the Undercity in particular since that was his first post-Thrud story. There is more to come to explain this, but I can't devote the time this week. Feel free to add something yourself now you know the intention. GDallimore (Talk) 09:21, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dates

Just a quick comment on reading the article - dates should not be wikilinked unless they are given in full (ie day+month+year) - this is not so much about making the date clickable (though it does that of course) but more about allowing WP to display them in the preference format set by users. I'd go through and remove the links, but I don't have time right now, so I'll check back at some point & if it's not been taken care of I'll do it then. Enjoyed this article as a White Dwarf reader from the 80s - good work ;) EyeSereneTALK 18:47, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, but what? All the dates agree with the MoS as far as I can tell. Years and decades are linked on their own and no month on its own without a day is linked. I can't see where the problem is. GDallimore (Talk) 07:47, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Ah, do you mean that in a couple of places I've used [[year-month-day]] format rather than [[month-day]] [[year]]. I thought that was correct until recently and will go through correcting that. GDallimore (Talk) 07:50, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Apologies for the confusion - I was in a bit of a rush and wasn't specific enough with my comments. I was referring to:
  • Date formatting - this explains how to write dates that have a day, month and year so that they display correctly according to the reader's preferences; it looks like you've already got this sorted. The YYYY-MM-DD notation (I think) is generally used in templates eg for footnotes or references - but this is Wikipedia, so nothing's consistent ;)
  • Partial dates - this by no means universal, but many editors think that linking years alone (without an accompanying day and month) adds nothing to the text and detracts from the readability of an article. As per WP:CONTEXT, if the linked date is not directly relevant to the article itself (eg providing more information about the subject or related subjects), I would not link such dates at all. As a copyeditor I tend to remove these from articles I work on... but like I said, it's a preference not a rule ;)
Hope this clarifies things! EyeSereneTALK 09:15, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Ah, yes, the old "context" rules. It's always a tricky call. I agree that I probably have overdone it. From the perspective that only the first example of a word should be wikilinked, the article needs work and I'll do that. However, I guess I'd take the position that a year where something important happened in the history of Thrud is a year that should be linked, and that's most of them. I'll get rid of years like the 2001 for the infobox picture since that's not a notable date, really. GDallimore (Talk) 09:26, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough, although I'd argue that, turning the link on its head, from the historical perspective of say 1981 the creation of Thrud is not a notable event and wouldn't deserve a mention in that year's listing. However it's entirely your call of course - I'm not on a crusade, it just jumped out at me when I read the article. Thanks for the feedback, and all the best with the article. EyeSereneTALK 09:41, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Maybe I should get involved in the relevant wikiproject, since I'm finding this scarily interesting. :) Sadly this is not the best place for such a discussion. However, I would say that "context" is about the context of the article that is doing the linking, not the context of the year as a whole so it would be inappropriate to turn the question on its head as you suggest. Of course, linking from 1981 to here would be wrong for the reasons you give! As an analogy, it is right and proper to link from this article to "comics" but probably not appropriate to link from comics to here since it is not a hugely important comic in the scheme of things. GDallimore (Talk) 09:57, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
You make a good point, and back-linking is not always a good rule of thumb: wikilinking the names of countries would fall under the same criteria, and I don't really see a problem with this. It just seems to me that linking to a year is only contextually relevant in the most tenuous sense unless that article is about a significant event that would normally be associated with that year. For that matter, personally I wouldn't link full dates either if it were not for the display preferences requirement ;) My main objection is that, when a reader clicks on a linked year, they are taken to a page that is basically just a list of (fairly) random events, births, deaths etc... and this (whilst being great for wikisurfing) is not likely to improve their understanding of the original article. EyeSereneTALK 10:46, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
My last comment, and then I'll shut up. I think that linking to a random collection of events that happened in a given year can be useful for the very reason that it provides context. What else was happening in the world at the time and what things might have influenced this particular event/book/film/whatever? We normally can't put such things directly into an article without it being OR but we can give the reader the option to read up on it themselves and make their own synthesis should they wish. Now, this is probably more likely to be useful for history and politics related articles, but that shouldn't exclude less serious articles from presenting such an opportunity. Other than that, I agree that wikilinking "day-months" would normally be overkill if it weren't for date formatting. GDallimore (Talk) 11:28, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Righto - thanks again for the feedback, and again good luck with the article. EyeSereneTALK 11:54, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Good article review

  1. Is it reasonably well written?
    A. Prose quality:
    B. MoS compliance:
  2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?
    A. References to sources:
    B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:
    C. No original research:
  3. Is it broad in its coverage?
    A. Major aspects:
    B. Focused:
  4. Is it neutral?
    Fair representation without bias:
  5. Is it stable?
    No edit wars, etc:
  6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?
    A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:
    B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:
  7. Overall:
    Pass or Fail:

The only problem I see in this article is that the lead could be expanded, but that's not really a big issue. This article looks ready for FAC, you people did a nice job! Anyway, it passes all Good Article criteria.Mitch32contribs 21:26, 1 March 2008 (UTC)