Talk:Published alternate histories

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 3 December 2007. The result of the discussion was Keep.

Contents

[edit] Needs work

This is a pretty sloppy list, even if it's meant to be "random." Is there a standard format for book lists like this when there's no actual article? I'll go in and regularize it and tidy it up when I get caught up on Real World work. And probably add a number of titles, since I can think of at least a dozen classics just off-hand.

Also, I don't think supplements to a role-playing game qualify as "fiction." --Michael K. Smith 18:49, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Following is a somewhat random sampling:"

What a self-damning statement! Can this page possibly be made into either a meaningfully complete or a meaningfully exclusive list?

Can some kind of externally-sourced criteria be established? Recently, List of major opera composers struggled with a similar who-to-include problem, and went with a list of composers mentioned in a majority of overviews of the art in reputable music encyclopedias.

Could a similar standard be established here? What are some reputable science-fiction publications that could be used as the basis for inclusion?

Dybryd 19:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

I've reduced the article to about half it's length, based on my own feeling of what "the most critically and commercially successful examples" of the genre are. Obviously that's not objective, but I think it would be very hard work to apply entirely objective criteria. The works I've deleted have been those that I've rarely or never seen discussed in forums or cited in bibliographies.

The website Uchronia attempts to maintain a complete list of all published alternate histories, so I think it's proper that this list should only be of "notable" alternate histories. Akiyama (talk) 23:32, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking this morning about what objective criteria one could use. How about this: books that have been reprinted ten years or more after their original publication (check Amazon or Uchronia), plus books that have won any kind of award, plus the top twenty books tagged "alternate history" on LibraryThing (as a reasonable approximation of the "most owned" AH books) (go here and click on "see raw count"). This would create a list quite different from the original random list, and would hopefully be helpful to people wanting to decide which of the hundreds of published AH books they should read. Akiyama (talk) 11:03, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed merge with Alternate history

  • Oppose. This was apparently separated from Alternate history for the very good reason that two large articles are better than one huge article.--Kineticman 07:44, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose - for the same reasons. Both articles are already very big and the article would be too big with those 2 merged. --Maxl 23:33, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Not only was this article seperated from Alternate History because that article was becoming too large, but this is the second time this has happened! I previously seperated out the section on published AHs into its own article - a few months later it was deleted - shortly afterwards the section reappeared in the main article - eventually it became too large and was seperated out again - and here we are discussing it being deleted again! Akiyama (talk) 23:18, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

I was thinking of cleaning this article up so that it only lists published alternate histories that are award winner and/or very popular. Does anyone have any suggestions? Zombie Hunter Smurf (talk) 13:34, 11 June 2008 (UTC)