Talk:The Stormlight Archive
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Book titles
General question about this page and all the other "series" pages (like Mistborn_(series)). Why are all the book titles in italics? In all other pages (that I can tell), a book title in italics means it's unpublished, while a published work is in normal type. Seems like the same convention should be followed on the series pages as well. Or at least, is there a reason not to? That way I could go to the series page and see what is published and what is not, just like in Template:Books. Hadhad (talk) 19:08, 8 September 2017 (MST)
- Where are you getting italics-as-unpublished from? I've always thought that we use italics on book titles similar to how they are italicised throughout wikipedia for example. It's a way to emphasise them, and especially when they end up having to be included on in-world articles it makes it more obvious that it's not in-world? All the infoboxes automatically italicise the books row. Though we tend not to in navboxes, maybe we should? That I guess is a place where we don't italicise books. --Joe ST (talk) 08:02, 9 September 2017 (MST)
- Well, I'm not sure of all the history here, but if you look in Template:Books, all the upcoming books are italicized, and in the past, they've been un-italicized as they've been published. I actually never noticed that in the info boxes they are italicized, and it does help to distinguish in-world vs. meta. Sort of, because in-world stuff is labeled that way anyway, like The Way of Kings (in-world). Anyway, no big deal, but it seems like it should be consistent. Honestly, I kind of like the Books template because I can immediately view all the upcoming books.
- If you look in wikipedia, it looks like book titles are italicized. Poems and shorter works have quotes. For example, The Road Not Taken within a collection called Mountain Interval. Hadhad (talk) 14:29, 9 September 2017 (MST)
- I'm a big fan of consistency, so this is making me itch. It's generally proper to italicize books (and use quotes on shorter things). We really should italicize all book and series titles. This includes in-world books. Why does inconsistency exist? Probably because people are lazy and/or forgetful. :) I'd say when we see this done incorrectly it should be fixed just like any basic writing error.
- Unfortunately the error is very widespread. Just look at Cosmere for example. That probably further contributes to people doing it wrong, and it means there's a lot of work necessary to fix it. Don't suppose there's a magical way to change every instance of the ones that are always book/series titles?
- The biggest problem is the books template, where italics are being used for future books. Parenthesis are already used to note shorter/tangential books that aren't directly part of the main series. Is there an alternate way to note future books in that template? Perhaps flipping the current convention, and using non-italicized text to note future books?