Forum:SH Archive/Verb tense for BTS info

Over the last few weeks, I've noticed an area where our articles often prefer one style of wriring, often another. Specifically, I'm talking about "Behind the scenes" sections and their treatment of plot details from the source material. Should these be in the present tense or the past tense?

First off, some common ground: if a sentence talks about details like when a work was written, published, revised, etc., it's best to use the past tense. Thus, "George Lucas wrote the original screenplay for Star Wars in 1972," and "Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire was first published in 1993." I think most of us are on board with this.

Present tense
However, where the point of reference shifts to the fictional world of the work itself, academic practice would (generally) mandate the use of the literary present tense. Thus, "In the screenplay, Lucas portrays Skywalker as a naive farmboy," and "Mara Jade meets Skywalker after defeating a vornskr." The logic behind this is that fictional works are still around, and, therefore, if anyone goes and picks up a copy of Heir to the Empire, they will find that the plot is still the same as it was when the book was first published. In other words, literary present tense privileges the fiction as a "living" thing in that it's still around for us to see, read, etc.

This overview is simplistic, but here's a good primer on the concept.

We all tend to follow literary present tense in plot summary sections of out-of-universe articles, anyway, so I think most of us support the idea at least in that context. Where things get hairy is in "Behind the scenes" sections of regular articles, though.

Past tense
Many editors at Wookieepedia tend to prefer the past tense for "Behind the scenes" information. The examples above might be related as "In the screenplay, George Lucas portrayed Skywalker as a naive farmboy," and "Mara Jade met Skywalker after defeating a vornskr." This seems to be in keeping with our Manual of style's coverage of such things: "All in-universe articles should be in the past tense." Similarly, the Layout Guide makes no mention of verb tense in its guidelines for "Behind the scenes" sections.

At any rate, this seems to be the more common style here. It's certainly easier to make everything past tense in "Behind the scenes" than to consider whether a particular sentence privileges the temporal-real-world actions of the author or the fictional goings-on of the work. This also seems to be the common practice in everyday speech (and hence fandom); you'd probably say, "Did you see Clone Wars last night? Ahsoka was totally badass when she drop-kicked that droid commando!"

Summary
Finally, here's a worked example of how these two philosophies play out in a BTS, borrowing from an article I recently expanded, Amorphiian:

So, my question is this: How should we treat information in "Behind the scenes" sections? Should we try to adhere to academic practice, which puts us in the same camp as scholarly writing and most encyclopedias? Or should we go with what seems to be common practice among fans and report information from fictional works in the past tense? Or is this a case of live and let live, as long as a particular BTS is consistent with one style or the other? ~ SavageBob 17:11, November 6, 2010 (UTC)