Forum:CT Archive/No more flow-walking!

Let's settle this, once and for all. Recently, Sue Rostoni informed us of 2 planned novels being cancelled: Blood Oath and Boba Fett one. While doing regular update of their status on respective pages, I noticed how many pages already included "info" from those novels as a given fact. I'm not talking about Timeline of books or List of Star Wars media, I'm talking about pages like Zekk, Boba Fett and Human that included those novels in their appearances section, like they were already out. And you know it's not a unique case: too often we have users adding appearances or even plot twists based on nothing else other than a cover and a brief publisher's summary. And more often than we'd like they turn out not to be true: covers can depict thing that never made appearance in the comic/novel itself, official summaries are sometimes deliberately written to be misleading, not to mention the cases when the product gets cancelled altogether. I believe that adding such conjectural info based on the unreleased product does no good for Wookieepedia and should be forbidden.

Of course, such info still would be allowed on the OOU pages, like the one for the products itself ("Zekk will appear in this novel"), but not on the IU pages until the actual release (thus, the book will not be added to Zekk's appearances). Of course, if someone's got an actual copy of the book early, he would be free to post spoilers according to our spoiler policy as usual. Also, info based on the officially released previews and excepts will be allowed. Yes, they could also be different from the finished product (Qui-Gon is mention in except from Revelation published in Fury, but not in Revelation itself), but those cases are relatively rare and could be easily fixed.

So, to sum it, my proposal is: "Covers and brief publisher summaries of the future products alone are not valid to add any info to the IU-articles". Support it or not, that simple.  Mauser  Comlink 03:24, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, support the proposal

 * 1)  Mauser  Comlink 03:24, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 2) I'm all for it. It just makes the most sense.  After all, things change between preview and release, and having to go back through related articles and fix what was erroneously added can be a hassle.  It's best to just wait til the product is released, then update articles accordingly.  Trak Nar  Ramble on 03:58, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 3) Per Track. This CT should be extended to include all soon-to-be-released products. We should wait to update articles until a product is officially released. Toprawa and Ralltiir 04:03, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 4) *That was my understanding as well. All future products, not just novels and comics.  Mauser  Comlink 04:28, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 5) We should be using verifiable sources anyway (i.e. somebody should be able to go to the source and verify the info), but I don't see the harm in spelling it out for some people. - Esjs (Talk) 04:05, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 6)  Grunny  ( Talk ) 08:16, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 7) This would still allow us to add "Character X is pictured on the cover of Novel Y, scheduled for publication in year Z" to the BTS, right? &mdash;Silly Dan (talk) 11:53, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 8) *In OOU BTS - yes. In IU bio - no.  Mauser  Comlink 12:50, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 9) Grand Moff Tranner Imperial Department of Military Research.svg (Comlink) 12:23, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 10) Though obviously relevant upcoming release info should be present in the respective BtSes. -- AdmirableAckbar (Talk) 14:03, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * 11) --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 15:18, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Discussion
As usual, I will ask you not to add any third vote options without a discussion here first.  Mauser  Comlink 03:24, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Some questions: say, for instance, a character is mentioned in The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, but supposedly doesn't appear till The Clone Wars: Season Two. If my understanding is correct, this policy would only pertain to official summaries of soon-to-be-released products, but since the character was mentioned in an actual source, not a summary, the character article would be created with info from the CSWE, right? Or do we just wait for the episode to air, despite not knowing when that'll be? And what if verifiable other sources release info about a future episode? Can articles be updated then? I'm not entirely sure where the line is being drawn here.  CC7567  (talk) 16:39, 14 August 2009 (UTC)