Talk:Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince/Archive 3

message: Shouldn't the External Links be deleted as they are all related to stuff that was important before the release? They are already in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Crystal Ball)--May the Force be with you! Shreshth91($ |-| r 3 $ |-| t |-|) 06:24, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I just came to the Talk page to suggest the same thing. Yes, I think they should, and if no-one objects, I shall. Telsa 11:25, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

text: Just to reiterate, I want to remove almost all the external links. The old ones are archived in Crystal Ball. Most of the new ones are not really notable: NYT articles should not be linked anyway because they are not free to view after a week. --Telsa 11:36, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

text: Oh, fair enough. But looking at External links, now I see "In general, external links should be accessible by the widest audience possible. That is, try to avoid sites requiring payment, registration, or extra applications". NYT requires registration. I have no idea what to do now. Argh --Telsa 12:45, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

text: There is also an error near the beginning of the book, where it is written that a "fug" appears on the window. It should be "fog". In the Bloomsbury edition it is "mist".
The American Heritage dictionary says fug is "A heavy, stale atmosphere, especially the musty air of an overcrowded or poorly ventilated room". It may be a mistake, but at a message board I was visiting, people were pointing out that it might not be a mistake. *shrug* TheCoffee 14:48, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think a fug can appear on a window.  Through, or at maybe. Rich Farmbrough 18:41, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's obviously being used as the visible.. erm, "huff" of breath that condensed on the window. Whether this is proper English or not is really not something I think needs to go into an encyclopedia: do we have mentions of "used flout instead of flaunt" in other book articles? It seems to me inappropriate here. "We can pick holes in JKR's English", sort of thing. I think it should come out. Again :) --Telsa 11:35, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  External Links 

message: I removed the following line from the article:
:There is also an error near the beginning of the book, where it is written that a "fug" appears on the window. It should be "fog". In the Bloomsbury edition it is "mist".
The American Heritage dictionary says fug is "A heavy, stale atmosphere, especially the musty air of an overcrowded or poorly ventilated room". It may be a mistake, but at a message board I was visiting, people were pointing out that it might not be a mistake. *shrug* TheCoffee 14:48, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think a fug can appear on a window.  Through, or at maybe. Rich Farmbrough 18:41, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's obviously being used as the visible.. erm, "huff" of breath that condensed on the window. Whether this is proper English or not is really not something I think needs to go into an encyclopedia: do we have mentions of "used flout instead of flaunt" in other book articles? It seems to me inappropriate here. "We can pick holes in JKR's English", sort of thing. I think it should come out. Again :) --Telsa 11:35, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Fug

message: I felt this book had a wierd emphasis on passwords to tell the fat lady to get into the Gryffindor common room. I espically thought the password "abstinence" was odd. Did anyone else notice this change, or is it just me? --Cameron 01:30, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The password "abstinence" was the Fat Lady's choice, on a morning when she had a bad hangover from drinking with some drunken monks from another painting. It doesn't refer to sexual abstinence, but abstinence from alcohol. This does lead into what is a particularly curious motif of this book, though: alcohol. Half-Blood Prince is practically soaking in booze, from Rufus Scrimgeour's whiskey to Trelawney's sherry to Slughorn's poisoned mead. Trelawney's is the particularly unusual one -- her attempt to hide empty sherry bottles strongly suggests that she's a secret drinker. --FOo 02:21, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Passwords for Getting into Gryffindor Common Room 

message: Some very poor editing has occurred 22:16, 19 July 2005 by 212.59.61.140 and no one seemed to had checked the diff before continuing to edit. There seems to be some very poor grammar in several of the additions, and the entire 'mistakes' section has been removed and reverted back to an older one. 
There's a fair bit to fix up and consolidate back. If I didn't know any better, it looked like a very stealthy way to vandalise. I'm just mentioning this for people to be a little more wary about it. --takagawa-kun 18:55, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Poor editing allowed to propagate

message: Earlier today I re-added a link to the chapter-by-chapter summary to the plot synopsis. Now even that's gone. Is there any reason for them being removed entirely? I think that the plot synopsis was an important part of the article. --Sanguinus 19:08, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Flicking through the revision history, it appears that the plot synopsis was lost as a result of vandalism. Perhaps I jumped the gun a little by asking why it was gone. However, it didn't get readded so I'll add it back in myself from the last sane version of it. --Sanguinus 19:20, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  All plot synopsis gone? 

message: I have cut down the article from an unwieldy 578 words to a slightly more manageable 299 words. I also added the following comments (as suggested earlier by Telsa) in an attempt to cut down on some of the, um, shall we say "detail-oriented" edits in the article. If you feel these comments are a little strong, please feel free to edit them as you see fit:
:DON'T PANIC.
:BUT PLEASE DO NOT INCREASE THE SIZE OF THIS PLOT SYNOPSIS.
:This section is meant to be for readers who merely wish to skim through a quick summary of this book.
:On the Discussion page, we have agreed that with the existence of a chapter-by-chapter summary, this plot synopsis does not need to be very large. If you add too much unnecessary content to this section, the editors may remove it to bring this section back to a manageable size.
:If you wish, please continue to improve this section without increasing its size, or you can try to expand the chapter-by-chapter summary.
:THANK YOU FOR YOUR CO-OPERATION
:(Current word count: 299)
Cheers all, and here's to a leaner, meaner article! --Deathphoenix 03:10, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plot synopsis cut down 

message: the bit with the O.W.L. results - wasn't it only fred & george who called T troll and it was actually T for terrible?
:Nope. The results of the OWL came back (by owl, pardon the pun), and among the legend of the grades was "T - Troll". I immediately regreted my "known colloquially as Troll" edits earlier on. The fact that I immediately thought of my Wikipedia edits is very sad. --Deathphoenix 04:36, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not an error; the word doesn't mean (just) what you think it means.  See wikt:ejaculate#Transitive. —Cryptic (talk) 05:13, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible Error? 

message: Hi folks. Someone appears to be pasting the entire contents of the book, word for word, into this article. My browser (I'm currently on dialup) isn't loading the full contents, but I count at least three chapters, word-for-word, from the book. User:Koolman2 has been reverting the damage, but the text of the book still resides in the article history. This is a very serious problem, and Wikipedia could get in serious trouble (since J.K. Rowling isn't shy with the lawyers) for even having the text of the book in the article history, because someone can simply link to a previous revision and thus read the book online for free. I don't know if this is possible in MW 1.5, but is it possible for an admin to delete select versions of this article from the History? --Deathphoenix 04:45, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: According to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Harry Potter and the Enormous Headache, it needs a developer.  If there's a way to get ahold of one in a hurry other than IRC (which I'm unfamiliar with, and won't have access to for at least another six hours), I don't know about it. —Cryptic (talk) 05:21, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. I don't know how to get a hold of one quickly, unfortunately. I've been swimming in these Harry Potter articles so much lately that I didn't even THINK of WP:AN. Definitely time for me to sleep. (forgot to sign last night, telling you JUST how tired I was) --Deathphoenix 11:58, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

text: It looks like it's been fixed. --Deathphoenix 11:58, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyvio problems 

message: (CCed to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Harry Potter)
Hi all. To help deal with the many edits we are getting, I created a Harry-Potter related Watchlist at User:Deathphoenix/HarryPotterWatchlist. You can see the list here, though you should probably tweak some of the settings to get an ideal watchlist.
This watchlist is VERY sparse, so please add more articles to the list for all to use. Thanks! --Deathphoenix 15:14, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  I've created a watchlist 

message: It has been suggested that Harry Potter (plot)#Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince be merged into this article or section.
:Moved to Talk:Harry Potter (plot)#proposed split of this content into core book pages' synopsis sections, though I'm going to tone down the language a little bit. --Deathphoenix 02:34, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge from [[Harry Potter (plot)]]??? 

message: This page is now throwing up warnings when I try to edit it, and is over three times the recommended size for a page (Article size). I do not yet know how to do this archiving business, and the help pages are not proving helpful, so I'll just add suggestions from the back seat. :)
*The first eight ("Release Date" to "The Canadian fiasco" are all pre-publication.
*Then "Copyright?" to "Full plot summary moved" are mostly about plot summarising.
*Then "Balkans" to "Passwords for Getting into Gryffindor Common Room" are mostly about the book's content. 
And that leaves "the rest" on the talk page to provide context. (Although it's still fairly large like that.) How does this sound?
If reasonable, would anyone like to do it, or to walk me through how to?
--Telsa 07:23, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I was thinking the same thing. I've archived most of the discussions that haven't had any activity since July 18 to /Archive1, and moved the chapter-by-chapter text that's already there into /Archive2 because I anticipate eventually moving the Chapter-by-chapter synopsis that contained this text into that archive. --Deathphoenix 13:33, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Some archiving required?