Hi Drmies, I see you've removed the episode guide per (I take it) WP:NOTDIRECTORY. I'm a bit perplexed because so many of our entries for podcasts as well as other forms of media (e.g. television) do include episode guides--some even have a forked page wholly devoted the episode guide, for instance List_of_WTF_with_Marc_Maron_episodes. I'm wondering why this one isn't appropriate for inclusion? Thanks. Innisfree987 (talk) 03:14, 7 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
- I haven't looked at other articles. What we had here was a huge list which overwhelmed the actual prose content of the article. In general I don't see any good reason at all for such directories. Drmies (talk) 03:41, 7 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
- I would agree that a collapsible list might be ideal here so that it doesn't overwhelm the page (I hadn't done it already simply because I don't know how, but presumably I can figure it out), but given the frequency with which these lists are included (to give another example, This American Life has a separate forked pages listing episodes for each year of its existence), it seems folks generally find they provide useful information. And it makes more sense to me to give them as a list than as a running prose description of, say, every guest interview that got secondary source coverage (a very large number of them). Innisfree987 (talk) 03:54, 7 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
- A collapsible box is better but I have a problem with the idea that Wikipedia should cover that sort of thing. Next think you know we do it for all the things--I believe we are not a directory. All that stuff is available outside of us, and in a much more useful way--like here. Drmies (talk) 22:06, 7 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
- I do see where you're coming from, but on the one hand, I'm not sure it's quite "the next thing you know"--we're really already there. The television guideline actually instructs editors to make episode lists. And for my two cents, I do think the WP episode lists add intellectual value beyond what, say, the TAL guide can--most particularly, value in the context of an online encyclopedia where we have the opportunity to hyperlink names or topics, allowing readers to access more information generally, and specifically adding an additional form of context to the entry at hand.
- If it's makes a difference, this particular show had such widespread coverage that it's possible to cite not just to a primary source but in many case a secondary source for many of the individual episodes and guests. With all those sources, it would be possible to expand the "Guests" section rather dramatically, but a list seemed like a good middle ground between not putting undue weight on the section but still providing useful information to the reader. (I do think the Guest section would be usefully expanded by describing a few interviews that received a particularly large amount of coverage, but I don't think it makes sense to write out in prose every single episode that got coverage; yet I do think it's a loss for the readers to delete all that info, especially given what a large percentage of guests have Wikipedia entries to link to.) Innisfree987 (talk) 22:32, 9 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
