Talk:Tatort

Swiss re-participate after 10 years

It was planned, that on April, 17th, should aired the first new Tatort from Lucerne, Swiss; the first within 10 years. http://www.tatort-fundus.de/web/fehlstart-fuer-den-schweizer-tatort.html Cause of 'unsatisfied acting by Sofia Milos' (or cause of here Scientology membership) it is drawn back and shifted for unknown time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.153.238.248 (talk) 12:16, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

List of Tatort investigators

Where did this list go?YOG'TZE (talk) 23:39, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

@YOG'TZE:: See below. Swanny18 (talk) 23:23, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

The table of investigators was deleted, for no obvious reason (the edit summary says "trivial", as if that is supposed to explain everything): I’ve restored it (per WP:BRD), because .a) it’s no more trivial than anything else here, b) it serves a useful purpose in helping to navigate a fairly complex set-up, c) several of the collections have been sold abroad, (Borowski, Cenk Batu, Falke, Faber (The Mind of a Murderer), for instance, to Britain’s Channel 4) and having a sortable list together makes things a lot easier to follow, and  d) it mirrors the page on the German WP (which we should, I suggest, crib to improve the table here). If there is a good reason to delete the table, we should hear it. Swanny18 (talk) 23:21, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi Swanny18, I suppose I wasn't clear with a short edit summary. It's an odd combination of MOS:TVEPISODE and MOS:TVCAST. The headier is "List of Tatort investigators (Kommissare)"; instead of an actual cast, it's a list of the in-universe investigators (see WP:INUNIVERSE). An actual cast list should mention the actor and just a small description of the character. There's no description of the character, but we are provided with the year of release, in which city the episodes were set and how many episodes there have been. That Jörg Hube portrayed Paul Enders in one episode set in Essen in 1980 says nothing about the character and doesn't help the general reader of Wikipedia (see WP:AUDIENCE).

An article about a TV series doesn't necessarily have to have a list of characters. Except for a few characters (Paul Trimmel, Horst Schimanski, Thiel and Boerne, Klaus Borowski, and that last one probably doesn't need it own article), most of these characters probably aren't notable, and probably never will be. Right now, there are a total of 5,072 words and 37,005 characters in the article (including hatnotes, categories, references, etc.); in the "List of Tatort investigators (Kommissare)" section there are 2,379 words and 17,418 characters. That's nearly half of the entire article, dedicated to a table about fictional characters without any relevant encyclopedic information. After all, Wikipedia is WP:NOTTVGUIDE.

Concerning your points: a) yes, we all know that WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Just because there are other pages in Wikipedia in dire need of some good trimming, doesn't mean we can skip Tatort. b) helpful, how? Who benefits from seeing a huge table of characters? Remember, Wikipedia is written for a general reader, and not Tatort fans. c) We should keep a list of characters because several of the collections have been sold abroad? Outside of Germany, you mean? So we should keep this list, for people that might have bought a collection of Tatort outside of Germany, so it's easier for them to follow? That makes zero sense. Wikipedia is not the Tatortpedia. There actually is a Tatort wiki. d) It mirrors the page on the German Wikipedia? So? The German Wikipedia is a different Wikipedia, with different guidelines.

Currently, the entire table is unsourced, and it's up to you to find sources, per WP:BURDEN: "All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and it is satisfied by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution", italics my emphasis. So not only have I given plenty of reasons why, per our own guidelines, we shouldn't even have it right now. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 08:39, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Swanny18 for putting it up again. I agree that the list is one essential thing in this article as it explains the history of the series and the change of characters during the years and decades. It is not irrelevant as others might think. Best regards from Germany! YOG'TZE (talk) 21:09, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

@YOG'TZE:: Thanks for that; we'll see how it goes... Swanny18 (talk) 23:29, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

@Soetermans::Actually, you still aren’t being clear

You seem to be saying that there should be a cast list, presumably showing the actors and the character they play; whereas because here we’ve got a table listing the characters and the actors that play them, it should be deleted. And the additional information is the number of episodes they were in, and TV station that made them; how is that "in-universe"? Would you prefer a list like in the Polizeiruf 110 article, with less information? OTOH you are also saying such a list should have a "description of the character"; now, that would be more in-universe, wouldn’t it?

You also say the table "lacks relevant encyclopaedic information". How is the entry you mentioned, on Jorg Hube’s character Paul Enders, which says where the episode was set, and who made it, and when, lacking in encyclopaedic information?

And you seem to object to the table on the grounds that it’s "about fictional characters": The article is about a work of fiction; what else would the characters be?

In any event, the subject, Tatort, isn’t so much a single series (AFAICT) as an umbrella title for a whole bunch of police procedural series, made by different companies in different settings, shown (presumably) nationally under the Tatort banner. So this table isn’t so much a cast of characters as a table of the various strands within the series, with some useful (ie. relevant) information on them (who made them, how many episodes, when shown, who’s in them, etc).

You state that "most of the characters aren’t notable, and never will be": That remains to be seen, but the de: WP has managed to produce articles on pretty much all the Tatort strands, (with a notability threshold at least as high as ours), so I don’t see why that shouldn’t be the case here.

As for your comment about the burden of proof, are you saying the information is untrue? Or unverifiable? Or that someone has just made it up? That shouldn’t be a problem then, should it…

But that is somewhat by-the-by; We are supposed to be improving the content; how does casually deleting great swathes of information improve an article, or increase knowledge of a subject?

The fact that you haven’t previously challenged the truth of any of this by asking for citations, or flagged up any problems, or opened a discussion on content, before wombling in and deleting half the article with a throwaway comment like "trivial"; that smacks of vandalism, not a concern for improving the content.

So as this is a long-established article, and the table has been here more or less since the start (which suggests the consensus is with the status quo), maybe what you should be doing is finding another opinion that supports what you want to do with the article, before taking this slash-and-burn approach to content. Swanny18 (talk) 23:41, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi Swanny18, where have I said that there should be one? I'm reading my comment again and I can't see where that might've come from. The article does not necessarily need to have a list of a cast and/or characters. But maybe I'm not being clear. It's in-universe to the information in this kind of way. Instead of having an actual informative description of the characters, we've got year, broadcast station, investigators, actors, city and number of episodes. That doesn't explain the characters of the series, the events of the story arcs, that is an overview of the series. The general reader doesn't get any relevant information about Tatort this way. Maybe you're a fan and expand upon it a bit? Writing about the character, especially its creation, development, reception; that is exactly the encyclopedic information that is needed here. See for instance something like Broadchurch#Casting and Sherlock (TV series)#Cast and characters, which have a paragraph on the casting and characters. Or something like Luther (TV series)#Cast and characters, a neatly table with characters, cast and in which series they appear. No broadcast station, no year, no city, no number of episodes.

You're bring up the German Wikipedia again. Perhaps the articles there are in top-notch shape, but this one isn't. WP:BURDEN / WP:CHALLENGE asks adding sources to the article. If there's not, anyone can remove any unsourced claim in any article. And it's up to the person who adds, or in this case, restores that material to source it. Whether or not it actually is true doesn't matter, we need references to show that it is true. Adding citations sadly doesn't mean you can copy-paste a search engine result in a talk page, it will need inline citations in the article. So go nuts.

I think removing unsourced stuff is great way of improving articles. Take a gander at my contributions. I prefer calling it hack and slash over slash and burn though. WP:ATD is for deleting articles, not content, so that one doesn't fly either. Please don't think I'm vandalizing an article, just because it has been WP:UNCHALLENGED for a long time, doesn't mean it should stay. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 06:10, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

@Soetermans:: To answer your question, No, I’m not a fan, as you put it, but I have read the article (have you?) and I can see (as, presumably, everyone else who's been here over the years) that the unusual format of the subject needs something like a table detailing broadcasters, main investigative strands, and the number and date spread of the episodes, to make sense of it.

I see you are still insisting that the table of broadcasters is faulty because it doesn’t look like a list of characters to you. So I’ve renamed it Table of Broadcasters, and added an explanatory paragraph; is it clearer now? If you feel the article does need a list of characters then by all means add one; you know what you have in mind better than me.

But as for "anyone can remove any unsourced claim in any article"; if you think that gives you carte blanche to delete anything that doesn’t have a citation, then you’ve seriously missed the point of the guideline. WP:VERIFY is primarily a stricture against original research (ie. made -up shit); everything here must be verifiable (which isn’t the same as 'everything must have a citation attached'). The part that says "Any material lacking a reliable source … may be removed" goes on to say "Whether and how quickly material should be removed… depends on the material" and "you are encouraged to provide an inline citation yourself before considering whether to remove or tag it".

Also, your comment "WP:ATD is for deleting articles, not content" is pure wikilawyering; do you seriously think we have radically different attitudes to deleting stuff from articles, and to deleting the articles themselves? No, the emphasis is fix problems if you can in both cases.

And as for UNCHALLENGED, I’m aware that nothing is set in stone, but that section also says stuff that hasn’t been previously challenged "can be assumed to have consensus"; so the correct approach then is to challenge it, not delete it wholesale.

And yes, I have seen your contributions; they seem to consist almost entirely of deleting other peoples work. You might note another piece of advice at VERIFY; "Some editors object to others' making chronic, frequent, and large-scale deletions of unsourced information, especially if unaccompanied by other efforts to improve the material". You might have tried fixing the problem you perceived here, rather than dismissing about 12Kb of material (ie. several hours work by someone) as "trivial". Swanny18 (talk) 23:39, 11 April 2020 (UTC)