Template talk:Katharine Hepburn

Navbox guidelines

This navbox is useful as it links between articles related to Katharine Hepburn. However it currently goes against the guidelines at WP:MOSFILM#Navigation by including acting credits. The arguments to not have acting credits in navboxes are good and I can see no special circumstances in this case. The only argument that has been presented is that most of the roles are starring roles, but that does in no way make the guidelines inapplicable; the same is true for many other actors. The template has previously been at TfD for this reason, but survived because of the legitimate non-acting credit content. Actor navboxes without other content than acting credits are routinely deleted, regardless of the actor's status. Smetanahue (talk) 08:48, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for bringing this to the talk page. Firstly, I just want to make clear that I wasn't aware of the consensus against actor filmography templates when I made this. When the TfD came up, however, I made the point that all the films Hepburn appeared in - other than her last 2 (Love Affair and One Christmas, in which her appearance was a major selling point of each) - had her in a leading role. And that really is rare, most actors either start or end their career as support stars. So that is clearly why it survived the TfD, unlike other templates of this nature. It makes sense to link to every film she appeared in through the template, since she was a major part of all of those films. I do accept that this still seems a bit unfair to other actors though, so if more people agree that the filmography should be removed then I won't kick up a fuss. But in this instance, to be honest I think I'd rather the template were deleted altogether. I personally think it looks a bit silly with just those three or four links; I think it should be all or nothing really. --Lobo (talk) 15:20, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it's a problem to keep the template with just the non-acting links, though I guess it probably wouldn't have been created in the first place if it was only for that. But it doesn't hurt anything to keep it. It's true that Hepburn had a remarkable career, but so did several other stars, and if acting navboxes were allowed, any film with a full all-star cast would be crammed with them. It would also be impossible to adequately decide who counts as remarkable enough and who doesn't. This is already sometimes problematic with director navboxes, where it's practically an open door for any director to have one as long as he's made 4-5 films, even if he really had zero creative control; but at least with directors there is only occasionally more than one for each film, with actors there would be loads of them. Smetanahue (talk) 15:39, 14 July 2012 (UTC)