Talk:Heat (magazine)

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Formatting[edit]

I added data on some issues I had at hand, but I think the formatting that was being used for issues is pretty difficult to read. Does Wikifur have guidance for formatting this kind of running anthology data? Havi 10:33, 10 March 2013 (EDT)

I don't see anything in Help:Furry Book of Style . . . you're welcome to make something better up and plonk it in there. Be bold! --GreenReaper(talk) 11:42, 10 March 2013 (EDT)

Rewrote Article[edit]

I had the whole run of Heat on my shelf, so I decided to address Havi's formatting issue above by transcribing all of the contents information into collapsible tables and adding cover thumbnails to each item. I then started copyediting the lead, and before I knew it I'd overhauled the whole article. This is my first wiki edit of any consequence, and I recognize some potential issues, so feedback on these (or others I'm not aware of) would be welcome:

  • I've listed orientation for each of the items in the contents lists. This information is not provided by the publisher, so it is original research on my part in which I tried to be as objective as possible. There could be controversy with some of these items, though, and I have seen that sort of thing cause drama elsewhere[[1]]. I think it's useful information, but it might be advisable to exclude it for these reasons.
  • The formatting I've done renders very nicely on my computer with the info for each issue centered next to the cover thumbnail and the contents info available as a dropdown, but I'm not sure if rendering issues could arise in other browsers/setups.
  • The completeness of the contents list might be detrimental in that it sets a high bar that could deter future editing as new issues are published, or it simply may be excessive information. I chose default-collapsed tables to address the latter concern.
  • The lead image is now redundant because the cover is shown in the issue listing. I thought of replacing it with an interior page image to show the fusion of prose and illustration in Heat with a corresponding caption to that effect, but Sofawolf hasn't posted any interior pages on their site, so I'd have to scan it myself, and this raises copyright concerns. As it is providing an example of the work's content that can't be clearly illustrated another way, it seems like it would be fair use as long as the resolution is relatively low, but I don't know. Would this be a good idea? Alternatively, perhaps it could be replaced with an infobox.
  • I considered breaking the second and third paragraphs of the lead out into sections about the history and content of Heat, but I didn't feel like I had enough material to justify that, so I left it all in the lead section.
  • I don't know if my style could be wikified better. Rephrase time-indefinite statements? More links? Fewer?

--Ialdabaoth 23:50, 23 May 2013 (EDT)

Thank you very much for adding so much information and the cover images! Thank you also for providing your thoughts and questions here. I don't feel Orientation is an appropriate item (since it's labeling or opinion), although a wording such as "male fox and male wolf" might be, if someone is moved to provide that level of detail. -- Sine 00:36, 24 May 2013 (EDT)
Thanks for the feedback. I'm afraid that trying to label the submissions by the genders and species involved would be prohibitively complex. Some pieces involve multiple characters, separate pairings, or the gender/species of a character is ambiguous. There's even one story where both characters turn out to be the opposite gender from what they first appeared to be, so what does one do with that? This would also defeat the usefulness of the sortable list; as it is, one can easily sort by that field to find out the orientation balance of an issue. For example, in the Flayrah interview [[2]], Alopex goes digging through his stack of back issues trying to find examples of lesbian submissions--the article, as I've formatted it, would have saved him some time! I don't think there's a sensible and consistent way to present gender/species info here, so if a consensus arises that the orientation tagging is not encyclopedic, then I think it will simply have to be removed.--Ialdabaoth 01:21, 24 May 2013 (EDT)

Thanks, Spirou for the logos. I went ahead and moved them into an infobox to give a cleaner look. I took some liberties with the infobox formatting (images in the title and publisher fields, info in other fields less specific as it is a series rather than a single book).--Ialdabaoth 03:04, 24 May 2013 (EDT)

No problem. =) Good job on the anthology article. If you wish to create additional related ones in the future, check out our Media Gallery to see if the appropriate image is/was already uploaded (Thanks you for the Heat covers, something less to upload) ^.^ - Spirou 00:14, 25 May 2013 (EDT)