Talk:Letter 214

From Tolkien Gateway
Latest comment: 29 March 2011 by Ederchil

Whew! Of the 16 new articles I have made summarizing the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien in the last 17 days this one was the most difficult. Not only was it the longest one I've tackled so far, it had the most incoming links. As part of my methodology for handing these summaries I look at all of the incoming links to make sure that they are addressed. I feel that people following the links shouldn't come into an article and say, "Why does subject X link to Letter Y when subject X isn't mentioned?"

This leads to a question for any peer reviewers out there. I condensed the 8 pages of the letter in the book to 3 pages in Word before copying it into the Tolkien Gateway. Am I hitting a proper balance between conciseness and completeness? This letter had a lot of good information which tempts a summary-writer to perhaps put in too much stuff, and the need to address the incoming links may make a summary more detailed than is proper.

By the way, right now every time I add a new letter-article the number of dangling links goes UP. This is because of the Letters box at the bottom of every letter-article; each newly finished article links to all of the letters in the list and until the halfway point is reached more dangling links than completed links appear. After the halfway point the number of dangling links will diminish rapidly but any Tolkien Gateway statistician out there needs to be a little patient. Gamling 02:10, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

"Am I hitting a proper balance between conciseness and completeness?" Yes, in my humble opinion these letter articles are perfectly long. I think it's important that we mention all of the subjects (or as many as possible!) contained in a letter, especially when we use a letter as a reference in another article. Good work, Gamling (and Ederchil!)! --Morgan 04:06, 29 March 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]
You're doing a fantastic job Gamling. Even I tend to forget to double check the incoming links to make sure the article touches on what is being referenced, thanks for being so thorough. In my opinion it is far more efficient in the long run to start with as much detail as possible and fine-tune/trim the excess slowly than having to go back and add missing details later on. I'll see if I can start helping out as well. --Hyarion 04:14, 29 March 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Letter 214 is a tough nut, but it sat on top of wanted pages for a long, long time. It has so much info you simply cannot do it in less than this. -- Ederchil (Talk/Contribs/Edits) 06:25, 29 March 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]