Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Film/Style guidelines/Copy-editing essentials

Steve, it looks surprisingly transferable, and the examples are good (why didn't someone think of doing this before? It was Roger Davies' idea for MilHist, BTW). I'll have a chance in the next week or two to read it properly. In the meantime, I wonder whether you might be expressing the phenomenon too narrowly: "Good prose is important to maintaining and increasing the authority and reputation of these articles and their contribution to our understanding of the filmmaking process." I don't know, but "Good prose is important to maintaining and increasing the authority and reputation of these articles, and their contribution to our understanding of the filmmaking process and the significance of cinema as one of the foremost cultural products of the modern age." Sounds grand, but ... cinema is. Tony (talk) 13:11, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, read some more: well done! Tony (talk) 13:16, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"The studio's budget restrictions meant that the director was unable to shoot the battle scenes" is suggested as a better way of stating the facts, yet it includes the completely unnecessary word "that," which possibly is the most over- and misused word in the English language.

The sentence should read "The studio's budget restrictions meant the director was unable to shoot the battle scenes."

Even better: "The studio's budget restrictions prevented the director from shooting the battle scenes."

And better yet: "Budget restrictions prevented the filming of battle scenes." 172.166.121.101 (talk) 16:36, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Those tweaks look OK, save for the last (unless it isn't important who imposed the budget restrictions). In truth, most of the examples could be made better (this was put together pretty quickly), so I'll be going through the guide again at some point to make things tighter. Thanks, Steve ^T • C 16:58, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why is this suddenly part of the MoS?

There is no consensus; it was not written as a Manual of Style, but more like a tutorial. Tony (talk) 07:26, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I only just noticed this myself. I assume it's a result of moving Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Films/Style guidelines to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (film) per this discussion. This page was created as a subpage of the style guidelines for convenience more than anything; I didn't intend for it to be included as part of the official MoS. Given that the film MoS isn't really a manual of style anyway (it's a content guide), the change doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I've been intending to open a discussion for a while about detaching the film guide from the official MoS and moving it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Films/Article guidelines (the video game project has it right); I'll knock something up later today and open discussion at WT:FILM. Steve ^T • C 07:34, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, it looks like only this talk page was moved for some reason. I'll put it back now. Steve ^T • C 07:36, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]