This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.
This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Middle-earth, which aims to build an encyclopedic guide to J. R. R. Tolkien, his legendarium, and related topics. Please visit the project talk page for suggestions and ideas on how you can improve this and other articles.Middle-earthWikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earthTemplate:WikiProject Middle-earthTolkien articles
Note: Though it states in the Guide to writing better articles that generally fictional articles should be written in present tense, all Tolkien legendarium-related articles that cover in-universe material before the current action must be written in past tense. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earth/Standards for more information about this and other article standards.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Fictional characters, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of fictional characters on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Fictional charactersWikipedia:WikiProject Fictional charactersTemplate:WikiProject Fictional charactersfictional character articles
I would like to include dates in the timeline section. It seems incomplete to have a timeline without them. There were some dates in the timeline already before I edited this page, and I added more. User:Chiswick Chap took them out, stating that the inclusion of Second Age dates would make the article "way too technical for general readers of Wikipedia" and that readers would find them "incomprehensible, nerdy, and repellent". What do other editors think? 172.100.117.24 (talk) 22:52, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for discussing. The desire to add technical in-universe detail is in its own way admirable. However, such dates are deprecated throughout the WikiProject. They cannot be expected to be understood by the general reader; and supposing that they were, would very likely be seen as ridiculously redolent of Tolkien fandom, nerdy, and hopelessly over-detailed, all of which is to say, unencyclopedic. Since Wikipedia is a general, global encyclopedia, it must not attempt the role of a fan-specific website: fans are already well served by several such sites, such as Tolkien Gateway and Ardapedia. Our role here is instead to provide an outside view of the literature, films, and literary criticism of Tolkien's work, and the WikiProject already does that in considerable detail; indeed, it is remarkable that it devotes an article to such a minor character, who would not even be notable except for game and television coverage. I do hope this gives you some idea of Wikipedia's perspective and why, therefore, we don't use Tolkien's in-universe dates. He created detailed timelines to help avoid inconsistencies in the plot; this was essential to him as author, but that does not make them desirable to a general audience at first reading. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 03:25, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
By the same token, the article body describes scholarly analysis of how Tolkien came to devise the character, something for which there is remarkably solid evidence cited. This is rightly summarised in the lead. Since the lead is designed to for total newcomers to the topic, it is necessarily brief, non-technical, external not in-universe, and covering each major section of the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 03:41, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a copy of a table that may make clear why Wikipedia can't be written like a fansite: in a word, its audience is far wider.
Chiswick Chap, I am going to give way on the issue of the dates in the timeline because life is too short. However, I have again reverted the paragraph in the lead about Tolkien's research and how it may or may not have informed the character of Celebrimbor. If we were saying that Tolkien's research DID impact the character of Celebrimbor, that would be a different story, but this--as I mentioned--is just speculation. It belongs in the body of the article if it belongs here at all.
Then it needs to be worded more definitely - we British are famous for saying definite things (even emergencies indeed) as if they were minor or in doubt. And in this case native reserve combines with both scholarly and encyclopedic caution. However, the Nodens / Nuada Silverhand connection simply cannot be a coincidence; Tolkien had just spent two years writing a long and complex paper on the subject, and it involved a curse upon a ring as well as a character named Silverhand. .
The other half of this is that from an in-universe perspective, scholarly analysis looks as if it were speculative: it is not written anywhere in the text of The Lord of the Rings. Ah, but it is written in the book of reality: of archaeology, of history, of religion, of human life. This is the flip side of fanlike detail with delight in in-fictiin dates and so on: yes it's in the book, but unless there's an external reason for mentioning it, it's superfluous, in fact obtrusive, in the way.
Finally I will make a practical and procedural point: here on Wikipedia the job of the lead is to summarise the content of the article: not just the plot, not just the adaptations, but every part of the text. A key part of this article is the origin of the character and the role he played in Tolkien's thinking. The article does this: therefore the lead must do so too.
The fact that the material is reliably cited, and that the references are repeated in the lead to protect the paragraph in question, should also give you pause. Chiswick Chap (talk) 04:03, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Chiswick Chap, I don't have access to either of the cited sources, so I can't verify whether they say that the inscription at Nodens inspired Tolkien to create the Celebrimbor character. If they do, then the article should say so. I see that you have changed the lead so that it says that; however, the body of the article still says that the site "may have inspired" Tolkien to create Celebrimbor. This seems like an inconsistency. 172.100.117.24 (talk) 06:44, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've tweaked it. The sources are solid, and the wording is as I've explained both usual and advisable for virtually all scholarly conclusions. Nobody can be certain what was in Tolkien's head (same goes for all literary figures) but the reconstruction is so good here that it's frankly "beyond reasonable doubt". But the encyclopedist's job is to describe what has been said; there is a large difference between the best scholarship, founded on Tolkien's own writings, and wild speculation, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum. You can't go around deleting reliably-cited text, and indeed edit-warring about it: in most circumstances you would have had multiple formal warnings for doing that by now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:47, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Chiswick Chap, thank you for tweaking the language. It needed it. As you know, the reliability of the sources was not the issue I raised. As you also know, source reliability is not the only factor in determining inclusion of text on a Wikipedia page; relevance, importance, and many other factors also play a part. I do not believe warnings are appropriate. Finally, you could have taken a more collaborative approach in this situation if you had not led off by making wholesale deletions of all my edits, at least some of which had merit. 172.100.117.24 (talk) 12:43, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
