Talk:Team America: World Police

This article falls within a proposed limits on quotations policy. The subject of this article is a film, and as a result, the proposal would set a limitation of five quotes per hour (about one quote every 12 minutes). If you would like to add another quote to the page, you should consider whether to remove one that is already there in order to keep within the bounds of fair use of copyright material. For reference, the length of this work is: 98 minutes.

Quality

An exerpt from Jeff Q's comments on Talk:Main_Page, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

...I can say that Team America: World Police is considerably far from the currently recommended film format...

I checked out Wikiquote talk:Templates#Films_.26_TV_Shows and found nothing obviously wrong.

• Chronological Order & focus on dialogue
• Format like Blackadder, a cited quotepage.

...most are following the organize-by-character, bulleted format, which is a logical extension of the prevailing Wikiquote individual-quote format for people and literary works. My own interest in quotations is primarily with dialog, so I guess I'm a point man for dissension on this approach... (Also by Jeff Q)
I personally do not favour the organize-by-character, bulleted format because:

• The separation between quotes is not that clear. (but it still looks better than ones with lines in between)
• The markup looks terrible.
• Chronological is more logical, more easily verifiable, and more clear, especially when focussing on dialogue.
• Did I mention I really like the formatting on Blackadder?

Maybe anyone can hint at some modes of improvement. -- w:User:Zanaq.

Zanaq, you are quoting from a fairly old commentary on TV show and film formats. The current practices I alluded to (but failed to provide a link for — mea culpa) are subpages of Wikiquote:Templates and are cited on that page. The one for films is, rather logically, Wikiquote:Templates/Films. I agree with you on the preference for chronological over bulleted quotes. I've made the point in those old commentaries that I find dialog-only format to be sufficient, but the community still seems to prefer to keep the single-line bullets at least for some quotes. On the subject of Blackadder, I added the half-width lines at one point, but someone else reversed them, preferring the extra whitespace (which I also explain in those old formatting conversations tends to make the page look really bad unless you're using the default skin). Since then, we've actually made the half-width lines part of formal policy. Even though I started that markup, I've wished we had something better, but my pleas for skin-neutral spacing for dialog formatting have been completely ignored to date by the developers (although I may not have brought the issue up in the best venues). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:44, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Yeah. I see. It really looks awful on most skins, I checked it out. the two blank lines are rendered as >4 lines. Even the default skin could do with a little less space. Would there be a particular reason for this? it would seem easy enough to fix. Let's raise the question in better venues. And aren't most people using the default skin (or lynx) anyway? Zanaq 14 september 2005.

I'm not sure what the best venues are. I had a vague notion of setting up my own wiki for development, creating a markup for dialog and poetry formatting, and offering it as an enhancement for future MediaWiki releases, since it's always a good idea to have at least a potential solution if you're going to raise a problem. But I'm fairly sure that new markup (as well as changes to the existing skins) would run into significant opposition and/or indifference, after my earlier experiences. Basically, I'm just tired of fighting these hopeless battles, and have settled down to doing non-controversial edits, administration, and trying to increase my actual new-article contributions. If you have the energy, you're welcome to try. I'll chime in if it looks promising. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:55, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes. It's a difficult problem. The fact remains that this widely spaced format looks incredibly clear when Monobook is used. I checked out the html rendering, and it seems that this double line space is not due to the 2 inserted lines but due to the default rendering of <dd> and the like. When styles are switched off (for instance in using firefox) the extra space increases. I haven't checked out lynx yet. I'm still thinking, because I really think the recommended format looks awful. Zanaq 20 september 2005.

Song

I've just added a new song to the list, it's played at the end of the credits. I bought my DVD in the UK, so I know it's on the UK PAL DVDs, but what about the others (such as the USA ones)?