Talk:Narnia

From RfD page

Not Wiktionary material. — Paul G 09:05, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

• Keep and possibly expand. I understand that MI-5 doesn't prosecute officers who misbehave because of the secrets that might bring out in court; instead, it showers them with niceties and sends them away to do some meaningless desk job someplace. This "place" is referred to as Narnia. --Stranger 11:41, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

• Keep, we are not a monolingual dictionary. Portuguese translation is Nárnia, Japanese is ナルニア国 (Narunia-go), Finnish entry will have to show the declension... You may as well delete Italy. —Muke Tever 21:00, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

• • In that case, keep but change the meaning to that used by MI5. Yes, Muke, I'm well aware that we are not a monolingual dictionary, but we have limits on proper nouns. Country names are certainly within Wiktionary's scope, so there is no need to delete Italy; I would consider fictional placenames to be borderline cases. — Paul G 09:16, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Declining to explicate the pronunciation, etymology, proper spelling, translations, and grammatical properties of words just because we happen to capitalize them is hardly conducive to the idea of "all words in all languages". Especially a word such as this which has entered popular culture even outside the direct context of the books it belongs to. If you consider Italy an inapt example, try Utopia or Atlantis. —Muke Tever 16:52, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Here's my take on borderline cases like this: As elsewhere, the criterion here is independence, deriving from the Prime Directive of including a term it if someone would run across it and want to know what it meant (e.g., what's this "webinar" I've just been invited to? :-). With that in mind, I would not consider any of these independent:

• Appearances in the Narnia books themselves.
• Appearances in literary criticism of those works — the reader is expected to be familiar with the work, and in any case, the primary source is referenced directly.
• Appearances in public reviews, e.g., "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is set in the fictional world of Narnia.", where the author is essentially defining the term (and the primary work is referenced besides).

Here are increasingly independent variants of the same notion. I might not count the first, but I would probably count the others, on the basis that the general reader is expected to "just know" Narnia, and thus would have to look it up if this is not the case.

• This fictional world is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's Narnia. (Narnia is clearly C.S. Lewis's fictional world. If I want to find out more, I'll read (or look up) Lewis.)
• This fictional world is reminiscent of Narnia. (Narnia is a fictional world, but whose, and where would I find out more?)
• This is reminsicent of Narnia. (What the heck is "Narnia"?).

In any case, the MI5 case is completely independent (though almost certainly derived from Lewis) and should be included no matter the determination on the "Lewis's fictional world" case, though I strongly suspect that there is enough support for that sense as well.

Finally, just to pre-empt the usual complaint, including the C.S. Lewis sense doesn't mean we include the fictional creations of every aspiring author on the web. Almost none of these will be known outside the author's immediate circle. We include terms from Lewis, Tolkein, Rowling or whomever because the terms themselves have come to be used outside their original context, and we include only those that have come to be so used.

To be honest, I don't see great harm in including every single term from every work of fiction ever published, so long as we mark them as such, but that's not our current agreed-upon policy. IMHO, our current agreed-upon policy — which, to be clear, doesn't include anything about "show citations or face deletion" — is a quite reasonable compromise. -dmh 14:31, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Meets attestedness criteria twice, once for widespreadness (3mil ghits), and once for use in well-known work(s) (the Lewis oeuvre and the soon-to-be-released major motion picture, at least). —Muke Tever 00:04, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

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Narnia translations

• OTRS ticket 2009010810001215

The user in the email linked above seems to think that this translation project would be of use for future page development. Kylu 03:04, 2 February 2009 (UTC)