Anthology: Story Arc, Team, Character?

I would like to make the listings for Battle Picture Weekly better. It is a British weekly anthology from the 1970s/80s. Some of the stories are long-running and focus on a single character or team. Some, however, are only 6-12 episodes, never return and don't have the same central character (e.g. The Team Who Went to War covers all the members of a football team; The Fortrose Falcon has different generations of the same family; The Flight of the Golden Hinde is about the crew of a ship) Should these be Story Arcs? Or do I set them as a Team, a Character, something else?

@lawiedc: The episodic stuff from old British weeklies can be tricky, technically most of them don't qualify as a story arc because they don't include any kind of part designation like part 1, 2, 3, etc. or chapter 1, 2, 3, etc., they are kind of inbetween an arc and an event so they generally don't get pages. Years and years ago we discussed doing arc pages for the episodic stories in 2000 AD but the amount of work shelved the idea, for Battle Picture Weekly I'd lean towards having small stuff as arcs and larger recurring things as concepts but even that is pretty wonky.

If these things were added as arcs would you be adding content to the arc pages or are you more interested in the cataloging of the stories aspect?

@pikahyper : Thanks for the reply - I agree that that they are a bit on the edge of what I would normally understand by Story Arc.

I'm most interested in cataloging more accurately what is in an issue - ie an entry on the issue page for each of the six stories present. For Charley's War or The Bootneck Boy, where there is clearly a protagonist but rarely a formal "arc" to their adventures, I can reference that character. But it gives an incomplete impression of an issue to ignore The Fortrose Falcon or Battle Honours, which have no recurring characters. I do think that a reference page would need a sentence or two, at a minimum, to explain the arc/concept/purpose - e.g. "A series of self-contained stories each telling of a significant event in British military history".

To help my understanding, in the context of British Weeklies, would the story titles for Dan Dare in Eagle qualify as Story Arcs? (e.g. This issue has part of a specific story "The Solid-Space Mystery")

@lawiedc: I'm going to think on it for the weekend, I'm leaning towards yes but the resulting flood of story arcs could be a pain.

@pikahyper: Certainly worth a reasonable ponder.

I guess my interest in describing the issue can be met within the text, in the way that https://comicvine.gamespot.com/eagle-499/4000-353412/ is set out. The question there is whether it fails the test of providing decent metadata.

@lawiedc: Personally I think the big issue here wold be (through not fault of your own and not directed at you) possibly end up becoming something that can get spammed for a lot of older issues with no real way of working out story arcs.

But i'm all for you going on with this project. The only thing that would concern me is getting the correct information for story arcs.

Honestly you'd probably have to do both, Eagle #499 is a good example of the preferred way of setting up these types of issues but it isn't searchable so its usefulness is limited, adding the episodic stuff as arcs or concepts along with the descriptions would make it easier for research and collecting purposes.

I'm leaning towards adding them as concepts as the layout on concept pages would work better but for short ones an arc page would be best, not sure of the cutoff though, 12 or 15 probably. I'll let you know by Monday and then we can nail out specifics if it's a yes.

@lawiedc: I've thought about it and decided that you should hold off for a little while, big projects like this are usually done by editors that have been on the site for a while or have done a lot, they tend to have a greater understanding of the wiki and how we do things. So far you've just added missing issues, added cover dates and a few character associations, this is also why I've kept you in moderation longer, new editors also tend to burn out and I wouldn't want someone to start a big project that never gets finished. How long depends on what work you do around the wiki, the fact that you read your submission comments is a big help so it probably won't be long, couple weeks or a little longer.

I recognise that this is a big project, that I have just turned up and that completing it would take months or years but is a wiki ever "finished"? I'm here to help and I can see work to do in my area of interest. I'll do what I can and see where we go.

Still, I guess this thread shows CV doesn't yet have an agreed method for handling the metadata of how those anthology weeklies were built.