Talk:The Return of the King

== Why am I able to edit your web page???? == —This unsigned comment is by 68.96.39.232 (talk • contribs) 05:00, 3 December 2004 (UTC).

Because that is the way Wikis are set up: so that everyone can participate. The occasional vandal's edits are usually soon reverted because hundreds or thousands can be monitoring changes on the Wikipedia, and even a smaller Wiki like this project can have dozens of active participants keeping track of things during a day. ~ Kalki 05:18, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Copyvio problem and cleanup

I've flagged this article as a likely copyright violation because it contains substantial quoting from a copyrighted work. I ask the editors of this article to try to reduce the amount of quotes severely. I estimate that we have about 30 paperback-sized pages of quotes here, for a book that is about 430 paperback-pages long, or about 7% of the book. This is too much by any reasonable fair-use standard.

While we have no formal guidelines yet on a maximum amount of quoting for a book, I would recommend cutting it down to less than 1%. This may horrify Tolkien fans, but we need to focus on the very best, most pithy and original quotes from works. This means thinking more like editors of a Bartlett's Famous Quotations than of a fan website. While all of the prose in TRotK is quite impressive, we should try to get the most memorable lines, and avoid quotes that merely describe pivotal events, illuminate characters and personalities with less-than-unique phrases, and provide other examples that probably wouldn't make it into a top-20 list.

I expect to return to this page sometime after 00:00, 14 August 2007 UTC (i.e, about a week) and see how things are going. If necessary, I will start chopping out large amounts of material at that time. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:16, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh, I forgot — we should also have some better indication of where these quotes are for people not familiar with Return. I believe the headings should include chapter numbers, and page numbers and an edition from which to source them are also highly recommended. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:22, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

The first edition of The Lord of the Rings is out of copyright in the United States. So long as the quotes are taken from the first edition, there is no copyright issue here under U.S. law. Note that most of Tolkien's changes for the second edition that has been in print since 1966 were to the Appendices, so while Appendices to The Lord of the Rings could use a good trimming on copyvio grounds, most, if not all of the quotes in the three articles you tagged aren't copyvio's in the U.S. (though they would be in most Berne Convention countries.) 4.152.3.132 17:44, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

== Why are none of these quotes attributed? Who (in the novel) said them and to whom, when?! 203.122.250.137 06:54, 24 August 2007 (UTC)