User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20170427192340/@comment-24894325-20170428123556

Thanks for the excellent resources.

Whenever there is a clear and unambiguous rule followed across the wiki, we should cherish and praise it. The only thing I would do, were I an admin, is to explain this on T:DAB TERM. We sometimes use dab terms in ways that do not match their everyday meaning. The most obvious example is using "(comic story)" and not "(graphic novel)" for original graphic novels. We should simply be clear that "(novel)" does not refer to a novel in the accepted sense of the world. Partially, because the accepted meanings of novel, novella and short story are too fuzzy and vague to be used in a strict classification. (Here I disagree with SOTO a bit: a 32-page minibook is not a novel no matter how liberal one is on the term.)

From the sources Shambala108 kindly dug out, I can infer the following formulation: every story that is (originally) printed as a stand-alone book (paper or electronic) gets "(novel)" everything else, including stories (originally) printed in an anthology or published on a website like Christmas Special gets "(short story)". It's a nice and easy to implement rule. Embedding it into the description of dab terms would simply further help "to skip over debates on every single range" (to quote from CzechOut on one of the sources), i.e., to skip exactly the kind of discussion we are having now.