Talk:Quag Keep

Encyclopedic Tone/Neutrality

This article has been flagged as lacking encyclopedic tone and not having a neutral tone. I am willing to work to improve it, but reading the article, everything seems to have a cited source, and seems to be of the same tone as other articles about fantasy books, so I'm not sure why it was tagged. TheOmniscientEditor, can you explain why you tagged this article? Guinness323 (talk) 04:10, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Hi Guinness323,

I've reviewed the article and stand by my decision to flag the article for 'neutrality'. If you take a look at the 'Reception' section, it contains overwhelmingly negative feedback which I believe compromises the article's neutrality even if the book itself was generally unpopular. As for my issue with the 'tone', I initially noticed that the 'Description' section read to be a little off, but after reviewing other children's fantasy book Wikipedia pages, I am now not so sure. To me, it reads too much like a blurb, and is not encyclopedic enough, though I am willing to concede this issue if you think otherwise.

On another note, the article needs basic copy editing. I am willing to do this as well as help you improve upon the aforementioned issues within the next month. TheOmniscientEditor (talk) 16:17, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, TheOmniscientEditor. I have spent several hours hunting down other reviews of Quag Keep, both from 1979-1980 and from more contemporary sources. I have yet to find a positive review. If anything, the reputation of the novel has worsened over time.

• 2009: "Quag Keep is a very odd novel. It's far from Norton's best"
• 2019: "a plodding tale."
• 2020: "This is the sort of thing I'd expect from a teen writing a novelization of a D&D campaign ... It is a whole lot of not good."
• 2021: "it's just kind of boring. Even when there were fights it was boring."

My point here is that the reason there are no positive reviews included in the article is because they apparently don't exist. If there are no positive reviews in the article, it does not mean the article is not neutral, it means the article accurately describes the critical reception of a book that was judged by professional reviewers to be not as good as expected. If Wikipedia editors were deliberately leaving out positive reviews in order to skew the novel into a negative light, then yes, that would be a violation of neutrality. In this case, apparently there are no positive reviews to add to the article.

As for the encyclopedic tone, you should edit the article as you see fit. Guinness323 (talk) 18:25, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply and clarification, Guinness323. As you said, the article's 'Reception' section seems to accurately reflect its poor quality as established by reviewers in a general consensus. I will remove the template and adjust the tone accordingly in the near future. TheOmniscientEditor (talk) 19:16, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

I agree with you. This is an above average book article and there are no major issues that warrant flags. pburka (talk) 18:59, 2 May 2026 (UTC)