General Discussion

that's about as messy as template:star, but not of the same magnitude
 
I actually have no problem with the characters and species being listed alongside the items in the Star template: they all have separate subheaders, after all, and it seems like a perfectly useful way to organize the Star pages. I've even found the Star-realm-related locations being all grouped together useful for reading (although that section's technically "misc").

The alternative to the one template is having a separate template for the species and characters like how other species groups are dealt with, but why bother having two templates when one will suffice? And when you think about it, characters =/= species, yet we have no problem lumping them together - the main thing here is that there are many star-related items in addition to the characters and species, unlike most groupings, hence it stands out. Plus there's the fact that the lines between living and inanimate objects is pretty blurred in the Mario series: Super Mushrooms flee, Invincibility Stars bounce, the Beanstar makes faces, screams and blows itself up. Hell, if you really think about it, Super Mushrooms are a species of mushroom, like how Piranha Plants are a species of plant, and Yoshis are a species of animal.

I agree that Star (species) needs work, and that lumping all star-related things together is too broad, but rather than stripping out massive amounts of pages, we should enhance Template:Stars to make it more organized and useful.

So keep the characters, keep the species, make a proper location section and deal with the few truly "misc" things better, and then divide the items, into the power-up-type stars you're talking about now (although the "eyes" thing is a rather speculative and flimsy criteria to use, tbh), perhaps a star-related section for things like the Star Cures, the Star Rod and Star Pieces, and possibly a miscellaneous section for things like Launch Stars, rather than letting them drift off into the realms of template-less organizational dead-ends.
 
Walkazo said:
I actually have no problem with the characters and species being listed alongside the items in the Star template: they all have separate subheaders, after all, and it seems like a perfectly useful way to organize the Star pages. I've even found the Star-realm-related locations being all grouped together useful for reading (although that section's technically "misc").
Click to expand...
All right then, although I'm still not comfortable lumping Brighton and Starlow with stuff like Eternal Star and the Star Spirits; they bear little connection to each other, and I think that's the main gist of the problem.

Walkazo said:
The alternative to the one template is having a separate template for the species and characters like how other species groups are dealt with, but why bother having two templates when one will suffice? And when you think about it, characters =/= species, yet we have no problem lumping them together - the main thing here is that there are many star-related items in addition to the characters and species, unlike most groupings, hence it stands out. Plus there's the fact that the lines between living and inanimate objects is pretty blurred in the Mario series: Super Mushrooms flee, Invincibility Stars bounce, the Beanstar makes faces, screams and blows itself up. Hell, if you really think about it, Super Mushrooms are a species of mushroom, like how Piranha Plants are a species of plant, and Yoshis are a species of animal.
Click to expand...

Eh, Mushrooms and Stars can't be really compared to Piranha Plants as I feel Piranha Plants are more animal-like than still-life like plants and rocks. The Mushrooms and Stars aren't treated as if they're living beings, therefore a species, even though they have a face and sometimes make weird facial expressions. They're treated more as lifeless items that can change facial expressions. Just because they move or bounce doesn't make them a living species. So I disagree with you on that part.


Walkazo said:
I agree that Star (species) needs work, and that lumping all star-related things together is too broad, but rather than stripping out massive amounts of pages, we should enhance Template:Stars to make it more organized and useful.
Click to expand...
True, true, but I don't necessarily agree with some of your statements.

Walkazo said:
So keep the characters, keep the species, make a proper location section and deal with the few truly "misc" things better, and then divide the items, into the power-up-type stars you're talking about now (although the "eyes" thing is a rather speculative and flimsy criteria to use, tbh), perhaps a star-related section for things like the Star Cures, the Star Rod and Star Pieces, and possibly a miscellaneous section for things like Launch Stars, rather than letting them drift off into the realms of template-less organizational dead-ends.
Click to expand...
We're not using just the eyes here, but they all have the same shape and they do have some sort of connection in terms of design and that they're all extremely helpful entities, some even crucial to the gameplay, although some do serve very similarly, like the Star Cure. Maybe we can use a "related" section here and there, but I think the stars with similar design should be treated as the "main" section while the rest can be grouped into something else.
 
Brian and Booster don't have much in common either yet they're side-by-side in Tem:Human. It's one of the unavoidable troubles of having such a broad and variable series. My general feeling is that as long as things aren't uselessly vague, it's better to have more connectivity than less connectivity, and subdivided templates are the best way to encompass a lot of stuff without compromising organization.

I'm not arguing to treat different Mushroom items as species or anything like that: that's cause organizational chaos. I was just being a devil's advocate on account of my RL profession as a biologist, where even basic things like "what is a species" and "what is life" are up for debate (viruses being the "is it alive?" point of contention). Obviously we can't use the same criteria on the wiki - the Mario series is too fanciful (i.e. robotic enemies like impracticality iceberg). My point of that last bit was just that while there are obvious "species/character/item" bins, it's worth keeping in mind that it's not completely black and white, so it's not the end of the world if the odd bin out is grouped with the other two every now and then as long as the overall subject matter is the same (in this case, "star-related stuff").

Treating things with an overall similar design and function as the "main" stars sounds fair, I suppose, but only because it's a fairly substantial sub-category of stars unto itself - like how Koopa Troopas are worth being distinct from misc. Koopa species, and whatnot (only keeping it within the same template because it's not THAT distinct a grouping).
 
I'm honestly not a fan of things like the human template and whatnot, simply because, as you mentioned, there are huge discrepancies between the entries. From a reader's perspective, I can't imagine someone who'd want to jump from Marth to E. Gadd to Booster to Tommy Treehugger while perusing articles. Making templates for games? Makes sense, since someone reading an article would likely be interested in other subjects from that game. Making templates for Goombas and Boos? Sure, since the entries, whether character or species, all have a clear resemblance in both appearance in abilities. Making templates for Humans... I don't see a point in having that increased connectivity: if someone actually was interested in looking up a species that is hardly ever actually mentioned in the games (dumb question, is is technically speculation to have the majority of those entries as humans or does common sense override that?), we do have a category for exactly that (which I'm still iffy on but I think it's a better substitute). Besides, even if they don't have a species template, they're still going to have a template for whatever game or show they're in, so it's not like they're going to be stranded on their own. What actual benefit is there for this "bonus" connectivity?
 
Well, it beats the category in that it at least divides by overall series. If I ever do want to find humans for one reason or another (and I HAVE needed to do just that from time to time), I always use the template. Without it, I'd be stuck slogging through the category and having to deal with all the alt media characters and stuff, when all I wanted was a Mario or Wario VG series human. For the same reason, I pretty much never use species categories, since they have characters mixed in with them, and that's annoying, so I use the nice template instead, as it separates the subjects for me. Our job is to make information retrieval easy as possible, and templates help us do that - including Tem:Human.
 
Mostly fanfiction stuff. Adding obscure references to my stuff, trying to figure out who unnamed cameos in other stuff are, etc. And sometimes I just browse the random human pages for the sake of browsing through all the random humans. Like, all the generic names - who are these people? And then they're all so boring, you forget about them and have to revisit the pages a couple years later to remind yourself that Bean is some kid riding a horse and Onnanoko is a secret character in Wrecking Crew '98, and other such Trivia to fart away the hours with.
 
Mhm... Personally, I don't think casual boredom and one-off notes in fanfics are enough of a justification to warrant having an entire template across 300+ articles. I mean, I do like to dive into random assortments of names that I don't recognize as well (I make it sound like a taxing chore, don't I?), but considering I don't recognize Kaoru or Hercufleas any more than I recognize Sheri or Kiryl, it really doesn't make much of a difference to me. Also...

Walkazo said:
For the same reason, I pretty much never use species categories, since they have characters mixed in with them, and that's annoying, so I use the nice template instead, as it separates the subjects for me.
Click to expand...
That... doesn't really apply with humans, does it? I mean, I know you're making the same point with the games and all, but that seems like different areas.

(While we're discussing this, since Rookie (Bowser) is the only one to strictly be called Rookie in this "form", unlike Birdo or Popple, could the article be moved to simply Rookie?)
 
Fanfiction writers use the wiki for reference a lot, and I'd wager a lot of the readership are also just wandering around reading stuff or looking up one-time refs they see somewhere. Any use of the wiki is a valid one and looking down our noses at any of them is a completely wrong-headed (and mildly insulting) approach to running the wiki. We can make using it easier for anyone, we should. Hell, if people want to use the wiki for image references to draw their smutty fanart (and I bet they do), they can go right ahead - traffic is traffic, and as long as they're not posting the results of their hard labour around here, it's no skin off our backs.

If anything, leaving the template intact and on 300+ articles is the path of least resistance. It's very, very hard to justify the destruction of information or organizational material: that's the last thing we should EVER consider doing to our database, really. The template's made, it's not useless, so why go out of our way to scrap it? It'd be nothing but a shameful waste.



Yeah, the "Rookie" title can just go to Bowser, with a disambig page for the other things.
 
Any great reason the NPC characters from Mario Party Advance, which are identical to any the generic enemies, have their own articles? They have... talking roles, but what makes them more significant than, say, some NPCs in the Mario RPGs?
 
It's been quite a while since I've played the game, but I think most if not all of them have storylines to experience/problems to address that are integral to progressing through the game. By contrast, a lot of the RPG characters either just have dialogue or have problems related to those of a more significant character. This is just my guess.
 
Dr. Mario said:
Any great reason the NPC characters from Mario Party Advance, which are identical to any the generic enemies, have their own articles? They have... talking roles, but what makes them more significant than, say, some NPCs in the Mario RPGs?
Click to expand...
Names, quests, dialog, personalities, unique rewards... Appearance-wise, they're identical, sure, but they have a lot of outlying traits.
 
There's some discrepancies between key items' categories, like Old Photo versus Tape. Is it necessary for them to have cat:Items, cat:RPG Items, and cat:PM Special Items, or can they scoot away with just cat:PM Special Items?

I've also finished up adding just about everything to both the Paper Mario and Paper Mario Items template (here (User:Time_Turner/unfinished#Paper_Mario)). Anything in particular that's off/I've missed?
 
Pages should only have the most specific categories, according to policy. Unfortunately the category tree system hasn't been implemented in force, so we still have the uselessly broad categories like cat:Items littering the place (and I feel like cat:RPG Items could be phased out entirely, really), but yes, pages should in theory only have things like cat:PM Special Items.
 
So, would cat:Items only serve as a super category for the other item categories (and any really misc. items I guess) and should it be implemented in force?
 
Yes, basically. MarioWiki:Categories explains in full and has some diagrams and whatnot, although rewriting the policy page to be more succinct and more straightforward about some of the category-level stuff has been on my to-do list for about a year now. Once that's done, then I was planning to try and be more pushy about implementing it on mass. For now, Category:Super_Paper_Mario is one of the few sets of relatively up-to-date categories, although a few pages have had too general categories re-added (and new pages have been made and forgotten pages added in) since I went through them all a couple years ago following the iniital approval of the policy.
 
Shulk said:
Dr. Mario said:
Any great reason the NPC characters from Mario Party Advance, which are identical to any the generic enemies, have their own articles? They have... talking roles, but what makes them more significant than, say, some NPCs in the Mario RPGs?
Click to expand...
Names, quests, dialog, personalities, unique rewards... Appearance-wise, they're identical, sure, but they have a lot of outlying traits.
Click to expand...
Sorry, but here's an additional question: what's the negatives of merging them to the generic enemy article? I'm sure some enemies have dialogue in, say, Super Sluggers and Mario Golf games. Especially in Super Sluggers, where each character plays some role (all have some "quest" you need to do to unlock them, bar Mario and Luigi) and some even run shops and all...
 
Don't the Mario Party Advance characters actually have, uh, NAMES and a unique personality of some sorts? They're part of an entire narrative and all. In Super Sluggers, they're more like side characters who simply join you.
 
Baby Luigi said:
Don't the Mario Party Advance characters actually have, uh, NAMES and a unique personality of some sorts? They're part of an entire narrative and all. In Super Sluggers, they're more like side characters who simply join you.
Click to expand...
Basically this. Most of the characters in MSS join after hitting some arbitrary point, or completing some arbitrary challenge, with little to no depth actually given to them. The MPA characters, on the other hand, have distinct personalities with distinct quests and even distinct interactions with the other MPA characters. Basically, they have everything that a character really needs besides some fancy name, and even then, their names are "Goomba" or "Ninji" or "Mouser" and so on and so forth.

While I'm going through a big category exodus, can I ask if cat:PM Series Characters (Category:Paper Mario Series Characters) is even necessary? Even as a supercategory, the other categories could link straight to cat:Characters, no?
 
That's why I said I was WAITING to enforce the category tree system until AFTER I revise the policy: potentially unnecessary intermediate steps like that are one of the things I'm thinking of reconsidering as part of the simplification process.

Category overhauls are very time-consuming: we don't want to have to do it twice. I'd be happy to get off my butt and actually fix the policy and crystallize what our goals will be, but it's gonna take a couple days, at the very least, and then will need admin and/or proposal approval.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back