Scrap the "List of Implied ___" pages?

Glowsquid

Glowsquid

Shine Sprite
Retired Forum Mod
Retired Wiki Staff
'Shroom Consultant
José is a character mentioned in the Donkey Kong Country episode It's a Wonderful Life. During the first musical segment, Eddie the Mean Old Yettie respond to Donkey Kong's plea to be brought back to reality with "No way, José!". It is unknown who José is or why Eddie mentioned his name.
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This isn't a real entry from a List of Implied __ page, but it may as well be. I honestly believe it's the worst set of page on the wiki. Every random proper name, from halfway-important backstory fragments to random flavour text is bunched together with no regard to relevance or readability. Every throwaway joke, no matter how obvious, is listed and followed by "It is unknown where Bowser's bitcoin bank is located"... etc, it's inanity incarnate. The idea was that every thing on there used to be its own page and it's better to have the shit in one place that all over the floor, but this is a bad way to manage thing: Quarantined or not, AIDS is still AIDS.

In case an "implied" subject isn't 100% bogus or inane, it can always be paired with other related "implied" things (like most of the twerps in Super Paper Mario's grimdark backstory, or the random namedrops in the educational games), integrated into a related main wiki page (For ex, "the University of Goom" can always be mentioned on Goombella's and Professor Frankie's page and you wouldn't lose any info) or be, *gasp*, given its own page if it has enough relevant material and importance to the plot. And the times where we can't elegantly into his article that Wario has a pet hamster named "Fluffy"- well, who cares? Being an "encyclopedia" doesn't mean we're obligated to list every proper noun ever mentioned in the series.

I can understand why some editors would be anxious about such a development, though. So much quality content would be lost! Quality content like…

The Armored Harriers' mother, referred to as "Mom" by the twins, was referenced in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Grubba lied to the twins that Mario had said outie belly buttons run in their family. They were shocked that Mario would have known about their mother's belly button, which resulted in their bearing a grudge against Mario.
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The Goomba Environmental Board is an organization mentioned by Goombario in Paper Mario when he tattles in a certain area of Toad Town Tunnels. Not much is known about it except for the fact that it is implied to be run by Goombas.
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The Annual Plumbers' Dance is an apparent social gathering consisting of plumbers that was mentioned in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!.
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The Strongest Pianta Tournament was mentioned by a purple Pianta in Super Mario Galaxy 2 in Starshine Beach Galaxy in the mission "Climbing the Cloudy Tower", and the Pianta also said that the Piantas are "busy lookin' burly" (practising for the event). Of course, this tournament was implied, but was never shown in the game.
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How I weep.
 
Misty said:
Some of the entries are actually pretty good, though.
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That's what the entire second paragraph was about, "what to do with good entries" pretty much.
 
figured there was something bigger behind splitting the Diamond Software entry from that page

I fully agree. Making a full proposal on this would be unnecessary since I doubt anyone will really oppose scrapping the pages. I guess this thread will serve as a dumping ground when we start sifting through the crap?

ftr I'd be happy to tackle any page when the time comes
 
Yeah, get rid of the stupid ones and merge the relevant ones into articles where they'd be fitting.
 
Making a full proposal on this would be unnecessary since I doubt anyone will really oppose scrapping the pages.
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As much as I'd like that, it's a a pretty major change in content organiation this forum thread is hardly a substantial or representative sample of the wiki's editorship.

One issue I can see is, what to do with the stupid entries? Should we protect all the individual section redirects to prevent people from making articles on things like Old Man Skoo?
 
Personally, I think it's better to have a centralized location for all the implied things, rather than scattering the info all around the wiki. That way, if people search for stuff like that (and people will - otherwise these pages wouldn't exist), they get an entry rather than a disappointing line buried in another article. Most of the suckiness comes from people trying too hard to make meaningless throwaway refs into full paragraphs, but the better way to deal with that would be to prune the articles, not blow them apart.

Just use case-by-case reasoning and some stricter standards, and like Generic Subjects, I think it's quite doable to salvage the pages. I.e. things like "this reminds me of my mom" wouldn't mean the mom gets a section, because she's not an entity at all really, but a signed note from the mother means she would, and a lengthy description of the mother as a specific, tangible yet unseen character could be section-worthy too, as long as the section doesn't try too hard with the speculative cruft (i.e. "Billy is a crow from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door who is the son of Bob and Maude. His mom is contemplating saving for his college fund after hearing about Ronnie." seems perfectly fine to me: just the facts and boom, you're done). Things like Mario and Bowser's families could also be merged to cut down on sections, like how Rosalina's Family is all together. Real Life locations and people and things like Big Bird could also be handled differently, as they're more like references than implied characters/places/etc.
 
Scrapping the entire pages is not the best option, trimming the page, getting rid of unworthy sections is way too better.. Example of unworthy includes the No-Name Minor NPC. (i.e Ashley's Teacher). Big Bama and Neutron B can be kept. I may have read the manual, and I want to know who exactly is Big Bama (while I doubt I'd do). On the other hand: Blumiere's Father is not named, though he has much info, and he's worth a section. And like what Walkazo said, Real life things should be moved to something like List of references in the Mario series, and familes to characters' pages
 
I say put some in BJAODN and merge them into one page
 
I agree with not fully deleting the page, but having a bit of quality control on the crap here. So I agree with Walkazo.
 
Per Walkazo.
 
This thread harks back to the day of heated topics of the validity of Lakitu Travel. To get a full appreciation of what this thread is trying to deliver, just read the dang discussion of the Lakitu Travel shit, which is... wow.
 
Well, I still think listing every random proper name isn't kinda silly and that some set of entries would be better off on other pages (like the Croacus guys in SPM), if the consensus is against scrapping things entirely, I can go behind exercising some actual quality control.

To draw attention to the fact the pages are of poor quality, would it be advisable to add "guidelines" to them (either plainly visible or hidden w/ the "<!--- markup)? Something like:

Before adding an entry, keep the following in mind:

1: Be sure to filter out generic mentions. A character off-handely saying "Man, my mother is going to kill me" isn't worth a section, but a statement that actually gives information about the mother's appearance or personality is.

2: be direct and don't pad the entry with speculation, captain obvious or non-statements. If you feel the need to precede a statement with "It is possible that [thing] is" or "It is unknown who/what/where [thing] is", it's not worth adding.
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?

This thread harks back to the day of heated topics of the validity of Lakitu Travel. To get a full appreciation of what this thread is trying to deliver, just read the dang discussion of the Lakitu Travel shit, which is... wow.
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LOL
 
Guidelines like that would be fine, imo.
 
Glowsquid said:
Well, I still think listing every random proper name isn't kinda silly and that some set of entries would be better off on other pages (like the Croacus guys in SPM), if the consensus is against scrapping things entirely, I can go behind exercising some actual quality control.

To draw attention to the fact the pages are of poor quality, would it be advisable to add "guidelines" to them (either plainly visible or hidden w/ the "<!--- markup)? Something like:

Before adding an entry, keep the following in mind:

1: Be sure to filter out generic mentions. A character off-handely saying "Man, my mother is going to kill me" isn't worth a section, but a statement that actually gives information about the mother's appearance or personality is.

2: be direct and don't pad the entry with speculation, captain obvious or non-statements. If you feel the need to precede a statement with "It is possible that [thing] is" or "It is unknown who/what/where [thing] is", it's not worth adding.
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?
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Maybe we can have a discussion on the talk page first so those unaccustomed to the forums and stuff know there is talk about overhaul of the article. If I didn't have such limited access to my computer nowadays (password-protected, parental control limits on the guest account I'm using, and I'm 19, lolwut?), I would put a rewrite template and link it to here. I hope somebody else does this instead. This page is kind of useless, imo, so I wouldn't miss it if we decided to nuke it.
 
Glowsquid said:
Well, I still think listing every random proper name isn't kinda silly and that some set of entries would be better off on other pages (like the Croacus guys in SPM), if the consensus is against scrapping things entirely, I can go behind exercising some actual quality control.

To draw attention to the fact the pages are of poor quality, would it be advisable to add "guidelines" to them (either plainly visible or hidden w/ the "<!--- markup)? Something like:

Before adding an entry, keep the following in mind:

1: Be sure to filter out generic mentions. A character off-handely saying "Man, my mother is going to kill me" isn't worth a section, but a statement that actually gives information about the mother's appearance or personality is.

2: be direct and don't pad the entry with speculation, captain obvious or non-statements. If you feel the need to precede a statement with "It is possible that [thing] is" or "It is unknown who/what/where [thing] is", it's not worth adding.
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I can get behind that, though honestly, I'm still in favour of scrapping/merging the pages entirely.
 
I'm fine with sifting through the pages and removing the stupid ones and making articles for the more major ones.

On that subject, I was thinking about this for a while (read: a week), would the King Croacus I, III, and Queen Croacus really count as implied? I mean, unlike some of the stuff on that page (implied characters), there are actually pictures of the said characters as well as a brief description of their reign and other details. I'm not saying to give them each a separate page (although I'd prefer that), but I guess make one for Croacus royalty or something?

Edit: It seems Glowsquid already brought up the Croacus guys, but I'm bringing it up anyways just because. That's what I get for sifting through this thread.
 
The Croacuses used to have their own pages, but then they got merged via Proposal (MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive_26#Merge_the_Croacus_family_.28excluding_King_Croacus_IV.29_to_List_of_Implied_Characters), which was a response to Rosalina's mom not getting split (Talk:List_of_Implied_Characters#Separate_Rosalina.27s_Mother_from_Implied_Characters), which used the argument that pictures still aren't in-the-flesh appearances, since that leads to a slippery slope of splitting, which wasn't in vogue back then.

Nowadays, the push is for more articles and less big lists, so in the interest of all that, redefining "implied" to allow pages for characters depicted in pictures and as statues or whatever doesn't seem unreasonable at all. I'd even say characters that have dialogue but aren't seen could also get pages, like Blumiere's father.
 
Agreed. They're basically nonsense and should go somewhere else.

Zelda Wiki doesn't have a list of implied characters for all the Kings of Hyrule now, does it?
 
So, is anyone going to change up these pages or what? Is "now" the best time to do it? Because I did remove some garbage entries and I'd like to filter it further.
 
Halayà úbe Praseodymium Mario said:
So, is anyone going to change up these pages or what?
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No. Do whatev you want.
 
I'll try to remember to look at the stuff too, but no promises (RL is too busy, argh).
 
Awesome job. I re-added a couple, but for the most part, all the removals seem good.
 
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