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Talk: Characters by media

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Proposal to rename and re-organize character appearance categories[]

This is not intended to interfere with the ongoing discussion about whether chapters should exist, but rather as a complement to those goals.

The naming issues[]

Several categorization problems that I'd like to address:

  • This higher-level category, Characters by Chapter Appearances, refers to characters by chapters even though it includes specials, miniseries, and shows that are not in the 1-20 numbered chapter system.
  • When going to the next category level down to character appearances by campaign (example), no character pages are present. This is likely the most common level of specificity for searching for character appearances. This means that even for members of the Mighty Nein, they are not members of a category referencing Campaign 2.
  • 'Appeared in Chapter X' category names (example) do not themselves specify that categories are for characters, resulting in confusion and people adding places, factions, creature types, items, and ships to these categories as well. The category name should not rely on the parent category to make its referent clear. (Sidenote: This lack of clarity also applies to the chapters for the episodes themselves (example), where people have added non-episode pages to the category (example)).

Proposed solution[]

Using Python and AutoWikiBrowser, I could complete tasks 2 and 3 quickly and programmatically, including updating the categorization for every character page, episode page, and sub-category that are in renamed categories. Ideally, episode appearance information in character infoboxes would automatically add the containing page to the correct campaign appearance category so each individual page wouldn't need to be manually added to these categories. Is that possible?

Together, these three changes will make it easier for users to figure out which appearance categories refer to characters (leaving open the possibility for other types of appearances by campaign—guest star, in-game location, magic item, etc) and which characters appeared in which campaigns. SeiverEl (talk) 19:38, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I was going to take a couple of days to process all this, but since I see moves are starting to happen, I want to immediately say that capitalization should be sentence case, where "Campaign One" and "Specials" etc are proper nouns, i.e. "Characters mentioned but not appearing" but "Characters appearing in Campaign One". A couple of our categories (I cannot recall which, but I know they exist, ETA: like Category:Mind flayers and Category:Player characters by player and its child categories) were moved a few months ago to sentence case I believe by Durandal's Fate, and it would be consistent with article naming. I don't immediately have objections because it seems all sensible to me, but any detailed comments will take a bit of time. ~FreckledMcCree (Send me a message!) 02:03, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
Apologies, I figured the higher-level campaign category renaming (Characters appearing in Campaign One, etc) was not too controversial since currently it doesn't appear on any wiki pages directly. Fixed the capitalization of the campaign appearance categories to sentence case and I'll refrain from moving or renaming any other pages until further discussion. SeiverEl (talk) 02:37, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
After some thought, I didn't think of any objection to any of it, or any comment further than yeah I think the categories should all be in sentence case, treating Campaign X as proper noun (though I've decided I'm neutral on whether it should be Specials or specials, whichever). And it appears nobody else has thought of any of either either. So, consider myself as supporting the proposal wholeheartedly. ~FreckledMcCree (Send me a message!) 17:49, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
Really appreciate your thoughtful input & support on this. Should I wait for input from other users as well before continuing? SeiverEl (talk) 23:59, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
Couple of things: first, it'd be really nice to get User:Durandal's Fate's input on this since they've taken the lead on rearranging the tangled categories that make up the wiki. Second, have you done any kind of count on how many pages would then be in the category for each Campaign? I could be wrong, but it seems like those categories could be so large as to be unwieldy. LynnE216 (talk) 00:25, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
I would also be interested in Durandal's opinion, but does my being the one to propose the reorganization of "Category:Places" and "Category:Items" in the first place not count? I kid, I kid. :P That said, looking at this proposal, I think this is more akin to something like Category:Non-player characters, isn't it? Adding them to the top-level categorization would better signal to readers, via the visible categories at the top of the page, what campaigns the character belongs to rather than expecting readers to use it for navigational aid. So, it's achieving a different purpose from the Places and Items reorganization. ~FreckledMcCree (Send me a message!) 00:45, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
Sure, would be happy to wait and hear from them. As for appearance numbers (excluding mentions, which are in a separate category), by my count reconciling conflicting information from episode pages and character infoboxes, the maximum possible right now is 275 characters for C1, 344 for C2, and 19 for C3. What happens if the number of category members is too large, and what counts as too large? I think users would be interested to know which characters appear in which campaigns and there is currently no way to easily see that. SeiverEl (talk) 00:55, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
Ngl, those C1 and C2 numbers are a lot smaller than I thought. Consider: classic categories view lists 200 articles per page, and visual categories display roughly around the same number of per page and have an alphabetical table of context at the top of the page. So, anything less than 400 isn't actually all that unwieldy since it's essentially just one "next page" click. ~FreckledMcCree (Send me a message!) 01:01, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
Given that there are ~850 NPC characters, I'd also think it would be higher, but maybe that's about 200-300 characters just in the specials, one-shots, etc? SeiverEl (talk) 01:21, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
I think changing "Appeared in Campaign X" to "Characters appearing in Campaign X" is a good move, since it clarifies that the category is for characters.
As for putting all the characters who appeared in Chapters 1 through 8 directly into "Characters appearing in Campaign One" and 9 through 19 directly into "Characters appearing in Campaign Two" and so on, I'll just say that my intention with the category structuring was to reduce redundancy, e.g. the Holy Avenger goes in the "Swords" category, which is in the "Weapons" category, which is in the "Items" category, and we don't put the Holy Avenger article directly in the Weapons or Items categories because that makes those higher-level categories increasingly unwieldy (and also adds a lot of unnecessarily vague categories to each article when a more specific category is sufficient). The main problem with the "Appeared in Chapter X" categories is that few people outside the most active editors are very familiar with the chapters, but if we're going to replace the chapters with something clearer like "Characters appearing in Vox Machina's X arc", then reducing redundancy would mean putting that category within the larger "Characters appearing in Campaign One" category.
But as FreckledMcCree notes, maybe there's a good argument that reducing redundancy isn't as important in this case as it is with Items, Places, or Creatures. For example, if readers are searching for a character who they know appeared in a certain campaign but they don't recall which arc(s), it might be helpful for them not to have to look through each arc's page. I suppose there's not much danger that the number of higher-level categories on each character's page will explode if we add one or two categories for the campaign appearances.
I don't have a definitive answer, but I hope this input is somewhat helpful. –Durandal's Fate (talk) 00:38, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Thank you User:Durandal's Fate that is indeed helpful, I appreciate your working through the reader scenarios like trying to find a Campaign 2 character without knowing the chapter. So in light of this feedback, I'm guessing it's ok to continue with the category renaming to clarify that they are about characters like Category:Characters appearing in Specials instead of Category:Appeared in Specials, as well as adding the characters in chapter-level appearance categories like Category:Appeared in Chapter 1 to the additional higher-level categories of Category:Characters appearing in Campaign One? SeiverEl (talk) 03:48, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
I generally approve of changing "Appeared in X" to "Characters appearing in X". (Is there a reason we're capitalizing "specials"?) As for adding characters directly to "appearing in Campaign X" as well, I can definitely see the logic in it—and phasing out the chapter appearance categories while we're at it, unless someone can argue we haven't established a sufficient consensus for it yet. –Durandal's Fate (talk) 02:37, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
A courtesy notice that I have finished moving the appearances into category names with 'Characters' as the first word, making sure to update the category structure as well as individual pages. A good chunk of this renaming was handled by updating the Character and Deity infoboxes to automatically place characters in the newly-named categories. Maybe I could have done it this way with campaign appearances as well, but I felt less confident about adding new categories than editing existing ones, so I directly added campaign appearances to each character article.
Now with Category:Character Appearances as the lone member of Category:Appearances, hopefully we can start adding appearance types beyond characters. SeiverEl (talk) 00:53, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
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