Talk:Nintendo 48-Hour Wii U Video Challenge

Split everything

This talk page proposal has already been settled. Please do not edit this section or its subsections. If you wish to discuss the article, please do so in a new section below the proposal.

failed to reach consensus 9-8
If this were any other series, this would happen by default. This is being made into a proposal because of the following;

Nintendo endorsed the creation of these videos, did the promotion that allowed them to exist, got them showcased at the Sundance Film Festival.. yet Nintendo themselves did not make the videos. However, the videos' creation was still licensed by Nintendo, even though they were shot in a manner that is usually done for a fan film. These episodes contain a TON of unique characters, objects, and whatnot that could fill out their own articles. The sole reason I am creating this proposal is due to the fact that these videos were made by people not DIRECTLY affiliated with Nintendo [yet were released by Nintendo], so there could be a bit of a gray area there as to split/not split.

If it turns out that there is / would not be any pushback to the creation of these articles, this proposal can be canceled.

If this passes / gets canceled, the following articles would be created [once I have time];

• Corporate Asshole (not joking, this is the name given in the Genius lyrics)
• Scientist (Nintendo 48-Hour Wii U Video Challenge) (the actor states in the behind-the-scenes video that he's playing a scientist, which is the only name given for his character)
• Test Subject 4-2
• Ethan (from the Writer's Room one)

In addition to whichever other named things or people appear in these that I forgot about.

Proposer: Nelsonic (talk)
Deadline: September 10, 2026, 23:59 (UTC) Extended to September 17, 2026, 23:59 (UTC) Extended to September 24, 2026, 23:59 (UTC) Extended to October 1, 2026, 23:59 (UTC)

Sundance Supporters

1. Nelsonic (talk) Per.
2. Rykitu (talk) Per proposal and the votes below. They are unique named characters who appear in a licensed Nintendo video with a storyline. Those are my personal rules when it comes to giving web video/advertisement subjects articles. I feel like most people in the opposition are opposing because they hate advertisement coverage. Yeah, the characters have zero relevance in future media and "aren't Mario-themed enough", but isn't the point of this wiki to cover the entirety of the Super Mario franchise? I don't understand why we're omitting these, yet other advertisement characters like Bill can stay. As Hewer puts it in the comments: "Readers who don't care about a certain part of our coverage are free to just ignore it."
3. Hewer (talk) Named ad characters have a precedent of getting articles, I think this makes enough sense. Not sure why the videos being released by Nintendo but not created by them would be a hangup, the same is true of many games we fully cover.
4. Corporate Brat (talk) Per all. Articles for named characters appearing only in commercials are allowed on this wiki, as long as the commercial they appear in is specifically about a Super Mario product. The wiki also gives full coverage for Super Mario medias in which neither Nintendo nor any of its subsidiaries had any involvement in their production, as long as it is officially licensed.
5. Mr. Sorbetti (talk) per consistency.
6. The Real Consistency Fan (talk) Per all.
7. Salmancer (talk) Aside from everything else being said, The scientist created Super Mario powers and granted them to Test Subject 4-2. That's as valid as being a Piranha Plant to me.
8. Iand255 (talk) Per all. Officially licensed Super Mario focused media is officially licensed Super Mario focused media, regardless of what it is and who made it.
9. Harold Harefoot (talk) Per all.

(Couldn't think of a funny name for the opposition option)

1. Camwoodstock (talk) If neither Alison, Gary, and Dark Gary nor Jack have pages (the latter of which actually having formerly had a page before a later merge), we can't think of many reasons to give these guy pages, admittedly. We know someone's about to bring up the menagerie of pages for characters from Play Nintendo's videos as a counter-argument, but at least those videos have (had?) Izzy, who is literally a Piranha Plant, which is an enemy from Mario. None of these four guys have an edge like that.
2. Mario (talk) All these pages regarding promo videos from Nintendo, have a tenuous, peripheral connection to Mario at best, so giving pages to characters that are part of promotional vehicles is overkill. This is like giving pages for characters from advertisements, which was agreed to be overkill. I still think we should be more selective choosing what subjects should have articles and I don't think this territory of advertisements, Nintendo or not, is a worthwhile place to explore compared to subjects in video games, manga, books, tv, movies, etc.
3. Wandering Poplin (talk) Per all.
4. Power Flotzo (talk) Per all.
5. Keegster2 (talk) Correct me if I'm wrong, but these characters were made by a bunch of unrelated YouTubers and not Nintendo, right? If that's the case, giving them their own articles makes as much sense as giving all the fighters in Super Smash Bros. separate articles again because they happen to be in something that contains Super Mario elements.
6. LadySophie17 (talk) per Cam and Mario.
7. WACCA Lily R (talk) Per Mario.
8. MCD (talk) Per all. Even ignoring arguments about whether they're relevant or "interesting" enough, everything you'd need to know about these characters seems to be covered on the videos' pages. I'm not sure why all the ad characters listed in the comment below need their own pages and coverage seems inconsistent and a bit messy there anyway - does every random kid who appears in an ad need an article if they're named, even if there's no new info to add? Why is the coverage of the characters so concise but to find the actual ad you need to traverse this massive, inconvenient list? Might seem irrelevant but if we're creating a page for i.e. an unnamed scientist (I don't think we can claim that his name is "Scientist", sorry) in a web video then do we need to do the same for all unnamed characters in pther web videos and ads? Doesn't seem like a good precedent to set, especially without clearer coverage guidelines. At least with the characters in these videos, if anyone really wants to look them up, the info is already where you'd expect it to be on the video pages. Adding new pages for them would just be duplicating information which is already on the video pages, which they'd need to visit first before getting to the character pages anyway, so it just seems redundant.

COINSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! (Comments)

@Camwoodstock Jack's page was merged due to SSB crossover standards, if I remember correctly. Nintendo Week characters are part of a crossover series in that of themselves, but these characters are all entirely from a series specific to Mario (this "Challenge" was made explicitly for NSMBU). Nelsonic (talk edits) 03:31, August 27, 2026 (UTC)

"If this passes / gets canceled, the following articles would be created [once I have time]; "
What is that supposed to mean? I don't want these split, and I don't want those pages created. It's me, Mario! (Talk / Stalk) 03:42, August 27, 2026 (UTC)

We're assuming they mean "canceled and immediately put into effect", since that happens on occasion when something that clearly fits our coverage policy ends up having a proposal for a page creation anyways. ~Camwoodstock ( talk ☯ contribs ) 03:52, August 27, 2026 (UTC)

@Camwoodstock Correct. Sorry, I didn't think this would be divisive, otherwise I would've put "canceled and immediately put into effect" instead of just "canceled". Nelsonic (talk edits) 04:15, August 27, 2026 (UTC)

@Mario I get that these are essentially advertisements, but I believe they're referred to as short films in one of the videos. Nelsonic (talk edits) 04:21, August 27, 2026 (UTC)

@Camwoodstock: Nintendo Week is general Nintendo, not specifically Mario-centred, and Quest for the amiibo is an ad for Smash, so again not specifically Mario-centred. This case is unlike those two, as it's specifically marketing for New Super Mario Bros. U.
@Mario: Giving pages to named characters from advertisements was never "agreed to be overkill" to my knowledge, and pages such as Cowboy Jed, Jed Junior, Bill, Game and Watch (characters), Adriane, Mr. Arcade, Ken Darling, and Jamie Anderson are still alive and well. (You might be thinking of this proposal, which was very specifically about ad characters without names, not named characters, which this proposal is about.) Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 10:02, August 27, 2026 (UTC)

@Nelsonic If this proposal passes, Ethan's page might need an identifier since there is already a wanted page for Jordan's brother, who is also named Ethan. Since Play Nintendo Ethan has more appearances, I don't think he needs an identifier... Rykitu 9:15 PM August 27, 2026 (UTC)

Hewer: I'm not sure if it was universally agreed on to have pages on these characters, but precedent or not, most these characters you listed are largely outside the scope of Mario (except maybe Game and Watch (characters)) and don't benefit our wiki to have pages of them. Characters like Izzy and Kinopio-kun are certainly Mario characters (recurring ones too), and if those advertisements were themed after Mario (for instance, if they took place in Mushroom Kingdom and Mario characters were doing the advertising), and there were Mario characters created for it (for instance, hypothetically, let's say there's this purple Shy Guy called "Pay Day Guy"), then sure, we could create a couple short articles. We do this for The Cat Mario Show, which I don't have much issues with that article existing (even that page doesn't have full articles of episodes unlike these). But hardly any of these characters in these episodes have any relation to Mario, nor are they clearly Mario characters, besides that they're promoting a video game that has Mario in it, and I guess there's a couple Mario assets in there, but they don't come off to me as something MarioWiki should cover. I largely suspect those who read MarioWiki will find full articles of these, as well as the Play Nintendo content and movie tie-in promotional products largely baffling and seemingly off-target of our goal, which is to cover the Mario franchise but not necessarily the wider brand of Mario. I'm not too keen of the recent trend of treating coverage of these materials the same as other works such as video games, film, books, but that's probably for another time of debate. It's me, Mario! (Talk / Stalk) 01:49, August 28, 2026 (UTC)

I mean, I'm a reader of this wiki and I find the subject of this article interesting, and I feel like the Mario wiki is the perfect place to cover the whole of the Mario brand. The people who bothered to create these articles probably also found them interesting. I don't really find Mario's Super Picross very interesting, but I'm sure other readers do. Readers who don't care about a certain part of our coverage are free to just ignore it. Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 09:06, August 28, 2026 (UTC)

@Keegster2 Yes, they were made by third-party YouTubers, but they were officially distributed by Nintendo for a contest explicitly for NSMBU.They were all released on the official Nintendo YouTube channel. Nelsonic (talk edits) 00:06, September 2, 2026 (UTC)

@Keegster2: If the content was released by Nintendo, it doesn't matter who made it. Otherwise Waluigi (made by Camelot) and Diddy Kong (made by Rare) wouldn't be Mario characters. And I don't see how this is anything remotely like Smash. The reason we don't give Smash full coverage has nothing to do with its official-ness, it's because it's a crossover and not a Mario-centred product. These videos are not crossovers, they're ads for New Super Mario Bros. U. Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 12:11, September 2, 2026 (UTC)

...Apologies for the impromptu ramble, but something that's been on our mind that we feel like we'd be remissed to bring up is that's relevant to both this proposal, and a few other things like it. We feel like this sort of approach feels kinda... Misguided? Not just in the proposal's creation, but the opposition they tend to bring feels also misguided, in our opinion. We feel like there's some sort of stigma that we have to give these guys from advertisements full character pages, or that we have to file away every last Browser promotional game as a game, because otherwise they don't "matter" or aren't "real" characters or games that are "irrelevant" or some-such increasingly derogatory phrasing that has us gritting our teeth harder and harder. The way people phrase their opposition of these pages feels really slimy to us, for reasons we think we'd rather keep to ourselves. The details as to why this skeeves us so badly are between ourselves, and whatever Gods exist. But, like, the tone of the room with some of these proposals is that it feels like some people would just waltz up to the people behind these and tell them "I perceive what you worked on as the Super Mario equivalent of chamber pot scrapings, and I could not care less if it blew up tomorrow", and that's kind of a problem? Because, one, that's incredibly rude, but two, it's kind of missing the actual problem with pages like these, and we're gonna put this on a separate paragraph for emphasis.
The underlying problem is our organization for this stuff is an absolute mess. Dare we say, it's one of the least organized, most rat's nest-y things on the wiki at the moment. Advertisements all get a table for televised advertisements, and are planned to have a gallery for print advertisements, and like, that's fine for them... But the way we handle the rest of this stuff is highly questionable to us. For example, say, web video marketing, which weirdly gets stuff on a page-by-page basis. Sometimes you get individual pages for singular advertisements, sometimes the entire line gets one single, all-encompassing page. For as long as we can remember, literally every single piece of merchandise has been shuffled into generic galleries... Except for the odd few who instead list the relevant merchandise on tables on the manufacturer's page. Or a gallery on the manufacturer's page, which should probably be a table. Or the split gallery for the manufacturer, somehow doing all of these at the same time, in what might be the most incomprehensible gallery on the entire wiki. How exactly we cover a website isn't standardized whatsoever, so most people just kinda used the game infobox, because that was the closest thing. Which later butterfly effected itself into having zero distinction between these browser games (most of which are advergames for other titles), and y'know, the other titles. There is a {{website infobox}}, but sometimes it gets used, sometimes the game one gets used, and some just don't bother at all.
We oppose this particular split not because we think this sorta thing doesn't matter, but because it's just another layer of organizational hell. Our coverage of this little promotional video wouldn't be any better if information on it was haphazardly split across 5 pages. That's not to say we shouldn't cover this little promotional video at all on its own! But we really need to put in an effort to actually organize this sort of thing. To be quite honest, we feel like a Pipe Project to better our coverage of these sorts of promotional doodads, both in terms of spending free afternoons sinking 1-3 hours on the minutia of a random Flash game, but also in terms of better sorting this information so it's more practical to find it if you want it and not have it clog up other pages if you don't, would go a long, long way, to both easing the weird resentment we feel in the air about these things, but also just... Actually helping cover it, if we have a userbase that's evidently willing to help do so. ~Camwoodstock ( talk ☯ contribs ) 18:57, September 25, 2026 (UTC)