Template talk:SSB fighter infobox

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Now we only need these logos to have a transparent background, like they originally had on the official website. - Cobold (talk · contribs) 14:35, 19 July 2007 (EDT)

I sort of like the gradient of blue going to white and continuing to be white in the text. Wa Yoshihead.png TC@Y 18:04, 19 July 2007 (EDT)
I agree with Wayoshi, the blue moving into white trick looks cool. Additionally, we don't have all of the Emblems, so that could pose as a problem. I did manage to upload most of them, however :P User:Pokemon DP/sig
I found a problem. What to do with the symbols on the Super Smash Bros. Categories:

(With the Animal Crossing one coming soon.)

So, how will we handle the Symbols on those pages? User:Pokemon DP/sig

As for missing emblems, I have added an option not to add an emblem. Look at Roy. Also note that all SSBM official artwork requires a width of 200. For the categories, the emblems don't matter too much in them. - Cobold (talk · contribs) 04:54, 20 July 2007 (EDT)

Battle Entrance parameter[edit]

Does anyone know why there's a double line break between the Final Smash and the Battle Entrance while there shouldn't be one? I couldn't find a mistake in the coding. - Cobold (talk · contribs) 20:08, 2 November 2007 (EDT)

Different story, should we really list the Super Smash Bros. Melee entrances? They are all the same. I don't think it should be in the infobox. - Cobold (talk · contribs) 12:25, 20 January 2008 (EST)

"Game Appearances"[edit]

Would anyone mind if I changed this to "Video Game Appearances"? Of course, if it goes over onto two lines, that would be a reason not to, but "video game" is more professional than "game." Stumpers! 11:46, 13 October 2008 (EDT)

Portrayals?[edit]

May I suggest that we add a spot for every character's voice actor(s)? Since we don't give Smash-exclusive characters the regular char. infobox, they don't have this section. Dodoman (talk)

2 things[edit]

Can we add victory dance? and is there a way to find out everypage that has this infobox on it. Petey Piranha in Mario & Luigi: Partners in TimeGalacticPeteyPetey Piranha in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

Retire SSB fighter infobox[edit]

Brown Block 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.

Stop using SSB fighter infobox 7-2
Coverage of the Super Smash Bros. (series) on this wiki is contentious for sure. But we've settled on doing a lot of downsizing, and I think there's something that's been clinging on from the past that needs to go too. Given the name of this talk page, take a wild guess as to what.

Template:SSB fighter infobox was created in the year 2007, back when Super Mario Wiki was still wet behind its ears. And yeah, Smash Bros. was a major part of our coverage back then. With only three games we declared it a full crossover and covered it accordingly. (See this old coverage policy, and be thankful that I'm not picking the bonkers original "Importance Policy".) Smash Bros. games are kind of complex, and we have a lot of articles. An infobox is a good way to organize things to that people can easily find key details about a topic, and in the case of Super Mario Wiki hop to related articles, right? So what goes in it? The character's name, an image, which games they are in, and a list of their special moves with links to dedicated articles about them. A section for noting a character's animation for entering each Stage (Super Smash Bros. series) was added. It was soon embellished with the symbol that the character's series uses and color coding the infobox to correspond with each character's debut game. Heck, apparently the Smash infobox was so good that Smash Bros. characters only used the SBB fighter infobox and did not get a standard character infobox, as you can see (well, see the broken remains of) in old revision of Kirby. (And yes, modern wiki readers should be shocked and appalled at this: SSB fighter infobox lacks basic data that Template:Character infobox has, such as voice actor and species. The first of these is extremely important baseline stuff, and the second is core to the organization of Super Mario Wiki. This was a problem even pointed out in 2009, so SSB fighter infobox has always had issues.

Three games became six games, each one shrinking the Super Mario (franchise)'s role proportionally compared to the overall game, and the overall games only only got bigger and bigger. More professional heads prevailed and decided pages about characters should always lead on Character infobox presumably so that very necessary data like voice actor is at the top of the page. This moved SBB fighter infobox into the part of the body with the Smash Bros. section. (Here's the edit where that happened to Kirby, though you still can't read it.) The coverage policy was amended so that Smash Bros. is covered selectively, then proposal after proposal chopped away at coverage of that series to better reflect how there isn't really that much Super Mario in it. Why did we need an article on every special move anyway? And heck, why do we need that many articles about characters who only appear in contexts related to the Super Mario franchise in Super Smash Bros.?

Where are we now? Well, because the context that the infobox was made in is so different than the current state of Super Mario Wiki, we have some problems.

  • We don't like using the same artwork in infoboxes on different articles, as a means of helping readers identify that two articles on similar subjects are in fact different articles. Thanks to "Rosalina & Luma", who are definitionally a paired set, we have two infoboxes on different pages that have to use the same art.
  • There are 38 pages that use the SSB fighters infobox template. Only 14 of them are Super Mario characters on the character select screen. and that number goes up to 24 when you include paired characters, alternate costume characters, and boss variants The remaining 14 pages are in quite the lurch though. Take Fox. His infobox lists out all his special moves... to almost no useful effect. They used to be links to pages, then they were changed to be links to a dedicated section on the character's page for their special moves. Now? Each special move gets a sentence or so at best, and less than that if one is unlucky enough to be Sonic. We can't really link to sentences, so for non Super Mario characters the infobox's rows for special moves don't link anywhere. What good is that? Why are we listing the special moves as individual rows if they can't link to anything to elaborate on what they are and they aren't self explanatory in a way that complements the character? The words "Rush Coil" are genuinely meaningless without a link, but we've backdoored ourselves into having it and other specific phrases in an infobox without linking them I guess. (This is in reference to the "species" parameter of Character infobox, the parameter most likely to not have a link. When it does have a link, it leads to useful background knowledge about the character's physiology. When it doesn't have a link, it's because "species" reads something like "human", "dog", or "robot" and the reader's base understanding of the general world and fictional tropes hopefully does the same so we don't have to write a generic subject article.)
  • Speaking of the unlucky 14 non-Super Mario wielders of this infobox: since Smash Bros. is so old and their pages are so sparse because of how tangentially related they are to Super Mario, the character infobox and the SSB fighter infobox tend to be so close together that they end up on the same screen even without scrolling. See Mega Man and Isabelle. And that's silly: it raises the question of "why are these two separate infoboxes if they're often this close together?" to which there are no good answers because I doubt anyone wants to merge SSB fighter infobox into character infobox. Well, there's one good answer: deleting SSB fighter infobox so the 14 affected pages look less silly.
  • The symbol for the character's series... why is it still there? So back in the old revisions of articles before SSB fighter infobox (Like this really old revision of Kirby) articles about characters who were primarily relevant through Smash Bros. had the symbol for their series in the page's upper right corner, like how the Power Star of MarioWiki:Featured articles works. Why did we do this? I dunno, maybe we thought it would be useful to highlight "this article is for a crossover character" since at the time Super Mario games that weren't Mario games, including crossovers, were only under "Secondary Focus" (Oh no, a really old policy page revision!) I assume the symbols were incorporated into the infobox instead for neatness and to leave space for the Power Star. But since the SSB fighter infobox has been moved into the article's body, instead of at the top of the article, I'm no longer sure what the symbol is for. It's not informative, the article intro already says what series a character is from. But it's also not useful within the context of the series: Smash Bros has never ever given the symbols any mechanical meaning, only the series itself and only in side modes like "Conquest", "Event Tournaments" and maybe "Trophy Boxes". So I guess the answer is that "the symbol looks pretty" and that "characters in Smash Bros. are always presented alongside their series's symbol." Both of which are bad justifications for wasting space on a page.
  • Game appearances as a portion made much more sense when SSB fighters infobox was at the top of the page. Now it's just awkward given this infobox is always next to the section containing all the Smash Bros. game, where from length alone one can usually tell which sections are for playable appearances and which ones are not.
  • Because people on this wiki don't especially care about keeping our Smash Bros coverage up to date, improper usage of SSB fighter infobox can go unchecked for years! See the latest revision of Metal Mario at the time of this proposal, whose SSB fighter infobox is missing links for Cape and Mario Tornado, two topics we do have pages about. It's been missing them since an edit in 2010 removed them, and in the 14 years since no one has noticed and fixed it! That has to speak to a general apathy for Super Smash Bros, and if that infobox has stayed broken for so long who knows if there are problems hiding away in out other uses of SSB fighter infobox that haven't been looked over for similar reasons. Deleting the template, and therefore ensuring that all articles only have the one infobox that is at the top of their page, ensures that all of our infoboxes have the maximum possible visibility for editors and that problems in them actually get fixed in a timely manner.
  • Why do we specifically have a row for "entrance animation" but not "victory animation"? They have the same function, showing the character's role and personality with zero gameplay ramifications. I guess all characters must enter the stage at the start of the match while only some characters can win a match... Still, my point is that the "entrance animation" isn't actually that important. If we want to talk about it at all, doing so in the article's body would be fine. (I have a hunch we actually don't want to talk about the non-Super Mario ones because they have no involvement with Super Mario characters and the only reason they're still on mainspace pages is because of the interia of Template:SSB fighter infobox.)
  • Having an image elevated to a infobox that isn't the article's main infobox is doing weird stuff. Apparently we can't use the same image in two different infoboxes on the same page, so Samus's page inexplicably leads on Smash 4 artwork in character infobox so that SSB fighter infobox can have Ultimate artwork.There has been a back and forth on this, and this a waste of wiki time because it's basically the same artwork. Nobody should care which one is in character infobox, we should just pick the latest one and move on, and we're only having this debate because the page has two infoboxes. Removing the second infobox would resolve this "clash" instantly.
  • While having the color of the infobox vary to indicate the first game a character was playable in is cute, we're not allowed to use colors in tables "for aesthetics sake" anymore, it has to aid in reading data. Infoboxes are just tables without headers, so this policy applies, and colored infoboxes defenitly do not aid in communicating information to the reader. That means we have to pick one color for to use for all SSB fighter infoboxes, replacing this mechanic. Picking a single color is again a very pointless debate to no actual gain for the readership that we can skip by axing the template instead.
  • Why does Super Smash Bros. the crossover that we cover the least, get to have its own infobox? Really, if we have an infobox dedicated to this crossover series on the edges of our coverage, we should have an infobox dedicated to crossovers that are fully within our coverage! You know, like Mario & Sonic (series). It has many different games, and each character has one or two named special moves (from the Vancouver game's website), just like Smash Bros. Heck, it's better than Smash Bros. for an infobox, characters have infoboxable parameters like their type and if they are a Sonic character or a Mario character (relevant because the Rio game had a mode that pitted team Mario against team Sonic. Actually, why stop at crossovers? We could have a Mario Tennis (series) infobox, or a Mario Golf (series) infobox, both series of games with easy quantifiable and recurring properties of characters that could at least benefit from a list of games in an infobox. I could keep going, but this bullet point's bit is that having SSB fighter infobox puts us on a slippery slope that could justify many more per-series infoboxes. And that we should never put ourselves in a situation where articles having four, five, six, or more infoboxes in them is even remotely a plausible idea. My suggestion is to remove SSB fighter infobox and stay far away from ever doing this.

So that was an entirely too long winded way of saying Template:SSB fighter infobox is past its prime and that it's continued presence both dilutes the site and has/could force us into pointless debates. Which means its time to retire it from use. That entails removing it from all pages, which is no big loss because as stated, SSB fighter infobox doesn't do anything that the body of the article doesn't, and sometimes actually does a worse job. What do we do with SSB fighter infobox if this proposal does pass and it stops being used in articles? Uh, not sure. Maybe we just mark it Template:Abandoned, or maybe we delete it wholesale. I don't actually know what we do about removing a pervasive and long lived template (goes back to 2007) like this, I assume the former. Still, that's a staff decision, and not up for debate in this proposal.

Proposer: Salmancer (talk)
Deadline: August 11, 2025, 23:59 GMT

Stop using SSB fighter infobox[edit]

  1. Salmancer (talk) I spent my comedy budget in the proposal body. Per myself.
  2. EvieMaybe (talk) per proposal, this seems perfectly reasonable. as for deleting the template, i'd rather it be marked as abandoned, as deleted/renamed templates don't show up when viewing old page revisions.
  3. SolemnStormcloud (talk) Per proposal.
  4. Altendo (talk) Per.
  5. Hewer (talk) Sure, the thing with Samus's artwork was bugging me.
  6. Mushzoom (talk) Per proposal.
  7. Ahemtoday (talk) Per proposal. The template's just kind of lost its purpose — it's built for linking to things that have articles, but the things it would link to no longer do, so the whole thing is a bit outside our scope.

Continue using SSB fighter infobox (Status quo)[edit]

  1. Camwoodstock (talk) Shocker from the wiki's number one-to-five "we need to cut back on Smash coverage" figureheads, we know! While we think this could do with some heavy reworks, we think that conceptually, this is a perfectly fine infobox. We could probably do without the entrance parameter, and it's odd how games is a parameter and not the first_appearance/latest_appearance duo, but if those weird quibbles were taken care of, this would be a fine enough infobox to have, as it still sees decent utility on pages for Smash fighters/in the Smash fighter list pages. It actually (edit from future: would) shines best on those list pages in our opinion, since otherwise, we would probably have a lot of very same-y feeling Character infoboxes where the only parameters we really use are the first/latest appearance ones, and maybe a full name or species here-or-there. If we're going to specialize, we may as well do it right. (We will say, if we opt to no longer use this, please just sic the Template:Abandoned template on it instead of deleting it outright, we can see this breaking a lot of old page revisions BADLY.)
  2. Okapii (talk) Per Camwoodstock.

Comments (Retire SSB fighter infobox)[edit]

Camwoodstock, the list of fighters pages (ex.List of fighters debuting in Super Smash Bros.) don't actually use Template:SSB fighter infobox. No clue why, but in my opinion it probably felt redundant given how the page already has labelled sections per game for each character. (They also don't get standard character infoboxes, RIP.) Salmancer (talk) 14:25, July 28, 2025 (EDT)

Wait, actually? That's really weird. We admittedly thought as much because we saw it being transcluded on Kazooie's page, and assumed that's where it must've come from. Even if it'd be somewhat redundant, we killed Once And Only Once for a reason, and it certainly beats the character infobox for this purpose. Camwoodstock-sigicon.png~Camwoodstock ( talk ☯ contribs ) Camwoodstock-sigicon2.png 15:13, July 28, 2025 (EDT)
Well, unfortunately, the new crossover overview articles are slated to destroy our list of fighters articles anyway, so arguments based on improving those articles are moot. It'll just take until the heat death of the universe for every entry to be redone as a portion of a crossover article, we never actually established a timetable for that and they're really hard to write. If we want to improve our list of fighters articles despite their end being nigh by adding infoboxes, I would genuinely use Template:Character infobox. Why? It has "species" and "portrayed by" parameters, the first of which is core to the wiki's structure and the second of which is of great interest to both readers and editors. SSB fighter infobox inexplicably lacks both of these, in favor of a list of special moves that often have no inherent meaning because they often don't have self explanatory names and don't link to anything that could clarify them for the unaware reader. Salmancer (talk) 15:49, July 28, 2025 (EDT)
We don't think that the idea is to wholly delete the list of fighters pages, looking at the proposal. Looking at the List of fighters debuting in Super Smash Bros. Melee page, these list pages currently have three sections; fighters with pages, fighters with mentions on crossover pages, and the ones from series that don't have crossover pages. Unless we really want to make a "Crossovers with Fatal Fury" page that is just "Terry is in Smash Ultimate"? Though, we doubt this is what anyone had in mind when that proposal was made, as that would effectively result in a few pages that are just "giving Smash fighters their own pages, but with extra steps". Camwoodstock-sigicon.png~Camwoodstock ( talk ☯ contribs ) Camwoodstock-sigicon2.png 16:08, July 28, 2025 (EDT)
Template:Crossovers expects an entry for nearly every series. (You can largely pin the blame for this on amiibo, which gave nearly every series an "in" for Super Mario through Costume Mario and List of Yoshi designs in Yoshi's Woolly World. Tekken does a baseball slide into the template because Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Wii U Edition has a Super Mario themed mode. I think Metal Gear Solid edges in through level design jokes and the meta character Pyscho Mantis.) Given this, all of the list of fighters pages would be reduced to a gallery of images with links to other articles except for List of fighters debuting in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which would contain entries on Terry, Min Min, Joker, and Sora. And the last one only qualifies if we don't just mash Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy together. Galleries aren't lists, and so everything but the Ultimate list is a clean deletion. I don't think a list should stand if it only has four entries, there are better ways to write an article about four subjects than as a list. If it's only three, the list is in an even worse position. Salmancer (talk) 16:41, July 28, 2025 (EDT)
Actually, I'm being too harsh. Nintendo is probably making a new Smash Bros. game with new characters as we speak, and that would turn a 3/4 entry list into a more valid 5 or7 entry list. Still naturally down on using SSB fighter infobox on such a page, reading "Crack Shoot" as the entry for Terry's side special is still meaningless without a link, and there isn't a place for "Crack Shoot" to link to. Just use character infobox, then would contain the intuitively understandable "Species: Human" Salmancer (talk) 17:18, July 28, 2025 (EDT)
Although I'm supporting the proposal, I am a little confused by your insistence that "species" is a super important parameter for an infobox to have, especially in the context of an infobox dedicated to conveying information for the Smash Bros. series (where the species of each character is irrelevant in-universe info that doesn't matter at all). Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 22:21, July 28, 2025 (EDT)
So to explain this, we need to hop over to MarioWiki:Categories#Order on pages.

"For pages with a multitude of categories, the essentials should be picked out and placed first; for example, being a Koopa king is part of Bowser's core identity, and should come before the more minor or trivial things, like how he's a parent and uses magic. In most cases, however, the only real essential category will be the species (for subspecies and characters) or its equivalent (e.g. Category:Blocks for ? Block). After the essentials, the other misc. categories can be grouped together..."

We consider species to be the essential category of every subject that can have a species. Because its "essential" data for a character, the infobox for a page has every reason to communicate it. When I was complaining about Template:SSB fighter infobox not having a species parameter in the body, it was because I was commenting on how in the past pages used fighter infobox over character infobox, therefore burying information that wiki policy defines as important. In this comment thread, I'm making a point about how fighter infobox lacks a species parameter because in my opinion the "List of fighters" pages are secretly just a bunch of separate articles stuffed in a trenchcoat because we don't want to have discrete articles for Smash Bros. only characters, and therefore if we were to lend them more "full article-ness" by giving them infoboxes, we should treat them like every other article and lead on the proper Character Infobox. One of the reasons for that, though there are others, is that species is "essential" on this wiki and its on character infobox but not in SSB fighter infobox. Salmancer (talk) 22:53, July 30, 2025 (EDT)
What does a policy about ordering categories have to do with infoboxes? Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 21:22, July 31, 2025 (EDT)

@Okapii You're supposed to add your vote as a number point (#), not a bullet point (*). Altendo 16:42, July 30, 2025 (EDT)

Thanks for catching that, apologies for the mistake! Okapii 00:16 July 31, 2025 (EDT)
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