MarioWiki:Proposals

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New features
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Rename "Latest portrayal" section in character infobox to "Notable portrayals"
This is rather self-explanatory. Regarding the template, instead of simply listing one voice actor/actress in the infobox, I believe that the section should instead list others. Not all of them though, only actors who have portrayed the character enough times to become a recognizable name for the character in whatever OFFICIAL media they portayed them in, alongside their latest ones of course. In fact, the wiki kind of already does this with characters like Mario having Charles Martinet and Chris Pratt listed together (now with Kevin Afghani too). So I propose that we rename the section to "Notable portrayals" to make the section not quite as confusing/misnamed. of course the other option would be to enforce the "latest" part, and drop Chris and Charles from the section (on Mario's page at least) entirely, leaving only Kevin Afghani, since he would be the "latest" portrayal.

So to summarise: Proposer: Deadline: October 20, 2023, 23:59 GMT
 * Option 1: Rename it to "Notable portrayals" and include multiple VAs. For example; list Charles Martinet, Chris Pratt, and Kevin Afghani for Mario... maybe even Lou Albano and Bob Hoskins since they fit the hypothetical definition I gave earlier.
 * Option 2: Enforce the "Latest portrayal" part. For example, only list Kevin Afghani as Mario's VA.
 * Option 3: Do nothing.

Rename the section

 * 1) Other wikis handle it this way too, like Wikipedia.
 * 2) This makes sense. If we're treating this section like a "notable protrayals" section in the first place (e.g. listing both Charles and Kevin in Mario's infobox), we should probably actually label it as such so people don't get confused in the future.
 * 3) Seems sensible to me especially since this section is already being used in this way, and it should help with wiki navigation more generally.

Don't rename it and enforce the "latest" part

 * 1) What's considered a notable portrayal is going to be very subjective (there's already uncertainty about what could qualify in this proposal). Leaving only the latest portrayal keeps the infobox simple and streamlined, and the rest of the portrayals can be covered in a dedicated section. Also, having three VAs in Mario's infobox was the decision of one editor and as I'm writing this that list has already been narrowed down to just Kevin, so it's not really accurate to say we already do this. The movie was a special case since those were the latest portrayal, but obviously not intended to be replacements for the entire franchise going forward.
 * 2) Per Waluigi Time. If even the proposer isn't sure what qualifies as "notable," it's probably not a good idea. It may be blatantly obvious to include Charles Martinet for Mario, but what about Princess Peach? Which of her numerous voice actresses are "notable?" How many times does a VA have to voice a character to be "notable?" Does appearing in The Super Mario Bros. Movie alone qualify you for "notable" status? Do VAs from the old cartoons count?
 * 3) Per all. Limiting it to the latest portrayal ensures that the information on the page is delivered in an objective manner.

Leave it as it is

 * 1) I don't think this is fixing anything that was too broken. The second option is ideal for streamlining the infobox, but there are probably going to be more times when the latest voice actor is uncredited or when it's a one-off or substitute. And what if we have another situation where there are multiple in-game voice actors concurrently playing the role anyway?  Disclosure: I owe Charles a little favor so this may or may not be my extremely petty way of returning it.
 * 2) Second choice, per LTL.
 * 3) Thinking on it, we think we'd be alright with this as well--plus, as we've since gone over in comments, we do have an idea that we'd prefer over simply enforcing the "latest" part.

Comments
We feel like defining a "notable" protrayal isn't all that hard, honestly--just kinda spitballing one way we could handle it, it could feature both the first portrayal*, and anyone who's played the character for some amount of time (be it in terms of chronology or in terms of games/media). The finer details and any exceptions (such as, say, putting Kevin in there despite him having only voiced one game thus far on the grounds that this was a formally-announced thing, or putting Chris Pratt in as his most recent film protrayal) could probably be determined at a later date in a future proposal (possibly one after this if "rename to notable" passes?)

...Of course, all of this is moot if we simply choose to enforce the "current voice" moniker in the first place, which we can definitely understand. We just wanna make sure people realize what they're doing when they say to do that and what that entails, in case it turns out down the road that the "simpler" option really, really wasn't for the best. Personally, failing what we mentioned above, we feel like if we had to limit it, the smartest option would be to simply have a "first protrayal/latest protrayal" thing like we do with the games*--just a little something to indicate that there are indeed more voices than just, the current one.

* doing either of these would have the objectively hilarious side-effect of potentially putting either Harris Shore from a few TV ads or Pat McBride from Donkey Kong Goes Home, both of which have Mario performances so obscure they currently lack their own articles, in the infobox on the Mario page, seeing as the two of them seem to both be contenders for first voice in our admittedly cursory searches. which we would permit on the grounds that that is, in fact, notable, even if it's very funny to jumpscare people with that album in particular 14:13, October 14, 2023 (EDT)
 * What if we just limited the infobox to collapsible in-game portrayals, and made portrayals in other media its own optional section? LinkTheLefty (talk) 14:25, October 14, 2023 (EDT)
 * I wouldn't be opposed to including the latest actors from each distinct form of media in the "Latest portrayals" section, ie. Kevin Afghani (video games, 2023-), Chris Pratt (The Super Mario Bros. Movie). 14:48, October 14, 2023 (EDT)
 * That also works, though you do still definitely run into edge-cases when a media hasn't been represented in awhile. For example, do the DiC cartoons not count as the most recent animated series, so do we include Lou Albano? ...What do we do about Pat McBride, considering how much an outlier Donkey Kong Goes Home already is? This definitely runs the risk of cycling back to the "what does everyone else consider notable enough?", so we'd be fine with just keeping it to most recent overall portrayal, personally... ;P 14:57, October 14, 2023 (EDT)
 * "something to indicate that there are indeed more voices than just, the current one" - There doesn't need to be anything else to do this because that's what the latest portrayal field is for already. In cases where a character has only ever been portrayed by one person, the portrayed by field is supposed to be used instead (though latest portrayal is frequently misused for this). -- 15:36, October 14, 2023 (EDT)

Come to think of it, this proposal might need to be restructured a bit. As I've already pointed out, the situation where Mario had three actors listed at the time this proposal was written was not based on any existing wiki standards and is no longer the case. I assume the leave as-is option was based on the assumption that this actually was standard. Otherwise, there's not much difference between the latter two options. Even though I voted for "enforcing" this, I'd be okay with having multiple actors listed at the same time if we get another TSMBM situation where what's technically the most recent portrayal clearly isn't meant to be across the entire franchise. Unless anyone is strongly opposed to that, it's unnecessarily splitting the vote when this could probably work fine as a standard support/oppose proposal.

As an aside, I have to wonder if we should be listing Kevin at all since Wonder hasn't released just yet. -- 15:36, October 14, 2023 (EDT)

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