MarioWiki:Proposals

Writing guidelines
None at the moment.

New features
None at the moment.

Officially repeal the "no support reason" Featured Article nomination rule
The current rule regarding support votes in our featured articles guidelines goes something like this:

"Before doing anything, be sure to read the article completely, keeping a sharp eye out for mistakes. Afterwards, compare the article to the criteria listed above, and then either support or object the article's nomination. If you support, simply sign with your name, without adding a reason (unless you are the first supporter and thus the nominator)."

I used to enforce this rule, removing support reasons whenever I come across them, but now, I currently don't, because I've been thinking, seriously, what's the point of spending effort counter-productively removing reasons for support any more, even if the said support vote is actually constructive towards the article and not merely a fan vote as it once was? Fan votes used to be a particular problem in the past, but today, they are not as much as a problem as they once had them, so bending backwards to remove something....doesn't change anything at all and it wastes time expending effort that could go to something far more productive. The rule is also incredibly inconsistent to every other time we vote in MarioWiki, making this one of the reasons that removing support vote reasons used to be a frequent because the rule is convoluted and confusing to new users of MarioWiki and thus make the mistake constantly.

Hell, at this point, with me refusing to enforce this rule any more, it seems like no one else even enforces this terrible rule too, so now, I'd like to officially get rid of that parameter from our Featured Article ruleset once and for all, because there's no point to having a rule that no one wants to enforce and this would free up time for users doing other more productive edits, and this is especially true for support votes that actually do say something useful or actually praise editors for their hard work, which would encourage them to work harder and happier.

Proposer: Deadline: September 20, 2017, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Heck, even I support featured articles with a reason. Per Baby Luigi's reasoning.
 * 2) Why is that even a rule?
 * 3) This rule is outright broken. It overcomplicates the voting process and has no clear reason for its inclusion. Per proposal.
 * 4) Per proposal.
 * 5) Per all.
 * 1) Per all.

Comments
@Doc von Schmeltwick: I can try to explain. A lot of support reasons back in 2008-2009 used to be nothing more than "I like this guy he should be featured", so it had to be decided somewhere that they wanted to remove the reasons....because...it would...clutter...less space...and it would ... er...discourage fan voters..? I honestly don't see the logic here at all, in hindsight today. What gets accomplished here? Nothing? Just removal of words. That's it. 14:58, 13 September 2017 (EDT)
 * That logic makes the defining premise behind the movie make sense by comparison. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) 16:33, 13 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I think part of it was that almost everyone, in essence, was just saying "Per the first guy who already wrote about why the article's good," and they got rid of the support reasons to eliminate the redundancy. This also prevents people from including anything that the nominator missed and allows people to support nominations for entirely personal reasons, so I'm all for requiring support reasons. 16:38, 13 September 2017 (EDT)

Add categories for images of characters
Currently, if one wants to find all the images of a certain character on the wiki, there is no easy way to do so. While galleries might just have all images of a character, it must be remembered that certain images have specific purposes, such as, or. Including all these images without context would likely make the galleries bloated. A simple solution at the moment might be creating categories of images of characters to be added to the images themselves, of the format. With proper maintenance, doing so would allow, in the longer term, to see all images of a character on the wiki, allowing easier maintenance as well as retrieval of images that might have a second purpose on the wiki beyond the original one they were uploaded for, all this without creating bloat on the galleries.

Proposer: Deadline: September 18, 2017, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Per proposal

Oppose

 * 1) Per Alex95 and Wildgoospeeder's comments.
 * 2) I think the benefits of this proposal are far outweighed by the unnecessary processes and the horrendous organization we have to undertake. First of all, the only images that ultimately benefit from this proposal are screenshots. Nearly everything else related to their character are already found in the gallery, making the category on the bottom mostly redundant with their placement on galleries. Second, this proposal runs on the assumption that there are only one or two characters max per screenshot, and the proposed changes to the screenshots already sounds like more complication on top of an already messy proposal. Because that's what the proposal is aiming to do, and doing so will provide a gigantic, ugly mess of categories on the bottom area of the picture, which makes browsing images by their game even harder to do. And finally, what are the qualifications for characters receiving a category page? Are we going to give one-shot NPCs their own image category? The proposal doesn't say which characters "deserve" their own category, with maybe the proposed number of character images being "5", which I think is an arbitrary number for various reasons.
 * 3) This kind of system would only work properly if our images had a rigorous and consistent naming system - otherwise, it'll just be an odd mash-up of random images, with no coherent order to any of it. Per everyone else.
 * 4) Per Alex and Wildgoosespeeder in the comments. I am also not sure how many characters would receive a category.
 * 5) - Per me and Wildgoosespeeder below.
 * 6) Per Baby Luigi and Time Turner.

Comments
How would group images be handled? And would this include literally every image of the character - artwork, sprites, screenshots, et al.? 16:50, 11 September 2017 (EDT)
 * For the categories to have a purpose, they should include all images of the characters. Subcategories such as sprites, artwork or scans can be implemented later if this is beneficial and if enough images can be had in them. Group images are an interesting point, I see other wikis that indeed include all characters in an image, and since multiple categories per page are a thing here too, listing all characters might indeed be the best way. Anyway, as you can easy imagine, implementing this kind of templates is not something that can be done all at once, so as first step we can categorize images having one character to immediately see the time needed to properly implement the categories, the feasiblity and the benefits - if there are any -, after this "pilot phase", group images can be dealt with.--Mister Wu (talk) 21:07, 11 September 2017 (EDT)
 * Fair enough. As follow-up questions, how many images should a character have before an category is created for them, and will this eventually be expanded to include enemies, locations, items, and others? Even if these won't be applied for the "pilot phase", I'd still say that they're worth considering for the future. 22:06, 11 September 2017 (EDT)
 * Since we are talking about specific characters, a special case, we must consider whether grouping makes sense: the main pages already group some characters together through categories, but it must be seen if this simplifies any work - if a reader or a maintainer wants to know the exact number of images of a specific character, the category page should show it, it might be even useful to know whether some characters only have a single low quality image while they should have more than that. Expanding to other classes, such as enemies or items, can be considered if we indeed obtain good results with the characters, my idea at the moment is still focusing on something we want to know the covearge of or we want to see the images of, but if you want to extend even beyond that we can consider at that point setting a limit, possibly like the one of the current standards for image categories - should be five images.--Mister Wu (talk) 23:41, 11 September 2017 (EDT)
 * So would any character with five images get a category, or would it only be major characters? I don't feel it would make sense for minor characters such as Coach to receive a category. -- 20:07, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * From a long term point of view, knowing that a character has not so many images might be an intenresting information, especially if said character should have many more, if this were to pass I don't think we should start with minor characters, though, we could either go with the major characters  minus the species and the Toad variants, if we want to follow the Nintendo criterion of major characters, or the Mario series characters who have a gallery on this wiki and are featured in the Super Mario series main games if we want to see whether such categorization makes sense or not.--Mister Wu (talk) 20:58, 12 September 2017 (EDT)

I don't get it. What's wrong with the galleries? Yeah, some might be rather large to look through, but categorizing an image based on character would be pretty much the same thing as sticking it in a gallery. Seems redundant to me. Additionally, categories are alphabetized, and some images may not be named based on their relevance. Galleries, however, are sorted based on the type of image, from artwork to sprites to screenshots. Sure, categories show 200 images at a time, which makes loading times easier, but galleries are sorted in a way that makes navigation easier. 13:16, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I'm with on this one. I think our organization of images is a little lackluster, but the current proposal doesn't have any real benefits. We are clumping unlike images into the same image category. This will take a long time to implement, but why not organize each image category found in Category:Images by game into say like Category:Super Mario World Sprites, Category:Super Mario World Artwork, etc., to be in Category:Super Mario World Images? The reason I have not proposed this because of the sheer intensity of the project handling 300+ categories and dealing with ~80,000 images. The hiarchy I'm suggesting:
 * Category:Images by game
 * Category:Super Mario World Images
 * Category:Super Mario World Sprites
 * Category:Super Mario World Artwork
 * Category:Super Mario World Screenshots
 * Category:Super Mario Bros. Images
 * Category:Super Mario Bros. Sprites
 * Category:Super Mario Bros. Artwork
 * Category:Super Mario Bros. Screenshots
 * I don't see this being implemented any time soon. Also, there could be unforeseen conditions that could come up. -- 13:47, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * @ I fear you might be missing a point. Putting all images of a character in a gallery leads to bad layouts and to problems which were very well presented by, when I myself was invited to avoid this in the case of Iggy's sprites from Paper Mario: Color Splash; since the reasons are actually valid I started avoiding putting in the galleries images that are alraedy referenced in main pages due to their main purpose, and I've been mostly doing this since then to avoid cluttering galleries with images from a single source. In no way can a gallery replace a systematic retrieval system of images of a character, which is what PidgiWiki or, if we want to stay in NIWA, Bulbapedia have, both actually using a method similar to what I'm suggesting. My point is, even though in the games this might be of secondary importance, the Mario franchise as a whole is inevitably character driven, being named after a character, but currently finding all images of a character isn't simple, and galleries have unavoidable restrictions that cannot solve this - either you sacrifice layout for coverage, or you sacrifice coverage to have a cleaner layout, the latter being important not to give the idea to the new users that you can upload whatever you like in the gallery.
 * @ I won't deny the amount of work needed, still I think an issue is definitely there, and if fans are coming for images of the characters, we give them little resources to find them, same for maintainers, actually. I more than welcome better proposals for improving the situation, since of course the system I'm proposing is tested and actually implemented, but nonetheless very simple and requires much manual work to implement here.--Mister Wu (talk) 19:53, 12 September 2017 (EDT)

Double the amount of time a proposer can edit their talk page proposals
Because talk page proposals are less visible than regular proposals, they are given an extra week for discussion. I'm not going to argue against that; though smaller issues occasionally go on for too long, the extra time is invaluable for when large changes are being discussed. With that in mind, why can they only be edited within three days of the proposal's creation, the same amount of time as a regular proposal? So, we want to give people more time to discuss proposals, but we don't want to give the proposers more time to acknowledge the discussion and make changes as needed? There's a clear discrepancy here. I propose to double the amount of time a proposer can change, delete, or otherwise edit their proposals on talk pages, from three days to six. This lines up with the doubled amount of time they take in the first place.

Proposer: Deadline: September 19, 2017, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Per proposal.
 * 2) Per proposal. I think a week might make more sense than six days though; it seems simpler.
 * 3) This definitely makes sense to me. If TPPs have an increased amount of time for voting, then so should the time that is allowed to edit them. Though I don't necessarily agree with that "they are less visible" argument. Talk page proposals are about as visible as mainspace proposals, and these days, most editors DO check the list of TPPs regularly and as easily as browsing through this page. If visibility is a problem for TPPs, then measures should be taken to be more visible, since these matters are about as important as main space ones.
 * 4) Per proposal.
 * 5) - I may not be 100% on board and can see issues, but they're the same issues we're having currently, so... I'll support the proposed extension.
 * 6) Per all.
 * 7) Per all.

Comments
"Talk page proposals may be closed by the proposer at any time if each voting option has fewer than five votes." (Closed means the same as delete.) So are you proposing to double this to ten votes too? Because closing date is not dependent on the number of days passed for TPPs. 13:01, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I don't see the relevance. I'm talking about a discrepancy between the rules applied to both regular proposals and talk page proposals, not a rule that applies uniquely to talk page proposals. Besides, that rule says nothing about letting the proposer edit their proposal nor anything about what happens after five votes. 13:03, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I don't see the relevance. I'm talking about a discrepancy between the rules applied to both regular proposals and talk page proposals, not a rule that applies uniquely to talk page proposals. It is kind of hard to tell the difference between the two statements. What's the difference between them? Besides, that rule says nothing about letting the proposer edit their proposal nor anything about what happens after five votes. Obviously, otherwise it will fall under "All rules for talk page proposals are the same as mainspace proposals (see the "How to" section above), with the exceptions made by Rules 3 and 4 as follows" with the above quote being rule 4 of TPPs. And I know this. Otherwise, I wouldn't make my comment. 13:10, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * The first statement refers to rules that apply to both kinds of proposals with the only difference being their timespan, whereas the latter statement refers to rules that apply exclusively to one kind of proposal with no parallel for the other kind. Beyond that, what point are you making? 13:14, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * In either statement, there is this to be considered:
 * "Proposals end at the end of the day (23:59) one week after voting starts, except for writing guidelines and talk page proposals, which run for two weeks (all times GMT).
 * For example, if a proposal is added at any time on Monday, August 1, 2011, the voting starts immediately and the deadline is one week later on Monday, August 8, at 23:59 GMT."
 * "Voting in talk page proposals will be open for two weeks, not one (all times GMT).
 * For example, if a proposal is added at any time on Monday, August 1, 2011, it ends two weeks later on Monday, August 15, 2011, at 23:59 GMT."
 * So they will be basically the same design. Unless I am reading this wrong. As for point to this, Isn’t it obvious? I want to know if votes are going to double or not or if canceling is going to change like the other two. 13:27, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * This proposal wants to change one thing: the time period in which a proposer can change their talk page proposal should be expanded to six days from the current three days. 13:33, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I know this and I want to support this. But canceling a proposal is already different in TPP than in RP. I just wanting to know if you going to keep this difference, double this number, or change it to six days. In either case, I can easily support this. But I want to know before I do support. 13:39, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * You say that you can easily support this, but then you oppose. Sure. What specifically are you perring about their comments? sorry got the proposals mixed up 13:53, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * On topic, as I said previously, the only thing that will be changed is the time limit for editing the talk page proposals. 13:56, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * LOL. Anyways. You seem to imply that canceling will be changed to six days rather than (5) votes. OK. Though I like the 5 vote rule (and theoretically, it could be included as an additional thing to do), I don't know how it came to be. Either way this passes, this will change TPP's rule 4. 14:04, 12 September 2017 (EDT)

@Drago: It's tempting, but I'd rather that it's exactly equivalent to the main proposals. 13:14, 12 September 2017 (EDT)

The problem I'm having with this is that new information can show at any time, even at the final day of the proposal. In which case, a new proposal would be created when able to. There's also the option of getting an admin to cancel the proposal so the new information can be taken into account without actually going through with the current proposal. 13:20, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * So should we not allow proposers to edit proposals at all and just have them cancel their proposals whenever new information comes up? Giving the proposers more time to effectively respond to others without having the current discussions and votes being entirely cast aside (at the same time, setting a time limit for the changes prevents proposers from changing things at the last minute, but I don't want to give them infinite time). 13:22, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I'm not saying that. I'm all for having more time, but at the same time, there is a limitation that can screw with the proposal at the last minute, even if the time limit is extended to anything other than "infinite". Additionally, users may have to reconsider their votes after the change, some of which may not notice it (though the proposer can certainly send a message if they wish). 13:27, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * The same logic can be applied to the current time limit, but I don't think that it pans out in either case. I'm suggesting that, for a 14-day proposal, proposers have the ability to make changes for the first 6 days (ratio of 6/14 or 3/7), to be equal with a 7-day proposal allowing proposers to make changes for 3 days (3/7). The proposer should be motivated to inform voters of any changes, but I don't see what's different between the two kinds of proposals. If anything, you seem to be suggesting that the current time limit should be shortened, if you're that concerned about voters not noticing any changes until it's too late. 13:33, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I am concerned that voters may not notice the changes, but I definitely don't want the time to be shortened. 13:40, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * Another option may be to require proposals to notify voters of any changes (barring superfluous stuff like spelling/grammar corrections). 13:53, 12 September 2017 (EDT)

For a related topic, I have been thinking about the 7-day proposal and 14-day TPP should either be all 7 or 14 days for any proposal. Is there any benefit to having this time rule as we currently have it? -- 13:38, 12 September 2017 (EDT)
 * I think that this was discussed at some point in the past, but I can't seem to find any trace of it... At the very least, it's one of those rules that's been around for a long time and nobody has really bothered to question it. 13:53, 12 September 2017 (EDT)