MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive/38

Further separate appearance listing by medias
DELETED BY PROPOSER

In the early days of the wiki, appearance listing on character pages used to be separated by media (so all games were under a ==Game== header, all comics under a ==Comic== and so on) up until around 2008, where it was proposed to not separate things by media (the ensuing change mostly consisted of terrible attempts to link contradictory medias together), which was further stabilized into the purely date-based listing we have now. I was pretty apathetic about the change, but the quote above made me think.

The current system's well-intentioned, but I feel it's misguided and that separating things by media would lead to a more user-friendly browsing experience. Here's why:

1: It's a navigational mess. To take the Mario page for example, the main series platformers and the sports spinoff that most readers would expect to be "logically" close (due to similar styles and being, well, the same format) are separated by a wall of info about the more distant DIC cartoons and obscure OVAs. As a reader, I think it's irritating and a jarring shift.

Separating things by media would also have the effect of making the content navbar less bloated, thus making it easier to eyeball and click straight to a specific game/movie/cartoon. If I want to know about how many comics Mario has appeared in or that I want to read about a specific appearance but that I don't remember the name or publication date, it's much easier to find what I'm looking with a separated listing rather than having it lost somewhere in a huge list. It could also have the effect of making sections about obscure installments more noticeable than when they are sandwiched between the better-known and better-documented games.

2: One can peddle the "There's no official canon" line and that is true (and hence why I'm not proposing to give special treatment to Hotel Mario, When I Grow Up, the edutainement games or other oft-disliked installments of the franchise, because that'd be dumb) – but it misses the actual point: the media tie-ins are separate entries of the franchise. Events in the other medias usually happen in their own bubble and are not directly patterned after or "follow" the games. No characters that originated in the comics/cartoons/OVA reappears (with maybe the exception of the Koopa Bros. in a manga, but details are sketchy) appear or are even alluded to in the games. The characters/items that do appear frequently have clear differences in appearance, function, personality and sometimes names (some of that can be chalked up to early-franchise weirdness, but that only goes so far).

Even obscure, one-note games like Yoshi's Universal Gravitation and Wario: Master of Disguise have enough stylistic consistency and continuity cues that show they're meant to exist in the same "universe" as other games in their respective franchises, even if they're not referenced later. You can't say the same about the DIC cartoons vs the games.

Beside, there is a precedent for splitting other medias: The characters in the 1993 movie are considered to be "different" and indeed, most major elements from the film do have separate pages. If the movie is "too different" to count, then what about the Super Show with its locations that appear nowhere else in the franchise, celebrity guest stars, sizable number of characters that barely resemble their game counterpart… etc?. It takes a lot of mental gymnastic to exclude one but not the other.

Separating the medias isn't saying the comics/cartoons/ovas aren't "canon", "don't count" or something like that – it's simply acknowledging they're separate entries of the greater Mario franchise, which they quite clearly are, methinks.

…[/Martin Prince voice]

Proposer: Deadline: February 19, 2014, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Seem to be a good idea. Per proposal and all.
 * 2) Per Squidy
 * 1) Per Squidy

Oppose

 * 1) - The current form has worked for years and keeping everything on equal footing in the Histories is the strongest way to shut down thorny canon debates. The large pages will be cluttered no matter what we do, and adding a new intermediate level of headers will just add to the mess and force the games' headers to be Lv. 5 (i.e. nothing but bold text, which barely stands out and is next to useless). Having all the shows and comics and stuff back-to-back might be desirable in some ways, but on the other hand, you'd be lumping things which have even less to do with each other as they do with the games. In the end, is it really worth changing the entire wiki for? Haters are gonna hate no matter what we do, so I say don't fix what isn't broken.
 * 2) Per Walkazo.

Comments
I dunno if the Super Mario-Kun is part of this: what the manga is about is that it adapts events straight out of the game and puts its own twist to it, unlike most other forms of media where they just do their own thing. But otherwise, yeah, I see where you're going with this.
 * The Super Mario-Kun is probably part of it because it also follows a slightly different story that no other games gave a nod to, and the characters are given distinct personalities never seen in the games. You'll probably never catch Mario cross-dressing or molding a Star to the shape of a revolver, do you? Nevertheless, Super Mario-Kun's character designs are usually spot-on with their video game counterparts, even getting the details correct (while adapting its own style)

So, Glowsquid, what will you propose to do? Split Mario's article into separate articles by media? I'll very much like the idea (I also agree that the History's organization seems sporadic and jarring, especially to readers... and plus, Mario's article gets trimmed even more! YES! Same goes for Luigi, Toad, Bowser, Wario, Boo, etc.), but I also like to see the formatting layouts because that means we can also go into detail about episodes and certain comic volumes and issues without cluttering up the page.

A serious flaw from this proposal is the smaller articles. Minor Mario characters such as Tryclyde, Tweeter, Panser, Wanda, Jō, and much more also make appearances in non-game media, yet their articles are smaller than the main ones that really need this solution. Even one-timers such as Lavalava Island and Golden Diva make a non-game appearance from Super Mario-Kun. Even further, we've seen some extraordinary appearances such as Bluster Kong, who made an appearance in Super Mario-Kun, although he originated in a TV show. What may happen from this proposal is separating information from already-small articles into even smaller articles. There isn't anything in your proposal to address that, so...

I brought up the Movie thing to show that the current system is inconsistent rather than to say "That? We should do that for everything". The idea is that currently, all medias are under one header, like this;

--History-- ---Main Platformers--- ---Super Mario Land--- ---DIC Cartoons--- ---Obscure OVAs--- ---Educational Games---

With the proposal, the page sections would be formated like this: -History- --Games-- ---Main Platformers--- ---Super Mario Land--- ---Educational Games--- --Animation-- ---DIC Cartoons--- ---Obscure OVAs--- I'm not saying the DIC, Valiant... etc portrayals of Mario should get separate pages, though for what it's worth, Steve wants the detailled episode-by-episode summaries to be on separate pages (like this), so for major characters, the main page could have a general description of their portrayal and general storyline, with the individual episode summaries being linked via. The idea could be extended to other long-running medias like Super Mario-kun and the Valiant comics. And of course secondary characters shouldn't be split, that'd be dumb. --Glowsquid (talk) 07:07, 6 February 2014 (EST)
 * Huh, I had the wrong idea, then. It must've been that "separate" word that gotten to me.
 * Where would spinoffs go? Right after educational games or after Super Mario Land? Because spinoffs at least show continuity (many characters' current appearances are derived from Mario Party 4) and some get referenced even in the mainstream games (Mario Kart).
 * No, spinoffs are games so they'd stay right where they are: Glowsquid just listed them (represented by "educational games" for lulz or something) coming after the main platformers because that's usually ow the History sections work out. At least, I think that's what he's done. Anyway, there's a major flaw in the proposed reorganization, and that is that we'd be getting into Lv. 5 headers if we need one more subheader step in Histories (since the major headers are Lv. 2, not 1) and Lv. 5 headers are next to useless: they're nothing more than bolded text, the same size as the body text - they don't stand out at all, and are best avoided. Plus having too many nested layers starts to look sloppy, especially when one of the intermediate steps (i.e. the media type) is used very little. Also, unlike current History setups that can skip the series intermediate step for single-game appearances to keep down the clutter and superfluous organization, it'd be harder to do that with something that appears in one TV series or one comic (i.e. most things), since unlike the current mixed-usage series/standalone intermediate level, it seems the proposal if for the Lv. 3 header to become media-only.


 * In other words, current is this:
 * --History-- ---Super Mario series--- Super Mario Bros. Super Mario 64 ---Super Mario DIC cartoons--- The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 ---Super Mario Land--- ---Super Mario-kun--- ---Super Mario Amada---


 * And proposed is this:
 * --History-- ---Games--- Super Mario series -Super Mario Bros.- -Super Mario 64- Super Mario Land ---Animation--- Super Mario DIC cartoons -The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!- -The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3- Super Mario Amada ---Print--- Super Mario-kun


 * So in reality, this is adding more navigational clutter, not less. Plus, it's inviting canon discussion even if you try and say it's not. Even here, within a day of the proposal going up, there's speculation about the Super Mario-kun story in relation to games and confusion about separating spinoff games: not good. It's a slippery slope, especially when you consider how some game series portray the Mario world just as disparately as some of of the alternate media portrayals. And on that note, the comparisons between the Mario series and Sonic or Transformers are poor fits, and poorer still as arguments here. If you want to talk about keeping unrelated branches of the franchise separate, as you'd keep those different cartoons (and one film series) separate, you'd have to blast the entire History apart, not just the alternate media; but this proposal (purportedly) isn't about timelines, it's about media types, so you see my problem with the quote's apples and oranges approach to trash talkin' our wiki. -