Notability guidelines

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sub2pewds
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by sub2pewds »

Pentarctagon wrote: September 6th, 2019, 11:13 pm I think that to a certain extent it needs to be accepted that no rule can be created that accounts for every possible situation, so there does need to be some flexibility assumed rather than attempting to nail down every single splinter.

Somewhat relatedly, simpler is generally better (KISS and all that). For example, the rule "any leader who only exists in a single scenario of a campaign and whose sole function is to recruit units is not notable" allows determining notability via two fairly straight-forward criteria:
  1. Do they only exist in one scenario? - yes/no
  2. Do they do anything other than recruit units to attack you? - yes/no
If the answer to (1) is Yes and (2) is No, then they aren't notable, and that's it.
The KISS rule, I would argue, is exemplified on wow.gamepedia.org. But anyway, in the case of the characters I've mentioned above, they all exist in one scenario, and all of them except Rualsha and possibly Tan-Vragish do nothing but recruit other characters to attack the character. Would you agree? How clear-cut is it?
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by Pentarctagon »

The last four of those listed do something else than recruit: they speak.
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sub2pewds
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by sub2pewds »

Pentarctagon wrote: September 6th, 2019, 11:24 pm The last four of those listed do something else than recruit: they speak.
Ah, okay. That helps. :)

From your perspective, when would a character who speaks not be notable? If I had to think of the least notable speaking character, it would probably be a monster like Chompey, as octalot pointed out earlier.
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by Pentarctagon »

I'd define "speak" as "speech", so they have to say actual words rather than growls or other noises.
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sub2pewds
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by sub2pewds »

Pentarctagon wrote: September 7th, 2019, 12:01 am I'd define "speak" as "speech", so they have to say actual words rather than growls or other noises.
That sounds doable. The only borderline case I can think of is Rarlg (who may or may not be speaking words), but that is sufficiently exceptional to handle separately. If nobody has objections to this general rule then, I will roll it out:

"A character who appears in a single scenario, does not speak words, and contributes in no way to the storyline (besides a kill condition) is considered non-notable."
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josteph
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by josteph »

sub2pewds wrote: September 7th, 2019, 12:06 am "A character who appears in a single scenario, does not speak words, and contributes in no way to the storyline (besides a kill condition) is considered non-notable."
This sounds good as a default, but as Pent said, there'll be exceptions. For example, the quintains in the tutorial meet these criteria but mentioning the unit type "Quintain" on the wiki might make sense. Or conversely, the loyal elves in HttT S7 Crossroads have one line each in that scenario, but they don't have other lines and don't contribute to the storyline otherwise.

I do agree that if a character appears or is mentioned in more than one scenario, or affects the storyline, then it's notable, period. For characters that don't meet these criteria, we'll have to defer to common sense, for example:

- Does the character have a name?
- Does the character have non-generic dialog?
- Does the character have a custom unit type or custom attacks/traits/abilities?
- Do other characters talk about or to the character?

Or we could sidestep the question entirely and use a different yardstick: a character is notable if their description on the wiki is longer than one paragraph. Characters that meet this threshold get a page, characters that don't get an entry on the list of dramatis personae.
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sub2pewds
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by sub2pewds »

josteph wrote: September 7th, 2019, 7:50 am Or we could sidestep the question entirely and use a different yardstick: a character is notable if their description on the wiki is longer than one paragraph. Characters that meet this threshold get a page, characters that don't get an entry on the list of dramatis personae.
Strangely enough, that makes a lot of sense, in part because of its simplicity. I should seek your counsel more often. This is the first proposal that I wouldn't feel at all uncomfortable working with. I'm only sad I hadn't thought of it earlier. Would other people agree to this?
Mawmoocn
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by Mawmoocn »

sub2pewds wrote: September 7th, 2019, 10:38 am
josteph wrote: September 7th, 2019, 7:50 am Or we could sidestep the question entirely and use a different yardstick: a character is notable if their description on the wiki is longer than one paragraph. Characters that meet this threshold get a page, characters that don't get an entry on the list of dramatis personae.
Strangely enough, that makes a lot of sense, in part because of its simplicity. I should seek your counsel more often. This is the first proposal that I wouldn't feel at all uncomfortable working with. I'm only sad I hadn't thought of it earlier. Would other people agree to this?
I think it depends on how much detailed information you want the wiki to have.

Do you want lore, difficulty, connecting history, probably more details? You probably need to consider more criteria if you want feature rich knowledge, otherwise I think it's ok?

Anyways, I'll put this in a spoiler as this idea can be entirely different from what you imagined.

Spoiler:
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sub2pewds
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by sub2pewds »

@Mawmoocn: I've more or less intuited what level of detail seems ideal so far. You may find Haldric I or The Rise of Wesnoth are good places to get some idea of what that level of detail is like at the moment. I'm interested in all material relevant to the character or campaign, but nothing else. This is generally what happens with other game wikis. If a page is too big to contain all the relevant details, it can be split into subpages (e.g. The Rise of Wesnoth is split into each of its scenarios).
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lhybrideur
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by lhybrideur »

josteph wrote: September 7th, 2019, 7:50 am Or we could sidestep the question entirely and use a different yardstick: a character is notable if their description on the wiki is longer than one paragraph. Characters that meet this threshold get a page, characters that don't get an entry on the list of dramatis personae.
Seems a nice criteria. Although it requires to write the page before realizing it's too short. At least as a draft on one's computer I think.
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sub2pewds
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by sub2pewds »

Shouldn't be a problem. The articles can be written and then swapped out for redirects as soon as it is clear they are just a single paragraph long.
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GunChleoc
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by GunChleoc »

Or you can start on a collective page and then move the content to a dedicated page if it gets longer. This way, you won't need a redirect.
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sub2pewds
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Re: Notability guidelines

Post by sub2pewds »

GunChleoc wrote: September 10th, 2019, 8:38 pm Or you can start on a collective page and then move the content to a dedicated page if it gets longer. This way, you won't need a redirect.
The redirects can serve their own purpose for navigation. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalstatistix links to the "List of Asterix characters" page on Wikipedia. The same thing can be done with the redirects for the Wesnoth wiki.
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