Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20161124005352/@comment-61022-20161208210433

ADour wrote: Personally, I feel that trying to make such big adjustements for the sake of a feature that is not used that much is contrived.

When you say a "feature that is not used that much" do you mean that people reading the site don't take advantage of that or meaning in terms of editors making changes on the page?

In which case, why do you think it's contrived? Is it any more contrived than listing characters that are mentioned? Or creating a character page for someone named Joe who is a one-off character? Or categorizing characters who had hair but are now bald? Or creating a category for different eye colors?

Or are you making conjecture to express a lack of desire to do the sort of research to enter the APN tags and plot out a characters continuity?

Because if you really want to split hairs there are a of thing that people invest time on that I would call contrived, but have been told they are a necessity or something people want to do. (Mentions being a big one)

And did you perhaps consider the fact that a feature isn't used because a) there are no guidelines on how to properly use it. (As Edward very nicely pointed out)

b) it's not commonly used or updated properly to begin with so there are not examples for editors to check it out?

I think if it's a feature that is available we should be using it. I think it is as important as reference tags to be honest.

I would also argue that people who visit the site want to know where characters appeared previously and next. It's something we've done since the Wiki first started. Back in those days all that information was added at the bottom in the notes. The APN tags were meant to replace them.

I also feel that you are mistaking the reason something is "not used that much" is because we are not pointing people to the resources needed to do the job with people having no desire to do it. All we have to do is work on a resource that people can use (which I'm actually doing here)

Listing a character numerous times takes up quite a lot of space.

Whereas adding all of those tags creates the scenario that stated this whole thread. Either way, it is still increasing the length and space taken up by the appearance lists.

To which I ask, what is the problem with the length of the appearance section? Because one way or the other you're have pages that have lengthy appearance listings. ( is a perfect example of this among many)

The other thing is what -- from a design point of view -- do people find more important and what does a lengthy appearance list take away from the user experience?

Is scrolling down to get to the summary too much of an inconvenience? Should appearances still come first? Is there a site function that already exists that we can implement to make this work better?

The only reasonable argument I can see about lengthy appearance lists is that once you get past the info box that leaves a lot of white space on the right hand side of the page until you get to the summary.

Which, if that's a case, then perhaps the appearance list should be collapsible (like a TOC)

Listing every character that appears in a flashback in one section also prevents readers from easily distinguishing who were the protagonists, supporting characters and antagonists in that section.

I would say that this is actually contrivance. A protagonist and an antagonist can flip flop between the main story and the flashback. Technically speaking, you could, in turn have a character who is a protagonist in one story be an antagonist in another.

I take that as being akin to putting a mention in the Featured Character or Villains section. Just because someone is mentioned does not make them anything as important to the story as someone who actually appears in a story.

Yet there are people who edit comic summaries to this day who will plot Thanos into the villain section because somebody mentioned his name in a story. He's not the villain (or antagonist) of the story. Ergo, he shouldn't be put in the villain section.