Board Thread:Policies/@comment-10473115-20160314013421/@comment-10473115-20170413002913

Discussion seems to have fired up since I last checked. I hope that nobody hasn't frustrated too much because it's much better to have a civil and spirited debate than a silence. I feel some moral responsibility about this matter because I started the thread but as you can see it took a whole year to get started. And the reason for that was the promotion of content moderators. We have now many times more active editors with an actual vote on these discussions and that sometimes stirs the sleepy status quo. And in my opinion it's much more preferred way than to imply that don't bother, "the staff" will work it out (if they can be awoken).

Before commenting the issue at hand I want briefly to address the shortcomings of our decision making which are voiced in the thread. We lack many basic and needed policies but I haven't heard anybody to oppose simple procedure like proposing a change, voting if needed, and changing the policy. Clearer policies how to resolve disputes and manage discussions would obviously help us but it shouldn't stop our decision making. We just have to be maybe little more considerate to other opinions, proceed boldly at updating the policies, and try to solve the issue by writing better policies for decision making. I still feel that our biggest problem is to treat our policy pages like they are the Tablets of Stone from our forefathers beyond our reach. We have of course a deep philosophical disagreement about what's makes a good article and that can't be solved with a policy vote. I hope that we can find some kind of consensus about that on some point but these discussions are only way to achieve that. In this case I think that Monolith's deletion tags were just bold editing and start of the discussion. Of course a better way would have been to try to propose a policy change to back those deletions (and the right tag would have been Merge).

I think that we are going to a wrong direction when trying to base a page's survival on uniqueness, handbook entry or anything like that. Monolith has already gave a good rule for that: 1) Does the item require a description longer than what would reasonably fit on the CharacterWhoUsesIt (Earth-616)#Paraphernalia section? Then give it it's own page. If that section becomes too long we can just move the text to its own dedicated page. I don't see a reason why we should disagree on that but what makes it a controversial is a tracking of appearances. As we do that with a dedicated page we should give a one to everything we feel that deserves it. So we should delete only pages whose appearances don't need to be categorized (and find a way to keep articles without a categorization of appearances). And what we should categorize is the main point in this thread. I think that gallery pages for different models of a suit are interesting to the readers and we should keep those but not add an appearance to every comic page where its wearer shows up. Of course it would be beneficial to the readers to name those differently from real articles.

Does the item have non-redundant appearances, where it appears sometimes when CharacterWhoUsesIt does not? Give it an Appearances category. Second part of the proposal is much more problematic. If some suit or item has thousands of appearances with a character and a one without, it's appearances are still not worthwhile to be categorized. Also, it could be beneficial to categorize items with only a handful of appearances. Only threshold on that should be avoiding redundant information on comic pages.

So in a feeble attempt to summarize my thoughts, I'm all for the page for Reed Richards' Inventions and even own pages with enough content for different gadgets but not to add to comic pages:
 * Reed Richards
 * Reed Richards' Inventions
 * Fantastic Four Uniform

I appreciate Monolith's attempt to solve the issue by writing these exact rules but we obviously need to work on those. I would like to hear from the party of "list everything", what are your criteria for not to categorize something because if you really don't have anything, slippery slope becomes from a fallacy to a valid argument.