Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20160912200936/@comment-61022-20161031201932

ADour wrote: While I deeply agree that the history pages for characters should be trimmed down, I think the amount of detail put in the page should be equal throughout.

The Sandbox is an example, the details would be fleshed out a bit more. But let me tell you, I've tried condensing all the information down to a reasonable length. If we're trying to keep the page length of main pages, there is no way we're going to be able to cover the histories of longer running characters without directing people to expanded history pages.

I tried. I spent four hours trying to trim down year one of Mister Fanatic's modern age history. The other issue is, what is deemed relevant and what isn't? Having read everything about one character I can say that there are many things that a savoir faire reader would gloss over as "unimportant" due to ignorance or not knowing when it is actually an important part of their history. Certainly viewers of a page won't understand the scope of the character.

I would argue that a reader would want a synopsis of what happened in that period of time and if they are so inclined read about it in more detail.

ADour wrote: I also don't think it's necessary to put so much emphasis on dividing the character's story by years (or rather, I think it's better to leave that for the expanded versions).

I strongly disagree with that. The passage of time is very important to the history of the Marvel Universe. It's like saying Star Dates on Star Trek aren't important enough to be emphasised. If we're going to have people understand how series of events work, then we must start formatting our articles to conform to the working of the Sliding Timescale that these characters live within.

If you want people to grasp the history of a character than the passage of time is incredibly important. It certainly eliminates a lot of the redundancy questions we ask. It identifies what issues are topical references and which ones are factual.

ADour wrote: As it is now, the sandbox feels too brief, lacking details. I know it's meant to encourage people to check out the expanded version, but it should provide enough information while doing so in a way that reading the expanded history is an option and not a requirement to grasp the history of the character.

As I said before, that was just a brief example, as I couldn't figure out how to condense stuff that I wrote into smaller bits for a main page.

Honestly, I think we should reach out to the community and get a census on what is most important to people on the main pages before we go further on this.