Hello, Marvelites of the Database. Over the last few months, the administrative team has been overhauling quite a few different aspects of the wiki to help organize and better reflect information across the platform.
To open up this round-up, I would like to once again welcome Pedronog and 1137a to the administrative team. Both of these long-standing and valuable users were recently voted into the positions of administrator and moderator as part of an overhaul of our staff. As part of this overhaul, I was also nominated by the rest of the administrators to become a bureaucrat. Needless to say, I'm grateful and honored to be in this position.
Now, into the other changes:
Character Template:
The template for character articles has been tweaked. The order of the fields within the template has been altered to knit together related fields. The infobox is now separated in more clear sections. Most of them will appear collapsed when loading the page to improve the reading experience and give users the power to see the information they want to see.
Some of the fields have sub-divisions for clarity. The contents of the Aliases field are now spread between different sub-sections depending of the nature of a character's alternate identities, such as "Codenames," "Nicknames," "Impersonations" and "Others."
The Relatives field has been divided to include sections for "Ancestors," "Grandparents," "Parents," "Siblings," "Spouses," "Children," and "Descendants." These new fields must be listed in chronological order, from oldest/earliest to youngest/latest.
A few secondary fields, such as Hair2, Eyes2, Citizenship2 and MaritalStatus2 have been made obsolete. All the information should now be written using the main fields, with the appropriate syntax.
The field CauseOfDeath has been revamped, to provide a quick explanation of a character's death(s) as well as their revival(s) (comics!), This, along with other related fields, will automatically add categories to a character's article.
To close this section, a reminder not to neglect the use of references within infoboxes, unless the information is explicitly stated in the body of the article.
Item Template:
The template for item articles has undergone a similar overhaul to the character template, with certain obsolete templates having been removed, and others improved. For instance, the template Type will now automatically add a category based on its value, and an item can be categorized as more than one thing by separating each type of item that it is with a semicolon. The fields Properties and Alternate Versions that used to be widely used but always manually added are nor formally part of the item template.
Image Template:
The image template has been tweaked as well. The Source field is now placed above the creators credits, for instance. It's also encouraged to remove from an article template fields that are not in use. Certain automatic procedures for inserting an image template used to include headers titled "Licensing" or "Summary." These are now obsolete and nothing should be written outside the template itself.
Gallery Guidelines:
Gallery Guidelines have now been introduced to the wiki. They're an exhaustive explanation of the way images are to be sorted out within gallery pages. In broad strokes, galleries now have to be divided in sections based on different parameters like the type of media (comics, animation, and a few more), whether they're from interior artwork or a cover, etc.
There is also a new system for writing and formatting the captions accompanying each image. Please make sure to read the guidelines in the link provided above to know the new in-and-outs of these pages before editing them.
Link Templates:
A new set of templates has been created to link to articles of published material (comics, movies, TV episodes, video games, etc). This new template is {{sl}} and it can be used in all articles except gallery pages (since too many instances of {{sl}} causes the template to crash). The purpose of {{sl}} is to automatically format a link depending on the type of media. For example "{{sl|Amazing Spider-Man Vol 5 26}}" will automatically format the link like Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 5) #26. You can see that the title of the series has been italicized, the volume has been placed between parenthesis, and the issue number includes a hash. You can learn more about this template here.
A sister template named {{sld}} is to be used within the infobox fields for first appearances and appearances of death, and it automatically includes the release date below the link.
{{sl}} additionally has children templates that are used to link to specific types of media so {{sl}} doesn't have to figure that out: {{cl}} (replacing {{c}}) for comics, {{ml}} for movies, {{el}} for TV series and its episodes, and {{vl}} for video games. The main purpose of these children templates is to use them in galleries due to the aforementioned issue with {{sl}}.
Additionally, {{el}} has a variant. {{el}} displays an episode in the format "[show name] S[season number]E[episode number]" whereas the variant {{elt}} will instead display the episode's title. This can be used in instances when it's preferred to refer to the episode of a show by name and not by season and episode number. {{elt}} has its own sister template named {{eltd}} which functions similarly to {{sld}}.
Staff Articles:
Staff pages have undergone a major overhaul in naming. Before this change, it was possible for the article for a real-life creator to not just be titled after their name, but instead include the designation "(Earth-1218)" (for instance, "Stan Lee (Earth-1218)"). This was because, due to the nature of Marvel, it's not uncommon for creators to appear as themselves in different kind of media.
When a creator appeared as a character, that meant a disambiguation page needed to be created to differentiate the adaptations of the creators and their real-life counterpart. The disambiguation page was named after the creator, and the article for the real person included Marvel's designation for our reality, Earth-1218, and the Earth-1218 version of the creator was regarded as the main version within the disambiguation page. In essence, it worked like the disambiguation pages for entirely fictional characters like Spider-Man.
The administrative team decided that it was better not to include the Earth-1218 designation in the article title for real-life creators, since we felt a line was being blured between covering things from an in-universe and an out-of-universe perspective. The designation Earth-1218 does refer to our world, but it comes from a system that is really only pertinent in the context within the fictional publications of Marvel.
When a real-life creator has appeared as a character, their article will still be named under their proper name without any universe designations. Instead, their disambiguation will present the "(Disambiguation)" differentiative. Returning to the Stan Lee example, the article for the real-life Stan Lee is once again just "Stan Lee," and the disambiguation page that lists his fictional versions within Marvel media is "Stan Lee (Disambiguation)." These articles for staff members with fictional counterparts also include a header box linking to the disambiguation page.
FandomDesktop:
This is more of a global Fandom change, but it's worth mentioning here. A new opt-in for the upcoming FandomDesktop skin has been enabled. Please check this blog post by our Wiki Manager KylaraE for more information.
That is all for now. As usual, suggestions for tweaks and improvements are always welcome. Thank you for your tireless contributions to the Database!
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