| Welcome to Project CharacterDex! |
|---|
 Welcome to the talk page for Project CharacterDex. This is the place to ask general questions about improving Bulbapedia's content on characters, or proposing new ideas for the project as a whole. Please remember to sign all comments with ~~~~ and don't forget to be nice!
|
| Talk Archives: One |
Detangling notability requirements
So this is the first part of a two part improvement project I hope to try to be pushing forward with soon with the community. The first is when Pokémon are significant enough to be given their own page independent of their Trainer. The second is when it is reasonable to divorce a Trainer's page into independent pages instead of a section, but that is something I would like to cover at a later date.
I would also like to indicate that I have tried to keep this as free from my own personal bias as possible, despite my own feelings on the matter. However as a note, responses to questions will be my personal opinions on matters.
The Problem
There's been a non-insignificant push back and forth between staff and users as to when Pokémon should be considered notable. Among the arguments presented by both sides are that we tend to have a very anime-centric view in these cases, the pages don't actually add any extra information other then what is already presented on the Trainer page, and just because a Pokémon is seen with it's Trainer that doesn't mean it is actually doing anything of note.
For reference here is a summary of our current (relevant) notability guides
- For anime:
- - Main character Pokémon are notable if they appear more then once (with a brief amendment for Goh given his journey)
- - Rivals and recurring characters may only have signature Pokémon articles unless there is another Pokémon of particular note
- - Gym Leaders may have an article on their signature but only if it did more then battle.
- For manga these are a bit messier due to the dependence on when and how they are appear but generally:
- - Requires significant impact and reappearances
- - Starter Pokémon of the main characters
The current situation
Now looking at the pages for mainspacing, a lot of draft articles currently caught up are "signature" Pokémon of Leaders, Elites and Rivals, or Pokémon that appeared multiple times throughout series that belonged to Rival Trainers but didn't do a lot outside of battling. Occasionally you also get Gym Leader secondary Pokémon here too.
Defining signature Pokémon is something the series has been a lot better at doing for these Gym Leaders recently, however historically there will be some issues where we have the Gen 1 issue (lots of appearances across media, different representations) or where pre-evolutions are the primary Pokémon over final evolutions, Erika is one such example. We also have some cases where the signature Pokémon can flux between media types. Which is where thankfully, Pokémon Masters has been coming in use lately since it seems to be helping us pin point some of these mystery cases. There's also the Gotcha music video and another (albeit older) source we can sometimes use for these is the Adventures art for the key Trainers.
Working towards a solution
I want to talk about media agnostic views of the franchise, or trying to push for a more wholistic view of pages.
Although I won't linger too long on this point, unfortunately only one section can be the top section and their is frequent disagreement on what that section should be between users, staff and viewers. There are projects in the works to try and work out ways to change that. However, in the interim and to help us start this conversation there are three main categories of appearances for the most part that the staff have identified.
- Story - Usually Animated and Manga series, occasionally can include Games (think AZ's Floette or Jasmine's Ampharos).
- Data - Primarily this is seen with the games. Think things like Party Pokémon data, Master's links, Contest Data, and side game appearances.
- Visual - This is where the appearance is primarily in a visual medium on the page, think things like TCG appearances and Merchandise. This can also occasionally involve other mediums especially in blink and you'll miss it appearances, such as Gotcha.
Using these guidelines if we set a minimum amount of appearances between these three areas, we could potentially develop new guidelines that should see us able to have more Pokémon with pages that have been identified as important by the community, as well as help build a stronger Bulbapedia. --Spriteit (talk) 13:17, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
- I realized this hasn't been linked, but there's a Discord convo here too. Tiddlywinks (talk) 00:58, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
- This is for anyone reading this post, but the intent of linking the discord channel is not to force people to contribute their opinions by using a specific method over another. It is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, for people here to respond to the talk page messages here, and there is no expectation to join to discord server in order to post your thoughts. MaverickNate 01:38, 7 December 2023 (UTC)