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No, It's not.
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And that's exactly the problem.I’m working today as well, but I have a slight amount of time.
“a few powers that are quite self-explanatory”
This is the biggest problem with the removal. Elemental powers aren’t self explanatory. Practically zero character has full control over an element. Most just shoot or summon their respective elements, while others need to get it from sources other than themselves. Like not even avatar has the full extent of these powers. People are supposed to list what characters can do with these powers on the profile. So elemental manipulation is absolutely useful if a character can control a crap ton of elements as we need to explain how they can do so.
Yes, and the staff consensus is against this, so continuing to argue here is just a waste of time and energy.Well the big conclusion that is supposed to come from this is elemental manipulation being removed. Which isn’t going to happen because it would need to be a site wide revision and there’s zero way this would ever get enough attention to be site wide.
I agree with this.Personally.... overarching powers like this I have mixed feelings about. In a sense it is no different than "Superhuman Physical Characteristics" or "Magic" which cover a huge range of abilities each. So in that sense I don't think it should be deleted just because it can mean many abilities and specific subtypes can be listed instead.
I do believe however that we should specify that if a character only controls a single element (let's say Fire for example) that we shouldn't list "Elemental Manipulation" but just list "Fire Manipulation" instead.
Elemental manipulation should be for the power to control multiple different elements, and those elements they can control should definitely be listed afterwards.
Continued from here
Before anyone says that it was declined, Ant gave me another chance of sorts, given that only he and @Abstractions in terms of current staff members disagreed, that and there being some pending actions even if the page is to stay.
That being said, I'll start with the new problem I've noticed on keeping this page:
Perfectly describes? A better term would be "Unecessarily turns details on pages harder to find".
I'll bring up three cases:
1: "[[Fire Manipulation]]",
2: "[[Elemental Manipulation]] (Fire, Y can use it in Z manner)"
3: "[[Elemental Manipulation]] (Y can use [[Fire Manipulation|fire]] in the Z manner)"
A bot that tries to clean up a verse in question for the removal of Fire Manipulation will easily find the first option, but won't find the second case as it's most likely based on the What Links Here feature, given that it is compromised whenever Elemental Manipulation is used for the purpose you describe, if a verse has to have Fire Manipulation removed (or reworded) for some reason, but if it doesn't link back to the Electricity Manipulation page to filter the cases to remove in the first place, then now you clearly have a burden that requires being found manually, and filtering further by just searching for "What Links to Elemental Manipulation" as well or so can bring false positives for this kind of purpose, all for saving a few words at most.
And while the third option is a middleground that keeps a link to Fire Manipulation and Elemental Manipulation, the ones that want to keep Elemental Manipulation like you appear to dislike it as it just turns listing stuff even harder than if this "power" was around in the first place, showing how it's redundant, unecessary and overall counterproductive.
This could also be fixed by a way I'll explain later.
Easy, such pages that just listed "Elemental Manipulation" without further details would just have it removed (We do that to nearly anything), and some listing would be done on cases where this happens (namely to keep it clear to users that the respective page may need a revision).
Cases where it's said which "elements" the character in question does manipulate would just be listed as they were, but with the "Elemental Manipulation" part and the parenthesis over it (if any) removed. And as mentioned before, while it technically has a purpose, it does more negatives than positives in the long run from what I've seen, makes links regarding something within a verse harder to find for organization purposes (ironically), promotes inconsistent formatting, etc. Status Effect Inducement is also a relic from over 5 years back in the wiki, two wrongs don't make a right and it may as well be in needs of revisions in the same way.
Okay, now I'll go reminding the other stuff to do if the page is to remain:
1: Elemental Manipulation's usage for indexing being optional.
After all, by itself it covers nothing, and just listing directly each "subset" of it is about as effective.
2: The category "Element Users" being added to all characters that have at least two or more of its "subsets" regardless of if Elemental Manipulation is actually listed or not.
Now I'm mentioning the other alternative I said I was going to say before, if this page is to remain, all characters that have two or more powers that are considered "subsets" (As in, listed) within Elemental Manipulation get the Element Users category, this helps to remain consistent on regards of this "power" and eases finding pages that meet this criteria.
If the above is done, the Elemental Manipulation page should also be edited accordingly to keep it clear.
[[Elemental Manipulation]] (Can [[Fire Manipulation| shoot pillars of fire]])
Because elemental manipulation already links the power. You don’t do [[Soul Manipulation]] ([[Soul Manipulation| Can steal souls]])
Here's the thing, for example, if "Fire Manipulation" isn't linked, you get the issue of whenever it's required to find pages within a certain verse with this power, you won't find it as they don't link to it, and filtering by searching for what links to Elemental Manipulation easily brings a ton of false positives as well, which makes editing unecessarily harder, and as you've said before, listing the power in this manner ("[[Elemental Manipulation]] (X can use [[Fire Manipulation|blasts of fire]])"), defeats the purpose of having the power to make editing and indexing "easier".Because elemental manipulation already links the power. You don’t do [[Soul Manipulation]] ([[Soul Manipulation| Can steal souls]])
So why do that with elemental manipulation. Elemental manipulation is the power, it already has the links. If elemental manipulation description requires you to link all the individual subsets in the description then, yes it would be completely worthless, but you don’t do that. You link elemental manipulation and it has the links.
Fair, but we don’t do that with status effect inducement usually either. If there is something that doesn’t have a point here, it’s linking every element whenever they are mentioned in the description. Elemental manipulation already has the power links and I think people can understand that shooting out fire is fire manipulation, so just go to elemental manipulation’s page and find fire manipulation.That's because there's only 1 page for Soul Manipulation. Not so for Elemental Manipulation and Fire Manipulation.
As said before, two wrongs don't make a right, if anything what you're saying supports that Status Effect Inducement should be removed as well, especially considering that "power" also treats several unrelated powers as one broad category when for many verses they're not different from regular hax.Fair, but we don’t do that with status effect inducement usually either. If there is something that doesn’t have a point here, it’s linking every element whenever they are mentioned in the description. Elemental manipulation already has the power links and I think people can understand that shooting out fire is fire manipulation, so just go to elemental manipulation’s page and find fire manipulation.
What person looks up a page by fire users rather than the character’s name. Do people seriously search through specific categories and powers to find characters? Getting a false positive on something as specific as that is not a reason to remove a power.Here's the thing, for example, if "Fire Manipulation" isn't linked, you get the issue of whenever it's required to find pages within a certain verse with this power, you won't find it as they don't link to it, and filtering by searching for what links to Elemental Manipulation easily brings a ton of false positives as well, which makes editing unecessarily harder, and as you've said before, listing the power in this manner ("[[Elemental Manipulation]] (X can use [[Fire Manipulation|blasts of fire]])"), defeats the purpose of having the power to make editing and indexing "easier".
And while this could be fixed by having the respective page to also have the "Fire Users" category, it's quite unreliable for cases like this where the respective page for it isn't linked directly.
I mean, why do you think we have categories in the first place? Many users do actually navigate across categories at times to remain informed on related subjects to a certain page. And false positives are indeed a reason, it supports this "power" being more of a burden than actually useful, simply put, it brings more negatives than positives.What person looks up a page by fire users rather than the character’s name. Do people seriously search through specific categories and powers? Getting a false positive on something as specific as that is not a reason to remove a power.
Here’s the thing. What do we truly gain from removing this power. A shit ton of work for literally zero benefit.
Not really, removing Elemental Manipulation would make it so that users now would list like "[[Fire Manipulation]], [[Electricity Manipulation]]" and so on at worst (rather than also having to deal with "[[Elemental Manipulation]] (Fire)" or [[Elemental Manipulation]] (Can use [[Fire Manipulation|fire]] and [[Electricity Manipulation|electricity]]), and the first option is far more self-explanatory (And easier to get for newer members) than Elemental Manipulation, as that one is just a broad term for "Just say the elements without links afterwards", and by itself it has as much meaning as "Can use elements", while also bringing the other issues I've said in past replies.More consistency is pretty meaningless in this case. Majority of our profile are worded vastly differently majority of the time because different people make the profile. You can pretty clearly tell when a profile is made by an amateur vs someone who has done it for a long time.
There wouldn’t be an issue with navigation. A person manipulates fire and the elemental manipulation page says there is fire manipulation. The person would just click on that. People don’t click on power whenever they come across them, they click them once to see what they are about and probably never touch them again. The only powers I ever relook over are things that have specific types so when I make profiles I get the types right.
Powers should have descriptions anyways. All powers should have descriptions. Getting rid of elemental manipulation has literally nothing to do with that. If you have soul manipulation, explain why and how. No power is self explanatory, not even superhuman physically characteristics because you can have super speed or strength independently.