Ayewale
He/Him- 1,070
- 788
(Made this in Staff Discussion because it seems like it'd be really important.)
Buried within this page is probably the most important rule that the vsbw has regarding Marvel and DC characters:
To start with, where do these numbers even come from? They're hyper-specific but have no justification whatsoever. These rules come off as incredibly arbitrary: why does a Pre-Crisis character need 15 appearances but a Post-Crisis needs 10? Why? Why does Marvel Comics require a whopping twenty different appearances before a character can be indexed? They are arbitrary and unjustified. Bare minimum, we should include an explanation for these numbers and why the rule even exists on the page, which brings us to the second problem:
Why do these rules even exist? Put plainly, I simply do not understand why these specific verses have such a huge barrier to entry for page creation.
The criterion for other characters being added to the wiki are:
Agree: Maverick_Zero_X, CrimsonStarFallen, IdiosyncraticLawyer, Tllmbrg, CloverDragon03, Elizhaa, Marvel_Champion_07, Bobsican, M3X_2.0, DaReaperMan
Disagree: Armorchompy, The_Impress, SuigetsuHugs, Antvasima, Slightly Deagonx
Buried within this page is probably the most important rule that the vsbw has regarding Marvel and DC characters:
- "For the Prime Marvel Universe, please refrain from making profiles for characters with less than 20 appearances across comic books (approximately 2 years' worth of appearances)."
- "For DC Comics, refrain from making profiles for Golden Age characters with less than 5 appearances, Pre-Crisis characters with less than 15 appearances and Post-Crisis or Post-Flashpoint characters with less than 10 appearances..."
- "Alternative canon/non-canonical character profile pages for Marvel and DC Comics can only be created if the version in question was prominently featured in their own runs, and scale to their own feats instead of being presumed to scale to their main canon counterparts."
To start with, where do these numbers even come from? They're hyper-specific but have no justification whatsoever. These rules come off as incredibly arbitrary: why does a Pre-Crisis character need 15 appearances but a Post-Crisis needs 10? Why? Why does Marvel Comics require a whopping twenty different appearances before a character can be indexed? They are arbitrary and unjustified. Bare minimum, we should include an explanation for these numbers and why the rule even exists on the page, which brings us to the second problem:
Why do these rules even exist? Put plainly, I simply do not understand why these specific verses have such a huge barrier to entry for page creation.
The criterion for other characters being added to the wiki are:
- Your series isn't fanfiction and isn't collaborative fiction
- You yourself aren't a fanfiction-y character
- You aren't just an unremarkable 10-B human guy.
- You aren't just an unremarkable 10-B human guy.
- You need to have two years of appearances if you're in Marvel Comics...
- And one year if you're in DC...
- Except Pre-Crisis characters need fifteen issues of appearances...
- And Golden Age characters need five?
- "But without this rule, we would add loads of minor characters!"
- First off, a character having less than twenty issues worth of appearances isn't 'minor'; if they appear in multiple issues at all and can be scaled, they're not minor (much less having a nineteen-issue comic book run and being disregarded as non-notable). Second off, so what? We add loads of 'minor' characters to the wiki literally all the time, because the concept of a 'minor' character doesn't even exist outside of these two specific verses. We have random dnd animals, fodder videogame enemies, loads of oneshot villains and more. The wiki isn't going to run out of space anytime soon, so we shouldn't have any unnecessary restrictions on page count.
- "But without this rule, we'd have a lot more Marvel and DC pages to manage!"
- Indexing things properly can take a while, yeah. But 'lots of work' isn't an excuse.
- "Marvel and DC are so big that what counts as a notable character should be different."
- First off...no. We do not implement this Sliding Scale of Notability for any other verse, regardless of it's size, to any other verse in the wiki. And even if we did, the rule serves no actual practical purpose; I can't fathom why any character on this wiki would be allowed if it was published by Image Comics but not allowed if it was published by Marvel Comics.
- More importantly, Marvel and DC are far from the only verses on the wiki that are long-running and vast, yet to my knowledge are the only ones with this rule. If a verse has a large amount of characters and has been going on for decades, we should just...index the verse properly, yeah? And not decided that a huge amount of characters just don't count.
- "But those verses don't have multiple writers!" We do not have a minimum cross-reference count for SCPs.
- "But we've had this rule for a long time; we shouldn't change it."
- Yes we should. Better to start now than never.
Agree: Maverick_Zero_X, CrimsonStarFallen, IdiosyncraticLawyer, Tllmbrg, CloverDragon03, Elizhaa, Marvel_Champion_07, Bobsican, M3X_2.0, DaReaperMan
Disagree: Armorchompy, The_Impress, SuigetsuHugs, Antvasima, Slightly Deagonx
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