User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20200113121045

User:Shambala108 recently posted the following on Thread:264470: "Some of our character pages, specifically any version of the Doctor, any companion or any oft-appearing character, have very long pages. Character pages are supposed to be brief summaries of the character, as well as other items spelled out at Tardis:Guide to writing Individuals articles (keep in mind this is a very old page and therefore uses some out-of-date language). What character pages are not is long paragraphs of plot summary for every story a character appears in.

The way a wiki works is a user reads a page, and if they're interested in more, they click on the links. Character pages should just have a very brief (maybe 2-3 sentences) description of a story, and if a reader wants more, they click on the story to get the plot.

There is an argument that some stories deserve more of a description because they're more important, but that does violate Tardis:Neutral point of view. So the project here is to clean up the longer character pages by culling some of the info for the stories cited."

- Thread:264470

Now here's the thing… where in policy does it say that? And even if it does, I'm not sure this is the optimal thing to do on the Wiki.

I am sympathetic to the argument that Wikis are supposed to work by clicking from one page to another to get more information, and that it makes no sense for the same information to be repeated on both pages. The only thing is that as a Wiki reader, I, for one, find myself wanting to character biographies much more often than plot summaries. If I want to know a story's plot linearly, I'll just read/watch/listen to the damn thing. The specificity of a Wiki such as ours is that it has pages like, well, the pages about incarnations of the Doctor, where all in-universe information is gathered in one place in in-universe chronological order. As documented by Tardis:We're Wikipedia's evil twin, the in-universe is the focus of this Wiki; plot summaries are nice to have, of course, but they're still more the area of Wikipedia.

So don't we have this the wrong way around? Wouldn't it be more interesting and useful to reduce plot summaries and gather most of the data in the characters' "biography" sections, rather than the opposite as Shambala suggests?

I beg to differ on giving longer paragraphs to some stories than others being a violation of Tardis:Neutral point of view. If one story only says "an unknown incarnation of the the Doctor visited an unnamed Planet to buy some baguettes" while another says "the Seventeenth Doctor visited the Planet Skaro to meet with Davros, alongside their companions Alice and Bob, and witnessed the tragic death of Alice's mother before making the drastic choice to surrender their TARDIS to Davros in exchange for Bob's mother's life"… well, I'd say that the violation of Tardis:Neutral point of view would rather be in putting all of the information from the first story on the The Doctor page, but only a fraction of the information from the second story.

It's not a matter of how "important" a story is (I fully agree a TV story should get no more coverage than a short story per se), but rather of how much a given story has to say.

Bear in mind, as well, that a story can often give disjointed nuggets of information that are tremendously important to a character's biography, but not, in and on their own, plot-relevant. If a story set on Gallifrey mentions, out of order, a ton of details about the Doctor's education at the Academy, for instance, then even if we see fit to mention some of these details in the plot summary of the story, they'll only be there in the order that they come up. Surely it is the whole point of having in-universe character biographies that they would be a place to put all that information in one easily-digestible paragraph, in order. Even if that paragraph amounts to more than "two or three sentences".

Note that I do bear in mind Tardis:You are bound by current policy and invite others to do the same. If what Shambala108 wrote on the "To-do list" thread does reflect policy, then we must continue to follow that policy for now… but then the point of this thread becomes to change that policy, which I think can only be to the benefit of this community and of the encyclopedia it is designed to build.