What to do with individual Wrestler pages: Professional Wrestling

This is partly inspired by our little aggravation yesterday and this morning over a WWE fan with entitlement issues.

I cannot help but notice that we have a lot of articles on the wiki for pro wrestlers. Now, I acknowledge that Professional Wrestling is Serious Business among dedicated fans, and it is media, and therefore applicable to our mission.

What bothers me is that we have a page like Christian. To anyone except a Pro Wrestling fan, what's the first thing you'd think of upon seeing that? Yeah, me too. How about Ultimate Warrior?

In any other medium, individual "characters", which is what these are, would go in a Characters page, possibly split if needed due to length. That may not be practical here. But I don't think it's worth cluttering up the Main namespace with them, either.

I noticed that some are in a "Wrestler" namespace, like Sting, a grudging concession that the musician Sting is more notable, I guess? Anyway, I propose to move all pro wrestlers to that namespace.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Works for me.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Given how big Ultimate Warrior was at one point, my first thought upon seeing the page is the wrestler. Of course, I was entering adolescence around that time, when wrestling had the most visibility in my life. So I'm probably an anomaly for that page.

Yeah, I'd say that a characters page would be the wrong idea - if nothing else, the constant shuffling between promotions would inevitably result in constant updates to move entire sections wholesale from one promotion's characters page to another. Beyond the hassle, that could easily be mistaken for an Edit War to those unfamiliar.

A Wrestler namespace seems the most logical answer. One thing I would ask, though, is that wrestlers only get one page - not that it happens too often, but I wouldn't want to see each gimmick get one (this hasn't been a problem - Mick Foley is proof of that - but it should be put out there for the future).

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

Okay, since there's some agreement here, I'm going to move this thread to TRS and link it to Professional Wrestling. Oh, and rename it... yeah, all that's done.

edited 27th May '11 8:14:47 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Seeing that all the major wrestling promotions from the past twenty years (WWE, WCW, ECW, and TNA) all have character subpages already (and with entries for all the wrestlers that have individual pages, too*

), I'm not too keen on the idea for allowing any or all wrestlers to have their own pages.

I'm reminded of when we eliminated character pages for minor Batman villains (or, rather, villains lesser known than The Joker) a few months back and merged them with the existing character subpage. I'm not really sure what's stopping us from dealing with this problem in a similar way.

edited 27th May '11 8:27:03 AM by SeanMurrayI

Interesting, didn't realize we had all those subpages. That makes the presence of individual wrestler articles even less sensible.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Just curious, but why is it that comic book characters have so many individual pages?

edited 27th May '11 8:38:29 AM by Killomatic

Regulated fun - the best kind! I don't make the rules, just enforce them with an iron fist.

One topic, please.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

^^ The only straight-up character pages for comic characters that I'm aware of are for villains. And I believe we're trying to limit those specifically to characters that immediately come to most people's minds when they think of comic villains (Lex Luthor, The Joker, Dr Doom).

I'd suggest the same thing for pages for individual wrestlers; let's try to limit it only to the guys who most people immediately think of when they hear "wrestling"—your Hulk Hogans and the like. If that isn't doable, just merge them with existing character pages for whatever promotions are applicable.

edited 27th May '11 8:45:06 AM by SeanMurrayI

There's a case to be made for wrestlers who cross over multiple promotions. Hulk Hogan is one of the classic examples: everyone knows who he is.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Well we could do a separate character subpages like

Like the WWE subpage has this

• The WWWF Era (1963-1984)
  • List of characters
  • big enough to
  • have their own pages
  • The rest

The ones with more than one category can be listed on more than one index. The pages would be located in like "Characters / Hulk Hogan" or Multi Work Character / Hulk Hogan

Comicbook characters with sub pages get these too on their respective owner pages such as DC Comics and series they appear in it would get people actually thinking if its a trope thats presant across the entire work instead of "The Joker did this only in the Batman film" when it should be "Batman Film: yada yada the joker" or "Standard fare with The Joker in all his works".

edited 27th May '11 9:13:51 AM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

^^Indeed, and he's listed on both WWE and WCW character pages. He's probably on the New World Order character page (EDIT: Though I didn't actually realize that this one is an incredibly weak character page), too.

What I'd really note though is that while wrestlers often switch promotions, they often come to embody different characters with different personalities or carry different functions or gimmicks in different promotions. Hulk Hogan's character sheet segments would likely include some noticeable differences between all the different character sheets for the promotions he was in.

edited 27th May '11 9:22:25 AM by SeanMurrayI

Hmmm. I'm not really invested in this, because I would probably only recognize about four pro wrestlers at all, even if they came up and handed me a hundred-dollar bill (And two of them, at least, won't be doing that because they're dead — Gorgeous George and Andre The Giant. The other two would be The Rock and Hulk Hogan — both because they did something noteworthy other than wrestle). But, to offer another way of looking at it...

They're performers in a media that is jammed with performer-driven tropes. Arguably, a pro wrestler will have more tropes that his character is consistently associated with than most film or tv actors do, because they either use the same character longer, or because the character is treated almost as a work in itself. Since we allow individual actor pages, why not individual wrestler pages?

edited 27th May '11 10:56:06 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Most though are Persona quite different than their normal self the pages cover their various persona.

They should be on the characters namespace and linked with the works that are show their Personas like what I laid out above.

edited 27th May '11 11:24:34 AM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

Madrugada, the point, as Raso noted, is that these are characters, not the real people. They're wholly invented for the In-Universe "plot" of the wrestling show. The wrestlers themselves are paid actors who happen to be engaged in actual physical work in the ring. "Hulk Hogan" is a persona played by an actor (whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, by the way). His appearances in later media — film, TV, etc., are a form of Adam Westing.

As characters, not real people, wrestling personas should therefore be treated as any other character; the major distinction that we've been employing is that they tend to be fairly Troperiffic and, in some cases, span multiple seasons/shows, thus a straight Character Sheet listing is impractical. But we should not necessarily use Main articles for them for the same reason that we don't give Main articles to... oh, Sauron, or Bilbo Baggins.

edited 27th May '11 11:17:41 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

But the "real person" is virtually invisible except to die-hard fans of that wrestler or stable. The character is the performer, and vice versa as far as most people are concerned.

^ Your last point I have no argument with. I'm not saying leave them on Main. I'm saying don't hide them under whichever stable or company their associated with, because that makes it difficult or impossible for someone who is interested in one, but not a dedicated fan, to find the page. Was Hulk Hogan WWE? WWF? WCW? TNA? ECW? I have no clue. I wouldn't know where to start looking for his subpage.

edited 27th May '11 11:28:23 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

When you get into The Rock (which leads to a movie so no pothole) vs Dwayne Johnson things are quite different though when Dwayne Johnson appears on Jay Leno normal cool and then you look at The Rock and its completely different.

Hulk Hogan's reality show is different than Hulk Hogan the wrestler.

The persona might be all they see but these are still characters played by an actor. Its fine for them to have their own page but its still a character and should be in the right place and linked accordingly.

Same goes for The Joker vs Heath Ledger or Mark Hamill and so on.

edited 27th May '11 11:27:02 AM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

The character is the character. They Are Not Spock.

Re: The Joker, we said those types of pages were okay because they identify a media franchise in the same manner as Batman. But Hulk Hogan is not a multimedia franchise. He's a character that's appeared in many works, but that's never been enough in and of itself to justify a Main namespace article.

Regarding the original proposal, is there any good reason not to move all of the wrestlers who do have independent articles into the Wrestler namespace?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

We are becoming big on putting things in their right place. Hulk Hogan is a Wrestler so he goes in the Wrestler namespace, The Joker is a character so he would go into the character namespace, Comic Character namespace or a Multi Media Character namespace, he himself is not a work or an actor (There may be works he stars in but the page doesnt cover that more than just a list). Actors go in the actors namespace and so on.

Anyway fine with moving them all to the Wresler namespace but we might want to move this to special efforts to fix wicks and character sheets.

edited 27th May '11 12:28:49 PM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

Pro Wrestling is one of the craziest forms of art in the world.

You see, it's like a sport in that each performer owns themselves, they perform to their own standards. But it's a like a TV show in that it's a performance designed to entertain the fans with plot twists and such.

We create individual pages because each wrestler forges their own career. If an actor gets dropped from a show they're not taking their character and going to the competition, in pro wrestling? Yes. Characters can outlast promotions, so if we have one we should have the other as well.

Wrestlers and their personas are closely tied, you can't separate Scott Levy and Raven, because Scott's been playing Raven for twenty years. Is Richard Fliehr just an actor playing Ric Flair? Yes, but it's a role that Richard has crafted for over forty years. It's a role he's owned for a long time and you keep them separate.

If you want to create a namespace for Pro-Wrestler do so...but it's another level of complexity and annoyance that you have to add. There is no need to add Wrestler / Shawn Michaels for example. If it's Sting or Raven or Edge or Christian or Kane than fine, but there's not going to be any conflict over Triple H or Hulk Hogan or Stone Cold Steve Austin or CM Punk.

Add it when necessary, otherwise leave well enough alone.

"Whoa" Keanu Reeves

I think there should be a Wrestler namespace, but each wrestler should have a page that lists all their personas over the years. Yes, a wrestler is essentially an actor playing as a character, but the actor and character are much harder to differentiate than in other media because of kayfabe, which is unique to Pro Wrestling as a medium. In addition, wrestler characters have changed promotions with the actor more often than not. It is undeniable that more often than not the actor owns the rights to the character.

Looking at pages like Doctor Doom, The Joker, Lex Luthor, and Magneto, most of the reasons those pages exist is because the characters themselves are so fluid in their appearances both in the comic books they star in and outside of them that it is easier to just give them a page and link to it when needed for a character sheet. Wrestling is just as fluid with their character roster if not moreso.

edited 11th Jun '11 2:16:51 PM by GameGuruGG

Wizard Needs Food Badly

A character with an extremely complex backstory like The Undertaker and Kane certainly needs their own page, because it covers not only the character but their story.

But should we still put managers on the Wrestler namespace? (People like Bobby Heenan and Paul Bearer?)

Also, I've noticed some problems with the WWE characters pages. A lot of them list tropes for wrestlers who already have individual pages, and the page for the WWE Brand Extension covers more years than it should and thus is a mile long (The whole "Brand Extension" thing might as well have ended once WWE went "PG", wrestlers cross over from Raw to Smackdown whenever they feel like it now).

edited 13th Jun '11 10:18:57 PM by Surenity

My tropes launched: https://surenity2.blogspot.com/2021/02/my-tropes-on-tv-tropes.html

I'd like to call attention to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereIsNoSuchThingAsNotability

I don't know if it's entirely relevant, but if this is the philosophy of the wiki, that works shouldn't have to be argued for/against their merit for inclusion, and the whole of a wrestler's career is a great work on their part, then why a tiff over whether or not they get their own pages? Surely, it harms no one that they get them. If you're not a wrestling fan, you'd have no reason to be looking them up anyway.

I think we were arguing about how to organize it rather than whether or not they should be here.

Fight smart, not fair.