Referential Captions on Character Pages

It's fine and I understand.

Torn because I hate blanket bans due to how they complicate things when nuanced situations come up (looking at you, stock phrase ban), but also I don't think there's many scenarios where a referential caption is helpful. I'd think maybe if there's a meme better known than the work itself, but then it might look obnoxious since we try not to reference the audience on work pages anymore. But I also don't like cutting any sense of informality from the wiki.

I voted no at first but I'll vote yes to prevent these annoyances at least @_@ not that it'll change anything LOL

let me be clear here: funny captions are fine. snarky captions are fine to a point. goofy, silly captions are fine. im not trying to purge all humor from captions. i just think humor that depends on referencing something unrelated doesn't belong there.

e: this was meant to be posted in the caption repair thread

Edited by ChloeJessica on Aug 2nd 2022 at 9:43:03 AM

I think it works ok as is, honestly. At least it's not the same lyrics.

Edited by MacronNotes on Aug 2nd 2022 at 12:42:21 PM

I personally hate duplications like that, but it's worse on trope pages than work pages.

... i posted that in the wrong thread.

I was thinking that you mean the caption clean up thread but I wasn't sure if you were trying to make a point regarding policy or not.

Same, so I rolled with it.

well, either my point was so deep i didn't even understand it, or im dumb

one of those is more likely than the other

so according to How Crowners Work, the crowner can be called early if an option is at 10:1 or more, and the franchise choice has been at that or higher since the crowner started. can we go ahead and call?

It can be but I usually wait for three days on principle and I think wiki crowners should run the minimum 3 days as we make policy decisions there. There's no rush either so I am fine with calling this Friday.

alright, do we need a short-term project thread to clear out known problem pages? once that's done, i imagine they can just be brought to the caption repair thread as needed.

A short term thread can be made if needed.

What about the other potential exceptions I mentioned?

• references to works that a work is based on/inspired by
• references to extremely well-known works, such as The Bible and certain Shakespeare plays
• references to Creator Thumbprints (and similar?)

Edited by Twiddler on Aug 4th 2022 at 10:22:20 AM

I don't really have an opinion on those exceptions but we can still discuss your proposal on this thread. I don't if that's something that needs a crowner or not.

Edited by MacronNotes on Aug 4th 2022 at 1:25:16 PM

cleanup thread made here; Macron, can i get the OP pinned over there?

in most cases, i would say that's all information that should be in the description, rather than the caption. the Creator Thumbprint thing i could see a case for on a character that has a particularly visible instance of the thumbprint, but then that would be referencing something in the work, not outside it, so it shouldn't be problematic.

i see no reason to exempt famous works from the policy, barring a case where the work itself explicitly mentioned or quoted the famous work. that could warrant an exception.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Aug 4th 2022 at 10:32:29 AM

Here’s a reason: because people in everyday life use those famous quotes to describe things. When weird people make sense, we say there’s method to their madness. When bad men act guilty and paranoid, we say there is no rest for the wicked. And you get the picture. Why would you ban a significant part of the language this wiki writes in for no reason?

Edited by DustSnitch on Aug 4th 2022 at 2:22:22 PM

if it's an idiom that's entered common language and is relevant to the work in question, as both of those are, you could use it in the caption without potholing the famous work.

bumping to build on the above: if the phrase you want to use isn't part of the lexicon and isn't immediately recognizable as being from that famous work, then it runs into exactly the same problem as captions from less famous works: it requires the reader to check the source material it's from in order to understand why the caption is relevant. there is absolutely no reason for an exception.

I disagree. Sometimes a certain phrase just fits a character or work extremely well, even without knowing the source material. Plus, not every famous quote is exactly idiomatic. The caption under the Breaking Bad is “mo’ money, mo’ problems,” which is a pretty apt and concise summary of the progression of the series. It doesn’t matter if you know what song it’s from or not (I don’t), it works well, so why remove it?

That’s my general problem here, there’s no need for a rule here. The FNAF captions are just bad, so they can be deleted because they’re bad. No need to add a line of red tape to a wiki we all edit out of recreation when we can just remove dumb edits because they’re dumb.

Is that an accurate summary of the series? Walter's problem wasn't that he had "mo' money", it was that he was a meth dealer slipping into villainy.

yeah, that's a bad, unrepresentative caption that should be changed. someone shoehorned it in because they thought it would be funny. which is exactly the whole problem with referential captions.

in any case, this discussion has been had. the crowner is called. the time to talk about it was before it got voted into policy at a 9:1 ratio.

I mean, just from my osmosis of a show I've never watched I can see the rationale behind that quote (Walt originally becomes a criminal to ensure his family's financially secure after he dies, but as he rises up the underworld turf ladder constantly engages in Moving the Goalposts as to what 'financial security' means to avoid admitting his real motives, even though that also is constantly making things worse for him. Thus "mo' money, mo' problems). So it's not total nonsense or anything. But it also doesn't strike me as nearly straightforward enough to justify it.

Which is my general feeling for even the less outrageously bad examples of these quotes.

Edited by nrjxll on Aug 5th 2022 at 2:14:13 PM