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Including minor characters on a Characters page?

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walking-wolf from The Northlands Since: Mar, 2022
#1: Mar 4th 2023 at 9:12:20 AM

Yesterday I went to add a few things to the Characters page for Highlander: The Series, and immediately ran into a problem: the Edit page has a warning that the page is too long and needs to be split. I went back and looked up and down the page, and realized it may have a more serious problem than that.

The page is so long because previous contributors have included pretty much every Immortal, good or bad, who appeared on the series, and given each their own folder. There are also folders for recurring mortal characters. I have no objection to including recurring minor characters, mortal or Immortal, but most of the Immortals appeared in only one episode. Some of them were written as genuinely interesting characters, and one or two took on lives of their own far beyond that single episode, but the rest tend to be pretty flat, with little or no character development. This one was a generic drug kingpin who happened to be Immortal, that one a standard-issue revolutionary who happened to be Immortal — you get the idea. The result is a bunch of character folders with pictures, brief character bios, and half a dozen or fewer trope entries.

So my problem/question is: what to do about this? Do these rather flat characters really deserve to have folders of their own? Should I split the page, or gain space by deleting some of the existing folders? I hesitate to delete them because somebody put a lot of work into them, but a folder for every Immortal in the whole series seems excessive.

"Narn, Centauri, Human, we all do what we do for the same reason: it seemed like a good idea at the time." - Ambassador G'kar, Babylon 5
WarJay77 It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000) from My Writing Cave (Troper Knight) Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000)
#2: Mar 4th 2023 at 11:02:13 AM

Eh, "deserving" I think is the wrong thing to ask. Do the characters have enough tropes to warrant being on the page?

Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
walking-wolf from The Northlands Since: Mar, 2022
#3: Mar 4th 2023 at 2:48:38 PM

OK. How many tropes is "enough"?

"Narn, Centauri, Human, we all do what we do for the same reason: it seemed like a good idea at the time." - Ambassador G'kar, Babylon 5
WarJay77 It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000) from My Writing Cave (Troper Knight) Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000)
#4: Mar 4th 2023 at 3:04:13 PM

It's subjective, but the general rule of thumb is that they should have at least three valid tropes.

One big cause of character page bloat is people putting non-character-tropes up, so I assume a cleanup effort would be better than just removing some characters.

Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
MorganWick (Elder Troper)
#5: Mar 5th 2023 at 4:38:20 AM

This is hardly the only Characters page with lots of little entries for one-off characters with barely any tropes, but... does the series have Recap pages? Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that characters that only ever appear in one episode to be the Villain of the Week could have any applicable character tropes be placed on the recap page instead.

walking-wolf from The Northlands Since: Mar, 2022
#6: Mar 5th 2023 at 5:21:15 AM

No, the series doesn't have Recap pages. And I had the same thought: that many of the VOTW tropes would fit better onto Recap pages. On the other hand, the series has 119 episodes, so a recap seems like a pretty big project. I've only been a contributor for a year and only on existing pages - how much work is it to create something like a set of Recap pages?

"Narn, Centauri, Human, we all do what we do for the same reason: it seemed like a good idea at the time." - Ambassador G'kar, Babylon 5
Tabs Since: Jan, 2001
#7: Mar 5th 2023 at 12:15:55 PM

The simplest solution, I think, is to boot the villains to Highlander The Series Villains.

walking-wolf from The Northlands Since: Mar, 2022
#8: Mar 7th 2023 at 5:40:09 PM

[up]That does seem like the simplest answer. I'll see if I can find the time to do it this weekend.

"Narn, Centauri, Human, we all do what we do for the same reason: it seemed like a good idea at the time." - Ambassador G'kar, Babylon 5
Zuxtron Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel from Node 03 (On A Trope Odyssey)
#9: Mar 7th 2023 at 10:34:38 PM

Instead of removing tropes, I believe the preferred approach would be to split some characters off into subpages. Maybe the main characters, or the one-shot villains.

MorganWick (Elder Troper)
#10: Mar 8th 2023 at 4:42:12 AM

Yeah, the general process with pages that hit the too-long warning (assuming there isn't misuse that needs to be cleaned up) is to split off the largest category.

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