Character Specific Pages - misuse, and potential updated guidance

Hi all,
Character-Specific Pages have seen multiple examples of misuse over the past months, with tropers immediately using the 40k byte count (or sometimes less) threshold as a greenlight to split off characters who meet that count into their own pages without checking all other criteria (e.g. is the page Overly Long, and most importantly have other options been tried first, like splitting the page into smaller groups etc — both of which form part of the current existing guidelines). This has led to a plethora of rogue pages being launched, which need to be merged back and is time-consuming.

To firm things up, the working group at Cleanup Thread: Character Specific Pages have worked up new proposed wording to sit on the CSP landing page to help with compliance, and to ensure a smoother, less fragmented user-experience. Here is the newly worded guidance:

Here are the steps that should be assessed when considering splitting character pages:

• If the page has reached past or is close to reaching 250,000 written characters (this can be seen on the bottom left of the edit page in green), permission is given to split. If not, the page isn't in danger of being overly-long and no split is needed.
  Example: The Character Page for Alice Vs. Bob is over 250k written characters; this page should be split into smaller pages. If not, take no action.

• If the page has tipped over the 250k written characters mark, the first goal should be to split the page into smaller sections (i.e. sorting characters alphabetically, by group, or suchlike)
  Example: Several character folders fall under the group "Team Alice" and form the biggest portion of the page. A new page can be made called "Alice Vs. Bob: Team Alice" where these folders will a be moved.

• If Step 2 has been attempted, and there are no other practical solutions (e.g. in a situation where an already-split page also inflates beyond the 250k byte count) then splitting out a high-byte-count character (40k bytes+) into a CSP is the solution.
  Example: Team Alice's page has reached the 250k count. Alice's folder is the biggest one on the page, and it meets the other qualifiers for a CSP as seen below. A new page can be made called "Alice Vs. Bob: Alice" where this folder will go.
  
  

Requirements for a Character-Specific Page; these must be followed to create a new page:

The steps for splitting and creating character pages (as written above) must first be followed.

• The character's page is cleaned up beforehand, fixing any Zero Context Examples, removing outdated/misused tropes, and making sure all tropes listed fall under Characters and its related indexes (exceptions can be discussed).
• The page is at least 6,000 words/40,000 written characters (with spaces). Here is a byte counter. Once a new Character-Specific Page has been created, be sure to add its byte count to this page.
• The page it's split off from should reach the same minimum count.
  
  

Please let us know your thoughts — we're hoping this makes the guidance less of a 'pick and choose' menu, and more of a step-by-step sense-check before taking action.
Lex.

Edited by lexii on Feb 21st 2024 at 5:50:37 PM

I am cool with the changed guidelines.

Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup thread

(Mod hat off) sounds good to me!

The changed guidelines are good.

"Kenny isn't evil, he just did a little too much trolling. :p" | He/Him

I missed all the discussion in the CSP thread but I completely agree with the changes.

CSP Cleanup Thread | All that I ask for ... is diamonds and dance floors

So that's six in favor (myself included)? If anyone has any lingering thoughts or concerns, we're happy to discuss.

Edited by IkeaHan on Feb 21st 2024 at 11:49:04 AM

Character Specific Page cleanup

Thanks everyone for the positive reaction so far!

Good with me. I’ve definitely felt that this has become a recurring issue lately, and I suspect there’s somewhat of a badge-of-honor culture occurring.

back lol

There's always been one; people made a page for any character they thought "deserved" it before these rules were in place, and they still obsessively try to do it now.

I agree with these guidelines.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

to these guidelines.

These guidelines are fine by me.

to the guidelines

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

11 tropers weighing in, very nice.

Character Specific Page cleanup

I'm also in favor of the new guidelines.

I’m going to be a dissenter and say these rules are too strict, will remove around 90% off all pages that met the requirements, and punish people from making them and scare off new people from participating. A lot of people will be suspended and possibly banned over these changes and I don’t like how uncaring people were about it.

I also don’t think that multi-page franchises have been taken into account. There are multiples like Star Wars, DC Comics, The MCU, Marvel Comics, and others that have characters that have appearances in multiple works, not all of them in the same place. For an example look at X-Men. They have CSP’s for characters that span not only the X-Men franchise but the entire Marvel Universe, with hundreds of in-site links pointed at them. A lot of them also have their own solo comics, so can’t be easily placed in one section.

I would like these points addressed before I feel comfortable implementing proposed changes, because as far as I can tell the proposal is as following:

Until reaching 250K, the page is only allowed to be formatted like so

Protagonists

Supporting Characters

Antagonisits

And until it hits 250K you are even allowed to turn the page into an index like so

Characters

• Protagonists
• Supporting Cast
• Antagonists

And even if most page traffic is for one character who has reached 40K it can’t be split off.

Character Page

• Popular character (40k)
• Other character (10K)
• Other characters (400)
• Other character (900)

I am open to more formal procedure and stricter prerequisites in the launching of pages, but this seems too strict to me. I am willing to be convinced that this is the right way to go but I feel like this is too far too fast.

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

Hey - thank you for your input.

To clarify, these rules are currently already broadly in place, we are just refining the wording so tropers follow the steps correctly. The CSP exercise began as one option to mitigate Overly Long pages (it's not a vanity exercise for “deserving” characters), and tropers are currently advised that ALL alternatives should be tried first, including splitting pages into smaller indexes. The current CSP landing page notes "And most importantly, other options must have been tried first, like splitting pages into further groups". This is being ignored in favour of simply following the 40k byte benchmark alone. We see it all the time on the Project page. In your example above, that hypothetical 40k character you identify should in no way warrant being split off from their fellow characters, when the total page is only 50k-ish bytes. In all cases, the page split process should take place before a CSP is considered — we're just reinforcing existing policy with a sense-check guide.

And I can’t speak for the mods, but the notion this will lead to upset and banishment is perhaps a little strong — the idea is just to help tropers follow steps so it’s very clear whether a CSP is warranted or not. I don’t imagine it’ll increase bans, as tropers are already launching roguely anyway (ignoring the rules, as I mentioned above) and I haven’t seen a ban so far for that offence - it just leads to advice and a re-merge on our part. 

Edited by lexii on Feb 21st 2024 at 11:28:38 AM

I’m not completely happy with the "Must try other options first" prerequisite but I’ll table my disagreement on that. I have two CSP’s on hold because of page limits atm, if I can get a resonable answer I’ll change my vote to yes.

I have Marvel Comics: Colossus ready to go at over 42K atm and growing with the more tropes I find, since I’m combing through the X-Men related tropes. The page he is currently on is X-Men: '70s Members which has only 3 characters with tropes, with the rest being redirects. Now the page had ComicBook.Colossus redirecting to it with over 1400 inbounds and 180 internal links. Colossus will dwarf the other two characters in size, and I can’t split the page any further. Colossus also has solo comics named after him, and he is a character with over 50 years of history and fandom behind him.

Now that page will never reach 250K, at least not for 5-10 years if ever, so I can’t do anything. How am I supposed to deal with characters years old? What should it be suggested I do?

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

The “must try other options” is a current house rule that’s been in place since CSP guidelines launched and is not disagreeable, I’m afraid.

If the page Colossus is currently housed on is not Overly Long (typically a min of 250k bytes +), there is no technical reason to move him (it’s a slight 69k bytes) — I’d actually propose some of his fellow X-Men are merged back to join him, as a page of multiple redirects isn’t a great user-experience. His fame and historic status as a character do not play into this exercise. That’s what some of us above have noted about the (incorrect) emphasis placed on “deserving” characters.

Edited by lexii on Feb 21st 2024 at 11:53:12 AM

Ok ignore fame and history, what about the 100s of inbound links, thousands of inbound traffic, the fact that Colossus has headlined his own self-named titles, and has appeared in titles from Spider-Man to the Avengers, making him not just an X-Men character

I’m pretty sure Characters.Marvel Universe has some of the most CSP’s and getting rid of them will completely kneecap my over 4 years efforts to reformat the entire Marvel Universe section to be in line with other major franchises like the MCU or DCEU.

For 4 years I’ve been working on fixing the pages listed at Gigan Kills the Marvel Universe, Tropers, Assemble!, and Remaking the Comic Book Universe to either stand on their own at the 40k minimum or put them in the proper locations, as pages that were formatted as works pages were merged back into character folders and subsequently didn’t fit the formatting, so I have been slowly fixing them

This new proposition will destroy all my efforts with is why I’ve been trying to find another way forward.

Edited by GateStarX on Feb 21st 2024 at 4:17:12 AM

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

These issues seem quite particular to your own troping and I have huge empathy, as it sounds like you’ve worked very hard (I have my own favourite works to reassess) but it sounds like the rules that are clearly in place may not have been followed in the past. We can advise and help at the CSP discussion page, to which I think you’ve dropped by before?

Edited by lexii on Feb 21st 2024 at 12:29:44 PM

I don't know if I entirely disagree on the point brought up on legacy characters or tropes pertaining to a character across a franchise, as it would consolidate repeat tropes examples (say Robocop for example has Action Hero listed on every incarnation when it could be in a shared trope folder instead).

Though I think that should be in conjunction with the rule changes we're discussing because it would mean pulling material from multiple pages, many of which might be subpages of individual works, and could still run into issues where people try to push them out the moment the minimum size is reached which just feeds into the overall issue of CSP being prematurely made on the fly.

Edited by IkeaHan on Feb 21st 2024 at 4:35:07 AM

Character Specific Page cleanup

Ok disregarding all of my issue pertaining to impacts on my personal troping and projects, impartially I have a couple issues

• The byte minimum. Only the extremely popular works get pages that get to that point. I would suggest decreasing the limit to maybe 100K?
• Find a way to automate the process, because right now it feels like Image Pickin-lite. Not everyone is going to check in all the time to ask but as long as they follow the rules going forward they shouldn't have to. So make it airtight before updating the procedure.

Those are my only two impartial issues, other than that I agree with it in theory going forward.

Like I said before there are concerns about large multimedia franchise and character pages with more info than just tropes i.e. Marvel Comics: Cyclops, which has a list of adaptions and publication history for the character, but those are my impartial issues.

Edited by GateStarX on Feb 21st 2024 at 4:45:02 AM

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

How do folks feel about the current number we have for "overly long"? (250k)

Character Specific Page cleanup

I have a hypothetical question, what about say for example a group of four characters who are all each over the 40k limit and all four could be split into their own pages but don’t or can’t reach the 250k number, should they be split or should they be kept together instead?

Edited by Will426 on Feb 21st 2024 at 6:57:18 AM

With the current 250k limit we have, they'd ideally be kept together.

Character Specific Page cleanup