Character Specific Pages - misuse, and potential updated guidance

RE: #23 I suppose we could lower it slightly, but I feel that 100K is too low. I think that would just lead to people splitting off characters like they are now, with no consideration for the original page's healthiness post-split. Maybe 175K, or 200K if we were going to lower it at all.

To use an example, Dragon Age: Inquisition – Companions and Advisors is 114K characters ATM. Blackwall is 49K characters, Dorian is 47K, and Josephine is 18K. The way the character pages are currently split (all individuals), there's no group for Blackwall or Dorian to be moved to, and they don't have a further comonality to put them on a new page together, so if they were both split to their own pages, not only is the main page now only 18K characters, but the only character on the page is Josephine, so the page name is now misleading. TBH the whole series' character sheet needs to be reworked but I'll save that for after this is hammered out.

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RE: #24 If we go by the 250K floor, then those four characters would stay together on one page since 40K x4 = 160K which would be well below the floor.

E:

Edited by Hello83433 on Feb 21st 2024 at 7:41:08 AM

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

Good thing this guide makes it easier.

Absolute Rainbow

There's also the issue that if we decide to change the floor down the line, we'd have to adjust every existing page to be consistent with that new guideline. And I'm sure that would confuse the hell out of tropers and visitors if there were multiple occurrences after our initial decisions right here.

Should we go lower than 250k, I'd argue for maybe 150k as the absolute minimum alternative.

Edited by IkeaHan on Feb 21st 2024 at 8:06:29 AM

Character Specific Page cleanup

Does anyone happen to have an average for site-wide page lengths? Is that even a thing that exists? I'm suggesting 100K because most pages never get anywhere near that. Any page that high up is going to have higher traffic and is going to be more cause for concern anyways. A higher byte count isn't going to deter people from making CSP's on the bigger pages, but it will hurt formatting on the smaller pages. I can see new tropers misinterpreting the rule very easily.

I just went to the new edits character selection and grabbed a random 5 pages as a sample

• Metallic Rouge (7,561)
• League of Legends: G-H (154,010)
• Granblue Fantasy Primal Beasts (211,592)
• The Venture Bros. — Others (140,102)
• Bridgerton (136,496)

Just from that I've got an average page byte count of 129,952.2. So a good estimate would be maybe 100K to 150K?

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

150k sounds like a good compromise to me.

Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup thread

This might help with choosing the byte threshold: say you have a page, and there's no character folder on it that reaches 40k bytes. How long would that page have to be before you'd decide to split it?

The answer to that question would likely be the answer to what our threshold should be.

That's why I disagree with having our threshold be as small as 100k bytes. If we split off singular characters at 40k bytes from those pages, then what would the argument be against splitting off groups that have 40k from 100k pages too?

Well generally once you start splitting off the page you'd split off the entire page and turn the base page into an index. If the procedure is as followed then it shouldn't really matter would the minimum is, although setting a minimum prevents issues.

• a) Page meets minimum required bytes
• b) Page is split off into sub-pages
• c) Individual character meets the minimum byte requirement on a sub-page
• d) Individual character is cleaned up with all tropes correct and up to date
• e) Character-Specific page is created. As long as the process flows from a -> e then we should be good.

I was thinking about it and there should still be a procedure in place for a too long page notifier, probably the original procedure should be kept for that, and a lower byte minimum should be kept for the basic procedure. I would say splits would happen after hitting the byte minimum or a certain amount of folders/characters.

As an example of a page to be looked at, take Characters.Luke Cage, which is at 52,016 bytes. It has three categories for characters, Title Character, Allies, and Enemies. Now it could either be split based on ease of use and navigation, splitting the page into three separate pages and indexed on the main page, or it could hit the byte minimum and need to be split up.

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

I come back to the point that this exercise is to avoid Overly Long pages, so reducing a sensible 250k (a figure chosen as it’s around where the OLP warning/suggestion banner can start to kick in for some pages) to anything lower is arbitrary. If there’s no need to split a healthy page, why do it?

Far too many pages have more redirects than actual characters — lending a ‘ghost town’ feel to the page — for no real reason other than tropers have calved off any character that’s 40k bytes.

Approaching this from a technical aspect is the cleanest, most objective route for the site as a whole.

Edited by lexii on Feb 22nd 2024 at 10:23:57 AM

Absolute Rainbow

general to the revised policy.

can be phrased more intuitively:

• A Character-Specific Page cannot be split off if the parent Characters/ page would have less than 6,000 words/40,000 written characters (with spaces) by doing so.

I don't quite get why we have 6000 words as a requirement though, it's going to be quite bothersome to calculate and is redudant.

200-250k is good to me, but I was thinking on more specifically "when there's a red banner" threshold, which is a direct evedience that something requires splitting and is different for every page.

Don't think publicity is an issue. Or rather it's an issue for splitters, which I can't say I'm one of. If a comic book CSP is popular, we can do what we always do in clenaups and redirect to another page.

Multimedia CSP like Marvel Comics: Cyclops do pose a question, but here's how I see it. It's indexed at three Characters/ indexes, but can logically be split from only X-Men. In case if Marvel vs. Capcom and Marvel Universe were below 40k, they can still index a CSP since they weren't the pages that got split. If individual CSP don't feel like hosting work-specific tropes, each work can have individual character profiles and link to main one as reference like we do with many versions of The Joker.

Now, that's regarding CSP. But the conversarion, OP including, also talks about splitting character lists into groups, which while is relevant in ways of "don't make CSP if you can move multiple characrers first", is not really about CSP guidelines by itself. If a Characters/ page has like 20 characters from The Good Kingdom and 20 characters from The Empire, as with another pre-exsiting policy, if there's Discussion that a split is more convenient, it can take page size into an account but doesn't have to, it's up to consensus.

Edited by Amonimus on Feb 22nd 2024 at 11:38:43 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

6000 words is roughly equivalent to 40,000 bytes. It was put there as measurement helper when the first guidelines were made, and long before a character count display was added to all pages

Character Specific Page cleanup

I mean, since the character count is visible, why not go by character count only?

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I don't disagree

Character Specific Page cleanup

For the sake of clarification, is the majority in favor of 250k as an upper limit or not? Because otherwise it may be best to negotiate a number that folks feel is the best compromise.

Character Specific Page cleanup

I’m in favour, and we seem to have agreement on the new policy from almost everyone.

I agree with 250K as an upper limit, but as I’ve said before not many pages ever reach that point.

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

Thank you I think we now have general agreement?

Edited by lexii on Feb 22nd 2024 at 3:08:34 PM

You got my word too. Should I holler?

This is Idol Tap. (My Troper Wall)

In agreement with 250k as the upper limit. If there's a proposition to split a page that's less than that upper limit, we can always discuss if an exception should be made or not.

Well I still think 150K should be the lower limit. 150K minimum and 250K maximum

It's gonna be fun on the bun!

Oh, so you're proposing a range rather than an absolute number

Character Specific Page cleanup

I’m not sure I understand why this would be beneficial? As essentially tropers would just go with the lower threshold (150k) — which in terms of splitting a page is technically unnecessary.

Edited by lexii on Feb 22nd 2024 at 5:03:25 PM

Yeah I'm with lexi there. From a brand new troper perspective, I think that would make the pipeline feel more confusing.

Edited by IkeaHan on Feb 22nd 2024 at 9:05:07 AM

Character Specific Page cleanup

thanks mate - my point exactly. Tropers will just pick the lower amount, or be confused with what’s right. I feel we should be concise, with a site-wide, definitive rule.

Edited by lexii on Feb 22nd 2024 at 5:08:36 PM

Ok you’re probably right about a range being confusing, but I still don’t get why we’re waiting until a too long warning to appear. I think I’ve seen maybe 5-10 in my who time on the site.

It's gonna be fun on the bun!