Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help.
It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread
for ongoing cleanup projects.
I agree with trimming the descriptions.
We are not the Genshin Impact wiki nor are we the Honkai: Star Rail wiki. Extensive descriptions on how every character works, levels up, their attacks, etc., are unnecessary. We don't need to list their birthday, rarity, zodiac sign, favorite food, etc. It's all information that unnecessarily bloats the page and inflates the byte count. If there is a trope relevant to that information then it can go in the example explanation for the trope.
I think descriptions should be limited to one, maybe two short paragraphs. Enough to summarize the character's basic premise. We already have consensus as well to trim them, so it's best to just inform these tropers a decision has already been reached.
CSP Cleanup Thread | All that I ask for ... is diamonds and dance floors
I also agree that having lengthy paragraphs about how a character is played (and what happens when they're upgraded) in the character descriptions are unnecessary, as it would likely run afoul of entering Walkthrough Mode and the moves can be described in trope examples anyway.
Edited by Excessive-Menace THE GOLDEN AGE WILL RETURN AGAIN!
To just show what my idea of a clean up trim would be, I took the description from a random character (Dan Heng)
A quiet young man who serves as the guard for the Astral Express. Although often quiet and brooding, Dan Heng loves his way around a book and his skills with a spear are virtually peerless. His past is shrouded in mystery and is often off-limits for discussion, but to him his demons are something to be feared.
Dan Heng is a swift attacker that focuses on dealing high single-target damage, with ways to speed himself up and slow enemies down, as well as empower his strikes. Using his Skill, Cloudlancer Art: Torrent, he can inflict Slow (penalty to Speed Stat) on his target for 2 turns if the attack deals a critical hit, and his Ultimate, Ethereal Dream, is him trapping his foe in a painting-like landscape as he skewers them, which deals extra damage if his target is Slowed. In addition, his Talent, Superiority of Reach, allows his next attack to bypass a fraction of his target's Wind Resistance after receiving any kind of buff from his allies once every 2 turns, while his Technique, Splitting Spearhead, boosts his Attack stat for the first three turns of the next battle.
Dan Heng will automatically be obtained for free during the Trailblaze Mission "Eye of the Storm". His Eidolons can be obtained from any banner, or by purchasing him from the store's Starlight Exchange when available.
For his true form, see Imbibitor Lunae on the Xianzhou Luofu section.
How to Create a Character Page states that a short summary is fine. If someone wants all the stats and ability information for their favorite character, they can go to that game's wiki. Also, there should never be spoilers above the example line for any character.
Edited by Hello83433 CSP Cleanup Thread | All that I ask for ... is diamonds and dance floors
How I see things - gameplay information is generally not relevant to TV Tropes. Character summaries should be about the character as a character, not an in-game tool.
LP Deprecation Cleanup | Ask me about SMP Live
IMO gameplay information is relevant to TV Tropes, since gameplay and how players interact with a game has tropes; when the source material is a game, not describing the gist of what a Player Character can do ignores the most central part of the source material, ie. the game part of the video game.
Your trimmed description could stand to at minimum quickly summarize how Heng plays: "Dan Heng is a swift attacker that focuses on dealing high single-target damage, with ways to speed himself up and slow enemies down, as well as empower his strikes."
The issue only happens when the description is indigestible, nonsense to non-fans, or engaging in Walkthrough Mode. For this reason I'd excise everything except that summary above. Most of this stuff is illegible to me, as an outsider to the game ("what are Talents and Techniques?", "what does it mean to have a 'penalty to Speed stat'?", "what is a turn in this game's context?"). If it can't be described in a simple way that provides all relevant context to someone unfamilliar to the work, it's not worth mentioning to me.
Well, it may be relevant to tropes, but not necessarily relevant to the character as a character. Sometimes it is — it may reflect their personality or background or anything like that. However, in other cases it's all just game balance and not actual storytelling.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
I will say I've seen similar ability descriptions in all sorts of different multi-character games. Last I checked, the character pages for Overwatch and League of Legends also had lengthy ability explanations.
Since this issue likely permeates plenty of video game Characters pages, we might need to make a cleanup thread about trimming the descriptions to remove lengthy gameplay descriptions.
THE GOLDEN AGE WILL RETURN AGAIN!
Some edits
were just made to Characters.Warhammer 40000 Sororitas that seem to fall into the same issue of being too gameplay-focused.
A cleanup thread has been created for this issue.
There's an issue brought up in cleanup thread that the project went "further" than what the OP intended (and they've voiced that in said thread too)
I.e cleaning up "biodata" in character description when this query didn't talk about it
So I brought it here to ask: what should we do? Some people there suggested we bring it to Wiki Talk but I don't know how I should write a new thread (maybe mr. ~Dante Vin is better at it than me?)
Just any summary can go with new Wiki Talk thread, as far as people know what the discussion was and what's the question.
Edited by Amonimus TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
I believe the first thing that should've branched off from this ATT is a discussion on creating a detailed guideline page about character descriptions if it didn't exist yet... Perhaps a new administrivia page like What Should Be In A Character Description should've been the primary focus. Or perhaps the first thing the clean-up thread should've done is to finalize the "guidelines" on the pinned comment.
But unfortunately, the How to Create a Character Page was updated, and a clean-up thread was created. More problems only came about because the clean-up was following some administrivia page update that's still too vague... and as a result, a lot of text was deleted, and tropers are now indeed arguing on what should or should not be kept in character descriptions.
I'm not sure where should suggestions regarding Administrivia pages be placed. There are some inconsistencies that happened behind the scenes if you dig them up.
- ~Hello83433 suggested the update to the How to Create a Character Page on the Outdated Administrivia Pages thread, and it was approved. The problem is that a decision like this should've been more visible, or like what I said, more tropers should've been informed that an Administrivia page update was going to happen.
- ~WarJay77 suggested that what counts as valid info should be hashed out at Wiki Talk, instead of slowing the "Cleaning Up Lengthy Character Descriptions" thread by arguing over a rule that is admittedly rather broad and nebulous.
- But in the first place, read what happened on this comment. ~Mummy Ga Ga asked if voice actor info is fine to keep, ~Hello83433 said it's fine... But where is it decided that it's fine? If WarJay77 said that "what counts as valid info should be hashed out at Wiki Talk", then why was it okay for Hello83433 to immediately decide that something is valid info, and on the "Cleaning Up Lengthy Character Descriptions" instead? On the clean-up thread itself, several tropers were raising concerns on what other kinds of info should be in character descriptions, just in the same vein as MummyGaGa asking the clean-up thread if voice actor info is okay. It's inconsistent with WarJay77's suggestion that we take discussions like these somewhere else.
One of the best case scenarios is that ~Hello83433 should've been replying with several tropers' concerns with the clean-up effort since the second page of that clean-up thread. (From that point, there's a debate between "deleting all of the biodata" info" versus "deleting some of the biodata info"). It does give off the impression that they're the only troper who has to decide "guidelines".
At this point, it should be clear that the creation of the Cleaning Up Lengthy Character Descriptions project and the update on How to Create a Character Page was a hasty act. ~Amonimus said it best: "Then this as a cleanup should pause until a Wiki Talk decides what to do with this part of How to Create a Character Page"
I just can't believe that one ATT query I made to ask for clarifications (and something that would finally end the month-long "character descriptions" kerfuffle on ''Honkai Star Rail'' immediately created more issues that are now going to affect a ton of character pages... just because it was decided that all "biodata" info should be deleted, when I never even brought it up here initially.
Felt like I have to ask this question hoping for those who are way more familiar with how this wiki works to give their thoughts as well. Wall of text warning though, as this does not involve only one video game. But a TL;DR is that some Gacha Games on this wiki have long character descriptions because they're also including gameplay information and other fluff, while there's a debate on whether one game should copy another similar game's way of handling descriptions. Who knows if the descriptions run the risk of going into Walkthrough Mode? Just how much "fluff" can really be added there?
For those who are not familiar with the above two games, the older and longer way of writing descriptions can still be seen on Characters.Genshin Impact Fischl, divided into paragraphs or parts:
Note that the character descriptions for Star Rail used to have simple descriptions, yet there are tropers who massively expanded them to focus on their gameplay. The discussion on the descriptions started a month ago
... Several tropers (including myself) have already weighed in our thoughts on why trimming was necessary, though the discussion was mostly between tropers zero5889 and Ner0014re N, with the latter being the one who mostly did the trimming after getting plenty of responses from those who agree.
Personally, I agreed trimming specifically the "fluff" part of the third paragraph
, stating fluff doesn't really make sense depending on the character... as if other tropers were trying to link gameplay upgrades/passives and lore when they can be misinterpreted in another way, or are not exactly Gameplay and Story Integration at all. Welt's old character description in Characters.Honkai Star Rail Astral Express used to have such kind of fluff that don't really make sense if you're into the lore of the character.
The newer and shorter way of writing descriptions can now be seen on Characters.Honkai Star Rail Astral Express. Generally, there's no longer a paragraph talking about "character progression systems".
For what it's worth though, games like Arknights and Honkai Impact 3rd were written with concise/very simple character descriptions for years now (and tropers who are/were very active on maintaining them kept it that way), and yet troper zero5889 insisted that Honkai Impact 3rd needs some structuring on character pages, and suggested
that "detailed descriptions" for gachas like Arknights are long overdue.
But should it be the case? Are detailed character descriptions for Gacha Games really necessary?
If it would seem like troper zero5889 is planning to restructure character pages or rewrite descriptions on Gacha Games, they did confirm
they are going to give the character pages of Honkai Impact 3rd a look in the future. zero5889 also went to the Arknights forum
to suggest a rearranging of Arknights character pages to group them by "subclass" instead of general class, but several tropers objected and say it would just be overcomplicating things.
Recently on the Discussion tab
for Star Rail, there's another troper who disagreed on the trimming effort of some ability descriptions in Star Rail (particularly the removal of the "character progression systems" paragraph), like a week or so after the actual trimming edits were being done... suggesting the character descriptions of Genshin and Star Rail should still have a similar way of writing.
The trimming effort went through because many tropers agreed with it (like a majority vote, or so), but there are still those few who disagree (likely unware that a month-long discussion already happened).
Edited by DanteVin