Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6986530-20161019225110

Somehow each time this got brought up in the past it was sidetracked by another issue and ended up being inconclusive, so I'm making this thread to discuss this one issue and this issue only so we can get it out of the way.

The writing on character articles is filled with fluff, sometimes minor unfounded assumptions, and details that are ultimately irrelevant to understanding the character and events of the story. A lot of it stems from the fact that in the past it's been the standard to more or less take the "translations" available for novel material and write them verbatim onto character articles with a couple of tweaks. I think that this quality of article writing is flawed in the following ways:

1. It is difficult to nonsensical to read in places, as I've heard from more than one person, and it furthermore reads awkwardly either way.

2. It presents wrong information because the translations being quoted from verbatim are often poorly done, as we've already gone over.

3. It makes assumptions that can prove false or confuse people in its quest to fluff out every detail of a character's life. (Ex. Saying Mariam joined and rose through the ranks of the Silver Sparrow unit when we don't know how she became its general.)

4. It transparently endorses bad translations, when really we should just have the information on there.

5. Having to uphold this standard of article writing has clogged our updating on many articles because no one has the energy to do that when a character has done a lot in a story.

I see this as a big problem, it has been a big problem for eons, and I am proposing a change in article writing to fix it. I am proposing we fix the writing quality, take out details that are completely unnecessary to understand the story and character (the old example of "Gallerian stretched his legs after reading," for example,) and reword things to be more concise, not just reword things so it doesn't look like they were copy-pasted from a summary.

I want to make something clear. My solution to this is NOT blanketly summarizing the information. It is NOT making the articles bare bones. It is purely to cut down on fluff, to rephrase information to be more concise, and to cut down on unfounded assumptions the wiki tends to make that aren't worth the risk of being wrong or causing confusion in the fandom. To demonstrate this once more, here is an example article for Gallerian Marlon that was given this writing treatment. Please compare it with the existing article for Gallerian Marlon, make note of what it removes and what it keeps, and make note of how it has rewritten things. It is a way of fixing the phrasing from bad translations, which are near verbatim on the article, without having to wait for quality translations of all the series (I don't want to endorse translations this way anyway, and really at that point, why quote them verbatim on the page if they're available?)

Now I want to make clear, before anyone comments, that this thread is NOT about cutting down on length (even if it will be a small side effect.) It is NOT about whether or not we add tabs, or take any other measures to improve the pages. Those are separate discussions and will have no impact on this one, and vice versa. So do not bring them up, please. This is all about making the articles more readable.

On a slightly separate but related note, I also want to cut down on us making assumptions for the sake of fluff, period. We're not going to look at a character who yells at random cheese in one instance of insanity, and then write in their personality section "They hated cheese and would yell at it when stressed," to use a nonexistent example. We're not going to see one person from one country act one way, and then assert that everyone in the country acted that way, to use a vague existing example. It's poor form and its clearly to pad out pages. I also want to revise quotes because I've had it pointed out a lot of them are actually wrong and are not quotes of the source material--I assume no one has an issue with that, though.

All that said, does anybody have serious objections to our doing this, or questions about what we're doing? And if you do, I'd also appreciate a suggestion on how we fix the writing quality instead of just objecting. It is my very strong opinion that we do not need nor should we want sentence-by-sentence breakdowns of everything on any article. No serious objections after two weeks of this posting will be considered approval. Over ten approvals with no serious objections will also be considered approval.

I bring this up because my one big act as admin is probably going to be making the wiki policy page so we can spell out what we expect of editors without them having to constantly consult an admin, and this will play a factor into that. 