Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6986530-20141227001326

Now that we've received the Daughter of Evil manga and all those pretty pictures that confirm new character articles, I wanted to discuss an issue that several users have brought up in the past regarding the minor characters that have yet to receive their own articles.

The problem being the fact that they are not, by any definition on this wiki, minor characters. Sections like Muzuri Conchita, Ein Anchor, and Kaidor Blankenheim span across the minor character list as huge walls of text, and are only growing as we get more and more info. However, despite this wealth of information, they remain the eyesores they are on minor character pages because of the rule that if there's no image there can be no article. I've been told that's a policy from Wikia that was generally applied to restrict the amount of articles in a given wiki, and so already I don’t see it as a very necessary distinction to adhere to in our case, where we get several important yet unadvertised characters per novel.

I think that for our purposes we should relax this rule and give deserving characters their own article, image or no image. For the infoboxes on these articles, we already have made a placeholder image for media articles without any pictures, like in the case of the emailed short stories. For characters without images we can do the same, and customize a standard “no image available” picture or just use the question marks we use generally when we don't have a character's face in character lists.

If no one likes just using a question mark, I have two other proposals for the “no image available placeholder” image—one is a silhouetted character (in this case, Arte and Pollo as a kind of wiki in-joke) set behind the lettering, and another is a gear set behind it to signify it’s an important character (“one of the gears”) while there’s no face to it. If anyone else would like to craft their own placeholder image, they’re free to do so.

I can think of a few objections to this proposal—one in particular is that it would cause much more discussion on who is worthy of a character article and who isn’t, as well as all the effort it will take to make up new articles for whoever is worthy. To that, I offer that for now that we at least consider an image-less character worthy for a page if they have over 70 lines of information in their section and a name (I believe for now that the name prerequisite is a separate issue that can be discussed in another thread.)

This means, of course, that for now a character has to be extra important to get an article if they don’t have an image. By that criteria, current candidates to receive a page are:

• Muzuri Conchita

•Puerick Rogzé

• Kaidor Blankenheim

• Ein Anchor

• Seventh Magician

Making articles for these few characters would (very arguably) not take too much extra effort as the lengthiest section, history, would be already written as a result of our policy to put the same detail in Minor Characters’ sections as we do on character articles. I’ll also point out that, as we are already making new character articles, we may as well add these others and take care of it all at once, removing the most glaring examples of "not minor on a minor character list" and then discussing lower criteria over time.

Another objection I can see to this plan is that in a minor character section we can describe what the character looks like and not have it too out of place, whereas in a character article we already removed "Appearance" as a section and let the picture do the talking. I'd say the best option for that is to put all physical descriptors in trivia, so it isn't lost in the history section for curious fans. Then, of course, we have hair and eye color noted in the infobox if available.

I have made an example page for Kaidor Blankenheim to give people a general idea of how they would look, using my silhouetted character placeholder.

tdlr; Some "minor characters" are a scrolling abomination on that list, and not letting them have an article because they've no image is arbitrary and, what's worse, for some of them it’s unlikely to be resolved ever. Sopleaseacceptmyproposal. 