Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-27794543-20180719073203

Below, I'm mostly discussing the appearances templates on character pages (e.g. Finn Collins) and the tables on Character Appearances page. However, also keep in mind other places with appearance infomation, which include character infobox, episode & season cast section, cast pages, etc.

Looking at the appearances templates on character pages, I've always found "credit only" to be odd. The character wasn't credited, the actor/actress was. From character perspective, it's "appeared" (in present, past, hallucination, etc), "mentioned", or "absent". From cast perspective, it's two factors: 1) "appeared", "archive footage", "absent" and 2) "credited" or "uncredited".

But we combine both perspectives into a single table. So we generally ignore credit except in the very specific case of actor/actress being credited in an episode where character neither appears nor is mentioned. All the other situations of credit or no credit, we generally ignore. I.e. we do not differentiate between if cast member was credited when character was mentioned, so why do we differentiate when character is absent? We also don't differentiate between "new footage flashback" (including normal flashbacks like Pike teaching the delinquents, old videos like Chris's suicide, Flame memories like Becca's death, etc) and "archive footage" – both are flashbacks and from character perspective it's questionable if it matters vs from cast member perspective it matters a lot (since it influences if they get credited & if they get paid). Personally, I don't think archive footage should be counted toward character appearances since we already counted that footage as part of a previous episode.

Another odd group are dead characters. On Character Appearances page we have a separate label for cases where corpse appears but character died in a previous episode. We also group City of Light appearances with hallucination since a digital recreation is not equivalent to a live person. But on character pages, this all gets grouped into "appears" label.

We can always argue that we can split appearance labels into more distinct labels, but 1) when is too many, 2) what is the precedence, and 3) how can we implement the change with least disturbance to the wiki.


 * 1) Possible values: appears, corpse, City of Light, hallucination, [new footage] flashback, archive footage, mentioned, absent. If we wanted, we could also split the different types of flashbacks. Also, each of those values could have a secondary value of credited or not.
 * 2) Precedence: since only one label is shown on the table on character pages (on Character Appearances, only one color is selected per character per episode), that means there has to be an order of precedence. If character appeared as corpse & hallucination in a single episode, which label gets used?
 * 3) Implement: while changes to Character Appearances page could be implemented without too much hassle (though each character, each episode would have to be re-reviewed), changing the appearances templates would affect hundreds of pages. (Any volunteers?) Thus any implementation would have to be done in a way that doesn't break current pages, allowing indefinite time to update all the old usages.

A few other thoughts:
 * For appearances templates, our current default value is "absent" which confuses new wiki readers (and cause regular comment question of how do we know character x doesn't appear in future episode y). Other wikis have default value be "TBD". This however requires that after each episode airs that all pages be edited (vs. now, since "absent" is default, those pages don't have to be edited). A couple other options 1) have default for unaired episodes be TBD and for aired episodes be absent (though this may confuse readers regarding dead characters) or 2) keep default as absent but hide unaired episodes from table until episode airs.
 * Another option for appearances templates is not to list all episodes but only the relevant ones (e.g. w:c:lucifer:John Decker). For characters appearing in majority of episodes, list full table which notes absences, but for characters who are mostly absent just list the episodes they're not.
 * Currently "Cast" redirects to "Character Appearances". The page lists all characters who've appeared in 3+ episodes. However it counts all appearances under primary portrayer. Several characters have a younger version (Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia, Wells, Ethan, Madi, etc) and primary portrayer may not have appeared in all episodes that are being counted towards them. Also some cast members portray multiple characters (e.g. Erica Cerra and Paul Lazenby) and they're either excluded from the list of don't have a total count. I think "Character Appearances" should stay as character appearances, but I think we should consider doing something separate for cast.

So, thoughts, ideas, opinions? 