Thread:Janus100/@comment-25412203-20180719024900/@comment-27794543-20180719044507

It's arguable both ways. Personally, I don't think archive footage should be counted toward character appearances since cast members don't even get credited for archive footage appearances.

I've always found "credit only" within the character's appearances 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 flashback" and "archive footage" – both are flashbacks and from character perspective it matters very little vs from cast member perspective it matters a lot (since it influences if they get credited & if they get paid).

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.

So, this is my long way of saying, yeah, we could split "new flashback" and "archive footage" but there's a lot more involved in this subject, so it'd be best to get community input.