BattleTechWiki talk:Project Characters

I've noticed that the fictional people aren't currently categorized as "PeopleFictional", but rather just as "People'. It appears that the real people (Weisman, Keith, et al) are being categorized as "PeopleReal". Do we want to migrate all of the "People" to "PeopleFictional"? If so, I'll do that shortly. Bdevoe 12:01, 19 September 2007 (CDT)

This has already been discussed, albeit briefly, at BattleTechWiki:Administrators#Category:People. Scaletail 15:43, 19 September 2007 (CDT)

We should probably change the Project to be "People" and not "PeopleFictional" then. Bdevoe 16:54, 19 September 2007 (CDT)

People & Minor Characters

I didn't think to bring this up here until after I had started it, but I've created a category called Minor Characters, defined as those who have supporting or lesser roles in the BattleTech universe. I've linked to it (and back again) in the People category.

Question: might this be a good time to re-name the People Category to "Major Characters"? --Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 13:54, 15 August 2008 (CDT)

I created lists instead of leaving individual articles intact. Do you want to reopen the discussion of how to handle minor characters, Revanche, so that we have one, uniform way of handling them; or are you seeing them as a little more than one-line blurbs, but not quite as much as we might expect for a full article? --Scaletail 10:31, 16 August 2008 (CDT)

I'm not ready to take a stand on what (officially) defines a Major or Minor Character. As Justice Potter famously stated about obscenities: "...I know it when I see it...," and generally I read what we have about a person and decide if they were a one-shot (or similar) character, that will probably not recur or is probably not well known by either BT fans nor other in-universe fans. The way I envision it is: if they make a movie about the story that concerns this character, would the actor get any billing on the movie poster? As far as stub articles go: no, that doesn't figure into my reasoning. If someone started a stub-article on Victor Steiner-Davion, Stefan Amaris or even Natasha Kerensky, I'd still recognize that they are major characters (with currently minor articles).

Scaletail, I vaguely recall a discussion on lists versus articles (for minor characters). I personally would prefer articles on everyone, but I acknowledge that sometimes that would just not make sense. For example, in my impending article on the Brotherhood of Randis, I would like to link to each member ever identified in source material. However, as the writeups for many of those minor characters would be summed up as, "He died on Antallos, defending the Brotherhood's efforts to unearth a Star League cache," I can see why someone would much prefer seeing all names together and no such write-up being necessary. Sorry, I ramble. Is there a policy on this, yet? Or are we free to do both methods? --Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 21:35, 16 August 2008 (CDT)

I enshrined it at Policy:Notability, but there's nothing stopping anybody from reopening the discussion. --Scaletail 07:21, 17 August 2008 (CDT)

(took my discussion there) --Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 10:10, 17 August 2008 (CDT)

Scaletail, as to Major Characters: if we assume that Minor Character articles are not forbidden (and should be removed), how do you feel about re-naming the Peoples category to Major Characters? I'd be glad to change the individual articles, if you agree. --Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 10:10, 17 August 2008 (CDT)

It works for me since it will be much better. If we do that, then we also need to fix the sidebar. Since we will have no less than three categories for people (fictional or real), maybe we should switch that out to a short article that explains the system? --Scaletail 14:26, 17 August 2008 (CDT)

I can definitely do that, and thanks for reminding me of the Sidebar. To give this some time to percolate (as I believe Frabby may have some issues with the concept of dual (fictional character) categories), however, I'll be sure to add a note to the current fictional categories, bringing Users' attention to the real people category, as well. --Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 21:10, 17 August 2008 (CDT)