
Got some broken links here and there, but otherwise nicely comprehensive.
Got some broken links here and there, but otherwise nicely comprehensive.
Thanks to thedeadlymoose for writing a lot of these character descriptions the rest of the WikiWalk team and everyone else who looked at this!
Previously, this page used the standard for tags, but due to popular discontent with that policy it is now a collaboration page. If a character has been used in three or more stories of any format the author or a person who has written about them may add the character at their leisure. Staff will regularly prune the page to keep it from being bloated or crappy.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
Featured in five pages by at least three authors
At first I was excited. Now I am not.
e: Because this means that a lot of characters who are good and should be read more (and no, NOT just my own), don't get added. It's skewed towards the self-insert researchers, precisely because the other kinds of characters are usually more linked to one author in particular.
ee: And what about scips that are characters? Pretty sure the catgirls would fit on this.
eee: Check. Catgirls fit requirements.
You forget, good sirrah! Isabel is already on there, and I might be able to make an argument for not one, but all three of the Bailey Brothers. And then there are Mary-Ann and Salah; I'm 90% sure we could finagle something from them using ETDP alone.
That being said, I'm bummed that S & C Plastics is going to get the shaft on this, for the most part. I get that every one-shot character can't be on here, but why the three-author requirement? This essentially bars some rather iconic stuff like Ruiz Duchamp from being on here.
If authors who have written a lot of individual works about a character want to write up some blurbs for them I would not be opposed to adding them to this page.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
And what about scips that are characters?
I've been asking that myself.
http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-1938874/character-tags#post-2724835
About time we got a good character list. Good job on this!
+1
And where's Pat? (Technical Issues Pat, mind you) He'd be under former personnel, right?
I strongly dislike this.
I get that you have to have some bar of entry if you're going to have a character show up on an official hub. The problem is when this bar of entry ignores pretty much every single character who isn't part of a canon, since they're mostly written about by a single author already. If the advised solution to this is "well, then just go get a group of people to write about this character" then this hub changes nothing for the better in that regard. There are reasons it's difficult to start canons, which already have big concepts and appealing ideas to the people which write about them — and it's only going to be even harder to write about singular characters. See also S&C Plastics' lack of character tags for where the worst of both worlds intersect.
Unless you're Clef or any one of the Merry Self-Insert Crew featured here, your character does not have a fanbase who's willing to write about them. This doesn't make the task of getting other people to write about your character easier, it makes getting exposure to characters who don't already have writers for a canon/fans/people you've bugged in chat to write about them even more difficult, if anything. This is shooting yourself in the foot if you're trying to promote the idea of people writing more about characters.
The bigger problem here, much like with crosslinking, is that people are afraid to play with other people's "toys" — in this case characters. I wouldn't dare write about Ruiz Duchamp or Marion Wheeler or Amy and Rupinder because I'm not confident enough that I'll do the characters justice, or that I'll write a subpar tale involving them, or that the author will dislike my work with them. This is a cultural problem FFB's already pointed out here and I strongly doubt that this hub is the solution to that problem.
This does not look like an encouragement to pick up other people's characters and write for them, it looks like a plugging booth where old self-inserts get peddled to people looking for characters to drive their plot.
As I said upthread, there will be exceptions made if single authors who have a character who doesn't meet the requirements wants to write up a blurb for their character. It's not an insurmountable thing to meet, and you can see there are plenty of recently-written characters on this hub.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
As with greenwolf, agreeing with Aiden.
Edit: Ronald stimson is on the file. He has no tag, and doesn't have extensive works. He exists on one sole file, and thats it. That's one hell of a 'exception' Roget, and borderline makes it look like the characters that are excepted are ones that the wikiwalk team personally likes.
I think it's meant to be a joke, as Stimson's file is a meta thing about a member of personnel who has had his entire file erased. Even so, it's a poor joke, as it completely contradicts everything said about the character tag.
If authors are expected to get feedback on works on the site, why shouldn't staff receive feedback on things like this before they're posted? And I mean feedback from outside of staff.
I would almost agree, but Snorlison has an entry too. He doesn't have a tag (And doing a search, only makes a noteworthy appearance in two articles, with the remainder being breif by-name mentionings), he doesn't fulfil the vague guidelines for an 'exception', and his entry doesn't even link to his author file. Just like Stimson, he's been thrown in without fulfilling any of the rules Roget has set out.
Standing with the other two and agreeing with Aiden on this one.
fighting god in a denny‘s parking lot at 3am
Seconded, and so, so glad I wasn't alone in this viewpoint. When I first saw this, I thought maybe I was just misinterpreting something/was in a bad mood personally or something. I respect what Roget's saying in the first response to this comment to which I'm replying, but I don't think making exceptions is the way to go; exceptions can be made, but it doesn't change the work's feeling of intention and tone, which are of, well, what AE said.
Edit: Minor quibble, but along these lines, the exclusionary nature doesn't make sense in-universe unless the title is changed to "major high-ranking and well-known Foundation personnel dossier" or something, and even then it'd be a stretch.
Edit 2: I need to mention that the formatting is attractive, well-done, and modern, but my downvote stands for the above reasons.
Edit 3: Rescinded. See http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-2065574/personnel-and-character-dossier#post-2730074.
Setting the debate on principle aside, some of the technical bits here are really out-of-whack. Specifically the images, which insist on a predilection to the right-most side of the page, even when it looks like they shouldn't be operating there, and to the detriment of… easy reading, or thereabouts. Exempli gratia, Kondraki's portrait straight-up breaks the formatting and goes below the outline. I'm not sure if all this has already been noted and is just part of the way it was designed, but if so, it makes for a fairly sloppy end-result imo. Much happier with how it is now.
As for what's actually being detailed, AE pretty much summed up the issues that arise from attempting to rigidly define dozens of highly stylized but also inherently malleable elements that have been that way for a while. I have nothing to say about the content other than I admittedly have not experienced roughly 95% of it. Considering the introduction of old material to new palates was part of the original impetus for this project, I reckon that deserves props of a sort.
Alright, since people seem to not be fans of the three authors, five tales thing I've decided to relax the standard. Cyantreuse suggested to making this page a collaboration, pruned occasionally for bad entries, and that any character appearing three or more times can be added by the author or someone else who wrote about them, with the author retaining power to alter or remove it. The page will be tagged as collaboration and anybody will be allowed to edit it.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
Thank you so much for hearing me out! I think this rendition will have its share of problems (we don't want a bunch of random article-less characters from unaware recently-joined site members, as with any collab page) but I really hope it will be worth it. Downvote rescinded.
Heh. The discussion here really escalated quickly.
I do think this does have a lot of potential as a collab for people to share characters among each other, and draw attention to their characters and tales in general.
Either way, I think its a neat addition to the site, but hey… that's just, like, my opinion, man.
It's definitely a neat idea which I'm all in favor of, especially given the reasonable guidelines. No vote for now, though. I don't think I'll be quite satisfied with it until enough authors trickle in to thin out the old guard a bit.
It also might be nice to have an explicit "there is no canon" somewhere in here, or even something like "All files retrieved from the solid archive. Individual veracity cannot be guaranteed." I know it breaks immersion, but everything here comes off as "wink-wink" sub-rosa co-canon with a few cheeky collapsed caveats1, and that structure's not going to hold up as diverse characters get added.
(Also, Lombardi's collapsible has some grammar issues.)
Noting that there are some major technical issues with this page, mainly centered around images within collapsibles.
Also, there is no clear sorting system for organizing additions to this page. Is it supposed to be alphabetical, chronological, or what?