Forum:Minor Characters

The Proposal
What I want to do is a listing of minor/miscellaneous characters that have been mentioned throughout the series and its expanded universe. These are characters where there is some amount of information available but probably not enough to warrant their own article. This would work the same away as the Background Races article where races where we can only come up with a paragraph of information and grouped together in a single article, allowing that information to be disseminated without having a bunch of super-short articles.

Formatting

 * I have posted a link to a sandbox which shows an prototype version of this project. It's certainly not all the characters (I don't want to put too much work into it until I get a better idea if it's going to pass), but it does give an idea of what I'm going for.


 * Characters would be listed alphabetically by family or clan name when available. So for krogan, it would be by first name (e.g., Urdnot Wrex listed under "U").  For quarians, they would be listed by the name following the apostrophe (e.g., Tali'Zora would be listed under "Z.")  All other species would be listed by their last name.


 * Character entries would probably be no more than a paragraph or two long (anything more and we should start considering their own article). The entries will describe who the character is and their involvement in the series.  The characters' names should be in bold in keeping with the format used in other articles.


 * Beside each character entry would be a template similar to the one we use for other character articles. Included in the template would be the character's name, sex, species, their appearances/mentions, and voice actor and picture (if available and applicable).

Benefits
1. We are able to include more information in hopefully a more convenient fashion. Otherwise, information about these characters may be scattered amongst numerous other articles (like CDN stories or news reports), buried in much larger and mostly unrelated articles, or not even present at all on the wiki (such as with characters involved ambient conversations, which have not been transcribed here). In a lot of cases, these are interesting characters that add to the series and help make it interesting.

2. We avoid the creation of super-short articles. Although I'm not as opposed to such articles as others, I know a lot of people here feel articles should be a certain length to warrant creation.

3. It cuts down on discussions/arguments feelings over said articles. Such discussions needlessly end up taking up a lot of wiki's recent activity space and could cause other activity to get lost in the shuffle when the wiki gets really busy. Moreover, no one likes to put legitimate, good-faith work into an article only to be told that it's not good enough or not valid and should be scrapped completely. That risks turning off editors and creating hostility toward the community and it's administrators. Additionally, I've seen such discussions happen multiple times over the same characters. I know character pages for Lilith have been created and deleted multiple times.

4. It allows us to see if certain characters do indeed have enough information available to warrant their own articles. For example, had a Miscellaneous Characters article existed beforehand, we might have avoided a lot of the controversy over an article for Bray. We could have simply added him to the Miscellaneous Characters article and seen that there was in fact enough information to warrant his own article.

Things to Be Refined

 * Title
 * Do you like the current title "Miscellaneous Characters"? What about "Minor Characters" or "Background Characters"?
 * Defining which characters should be included.
 * I think one thing warranting inclusion is having the character's actual name. But what about unnamed characters? I don't want crap like "Blue Suns Trooper #35," but characters like Garrus' father seem important enough to include.  What about characters that have colloquial names like "Friendzone Turian"?
 * Defining when there is enough information to warrant a character having a separate article.
 * I said three paragraphs, but is that enough. Does sending an e-mail count?  This might be something that warrants a policy proposal in and of itself.
 * Is one article enough?
 * I would imagine such an article could get very long and unwieldy after a while. Would we want to sub-divide it?  If so how?  By letter?  By species?  The issue with species is there are several species where there are only a handful of individuals worth including.  For example, there has been only one raloi named in the entire series, so it would be silly to have an article for just raloi.
 * Formatting
 * Any suggestions? I think it could probably be cleaned up.  I'm also not sure how to handle any trivia, like noting that the character Sten is a reference to Dragon Age: Origins.