Template talk:Infobox character

I'm not a huge fan of the current templates, such as the character one, so I copied the existing one to a user page and played around with it to see if I could come up with something better. Personally, I think I have, but I'm posting it here to see if others agree (I've learnt my lesson, no more making such edits without checking first).

Here's what I came up with. http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/User:JakePT/Sandbox/Template:Character Here's an example of it in action: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/User:JakePT/Sandbox/Mordin Compare to the original: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mordin_Solus

Thoughts?

Also, issues I wanted to bring up apart from the design, are the labels like Location and Affiliation. These are pretty hard to apply to some characters, since most don't have a real 'affiliation'. Even then, which affiliation do we use if they have multiple ones? Such as after a character joins Shepard. Same goes for location, again an issue with ME2 characters. Do we put where they are recruited or where they spend their time between missions? We could do both like: Without doing multiple locations having a locations label seems a bit pointless because it doesn't tell you much.

Another thing I was think of doing was adding extra info to the info box, since what we have barely justifies having them at all, it's just a name, which we already know since that's the title of the page, their race which can be inferred from the image, their location, which isn't always right and their affiliation, which is sometimes incorrect or vague (Salarian Scientist? Notorious Assassin? Hardly 'affiliations'). Things like birth date, relatives, gender, voice actor, appearences (ME1, ME2 or Galaxy etc.) etc. are worth considering, assuming the information is available for that character. It saves having to force information like age/voice actor etc. into sentences in sections the information doesn't necessarily belong (like Trivia). Affiliation could also be simplified to something like 'Ally', 'Adversary' or 'Squad Member', or at least create a new label for that purpose.

Just some things to think about.

JakePT 12:10, December 27, 2009 (UTC)