I'm making this post because I realized having all this in a Discord message is likely to start a long discussion, so that kind of thing is more suitable for Discussions. I have some category-related proposals to make, and category-related questions to ask:
Proposal: Categories should be used for navigational purposes, if a topic has more than just links listed on its category page it should be split into an article.
Proposal:Category:Music gets renamed to Category:Undertale Soundtrack.
Question: Do we have enough content for a Cut Content page in the main namespace?
Question: Should we rename Cut Content into Unused Content? Is that a more suitable name? We had searches for "Unused", but we never had searches for "Cut".
Question: Should we split unused items back into their own pages? We merged them back in 2016 because all of them were pretty stubby, but it could be a good idea to split them back if we have enough content for them.
Question: We should have a main namespace page for items, but should we have one page listing all items or four pages for weapons, armor, consumables and miscellaneous items?
I believe there is enough content on Category:Music that it should be moved to the article namespace, like how it is on the Deltarune Wiki. The page should be renamed to “Undertale Soundtrack” to reflect the many links referring to that name.
I also think Category:Plot Mechanics should be moved to Category:Plot Elements. This was its original name prior to the creation of the mechanics infobox, and the name made perfect sense at the time.
I feel like Miscellaneous Items makes more sense than Key Items here, simply due to the Punch Card and Dog Residue.
And I’m gonna agree with F-sharp on the music page in the main namespace, it’s functionally a page in that namespace already. Maybe leave the category page as a redirect page, so clicking the categories still directs users there. This differs from the characters/bosses/vendors/NPCs categories, which don’t have any meaningful content outside of links.
Real World split seems like a decent idea, but I don’t think it’s really necessary, it’s used sparsely enough to where it can work as one category. Also accounts for the “Player” page, which is neither an event nor a developer.
Category:Music: definitely can be a mainspace article by itself!
Category:Demo Music: I think this can be mainspace.
I’m not sure what we can list for Complete OST. Is it the vinyl?
Category: Albums? Sure!
For Bosses: I think these could link back to the In/Battle articles instead? They currently link back to the main character’s article, where Characters already does that.
Cut Content to mainspace might be okay.
I think Unused is an okay move, especially if unused is searched more.
I think anything “cut” could be renamed to unused. I’m not sure on Inaccessible Rooms. Probably gauge that based on if it’s a popular article or not?
Unused items still seems stubby?
Items in mainspace: sure. Maybe: conumable, equippable, and miscellaneous? Weapons and Armor would have the same “sets” description, it might be easier to read and see the similarities if they are together.
Miscellaneous Items seems mainly fine due to some items not being Key Items.
Unsure? Are they supposed to be independent categories? Seems like people search for puzzles.
Endings article? Sure.
Like F-sharp mentioned, I think Plot Elements is reasonable.
16: Real World: agreeing with Frost, some of the content articles in the waits aren’t quite events: Newsletter and Alarm Clock.
But since we intend to have an infobox for events, and we already have an infobox for developers, I feel like those are two completely separate categories of content shoved into a single category. As for Player, we categorize it under Plot Mechanics on Deltarune Wiki already, so I suppose it would go there instead.
I mean, we can list the track list. The complete OST is slightly longer than the Collector's Edition OST so we could explain where these came from and such.
That's what I'm proposing yeah. Instead of these 4 categories going under Game Elements (which is a very general name that I'm sure nobody ever searches for) they would just be under the main content category, each with their own navigation galleries.
Proposal: Categories should be used for navigational purposes, if a topic has more than just links listed on its category page it should be split into an article.
I agree, I think categories are not a good substitute for actual mainspace pages. The overly detailed category pages should probably just be mainspace pages.
The Characters and Bosses category pages are what would often be called a "Portal" page on wikis — a page with little-to-no prose that is mostly just a navigational aid (example). Portal pages would typically be linked directly from the main page. Undertale Wiki doesn't currently have a Portal namespace, but it might be valuable to create one to contain that kind of content, if the goal is to do away with using categories for navigation purposes. Alternatively, it would always be an option to use the Project namespace and just title the page "Undertale Wiki:Characters Portal" etc.
As a sidenote, it seems a bit weird to draw a distinction between "Characters" and "NPCs" (non-player characters) in a game that only has a single player character. It looks like the NPCs category is really just lists of NPCs, the Vendors subcategory, and three other characters (Alphys, Monster Kid, River Person) who are in that category for unclear reasons. It kind of seems like it's meant to be non-main, non-vendor, non-enemy characters — except that Alphys is in both NPCs and Main Characters.
Question: Does the name “Plot Mechanics” even make sense? Is there a better name, say, “concepts”?
Yeah, that is a bit of a strange name, although I do like "Plot Elements" as was suggested in this thread. The exact contents of the category also seem quite vague — it's very much the kind of category where I would try to find other more suitable categories for all of its contents.
Proposal: Split the Real World category into Events and Developers, then get rid of the category.
This proposal makes a lot of sense, although "Events" is a very generic name that could also include in-game events, such as The War of Humans and Monsters. Perhaps something like "Promotional Events" could be less broad. Also, I would just move "Player" into "Category:Characters".
The goal is to use categories mostly for navigation purposes, I think. Using categories as portals is okay in that sense, but I was wondering if there's more to write on these specific categories of content such that we might need article pages for them. For example, RuneScape Wiki has a page on bosses which does contain a substantial amount of prose. We could technically have dynamic lists of enemies to list out their stats, or describe in detail how shops work on a main namespace Vendors article.
I think the distinction is that NPCs are non-enemies and non-vendors, which is why Alphys is categorized as an NPC. The fact that we have a category for NPCs probably comes from documenting most NPCs on NPC subpages for each location, and only a few are noteworthy enough to have their own pages. It seems useful to have navigation between these pages, but I agree the name is silly. If we were to merge the NPCs category into the Characters category, where should people who search for "NPCs" be directed to?
Yeah, it is. The idea was that, unlike gameplay mechanics, which have little to no effect on plot, plot elements describe game concepts which have significant impact on plot, but little to no impact on gameplay. Maybe "Lore" is a better name for that category? But then people would probably expect to find all lore described by pages of that category, which isn't what these pages are for.
Humans, Eight Humans, Monsters, Boss Monster and Royal Guard could just go to Characters. But I can't think of where a page like Delta Rune would go if there isn't some kind of "general lore concepts" category.
I'll have to think about it, because I'm not sure if anniversary events are generally considered promotional. Would Alarm Clock App dialogue be a promotional event? I was thinking of a general 'these Undertale-relevant things happened outside of Undertale' category, but maybe that's still too broad.