As many of you know, we have continued to slowly split off NPCs from the larger NPC subpages on both Undertale and Deltarune Wiki (refer to my previous discussion on this topic). For the most part, this process has gone smoothly, and we may even be able to completely phase out NPC pages in favor of individual articles. However, we have run into a major problem that will only get worse as we continue to do this:
We list out main characters and others in separate categories.
We then list out enemies and bosses per major location in separate categories each.
This formatting has proven to be unsustainable in the long term, especially when Chapter 5 releases and we continue to add more characters. Our navboxes have become overly large and bloated, to the point where, when expanded, they take up over half of the viewable page in some cases. To prioritize content over the navbox, we have proposed a solution:
A larger "Characters" article
@Link has provided a draft that combines every character in the game into one article. You can view this draft by clicking this link. It lists main characters, then major characters, then characters introduced in each major location. These entries will have links to the character's individual article, if and when they have one.
Pros
The navbox will be significantly smaller. At the bottom of the page, you will see a reworked character navbox that is significantly more condensed and readable than the current navbox we have on the article namespace.
It'll be easier to add more pages. We will not have to continuously add entries to an already bloated navbox whenever we split off a character from the NPC pages. The characters will already be present in the article itself.
Cons
The navbox will not have every character visible. Unfortunately, in order to view an NPC, you would have to click on the appropriate location link in the navbox, then locate the character themself.
We will place less emphasis on collective NPC pages. For NPCs, the navbox will link to the character article instead of the NPC pages. Our long-term goal is to hopefully phase out NPC pages entirely in favor of individual articles. While this is favorable to our SEO, it may be less convenient to have separate articles instead of every character being visible on one page.
As always, please reply to this post with your opinions on this proposal, including the character article and the reworked navbox. Any feedback is appreciated!
Update: Drafts for Undertale Wiki are now live. You can view them at:
Right now, the characters navbox is repeating a lot of information, even locations. And I don’t think that’s helpful at all? Some of our Main Page links are also redirects to categories, like main characters, and that seems redundant with how small it is. Plus, the /NPC pages as is actually doesn’t list all the NPCs, and I’ve been concerned about it confusing people who are looking for certain NPCs.
We can improve the Characters page as we go too! Maybe even sort the NPCs better…
i do really like having the navbox so much more concise, even if it means only major characters get included. i'm not sure if by encounter is the best way to do that, though - having mizzles but no cuptains is weird, including friend but not ramb feels very strange, etc.
For the navbox, to throw some ideas out there, is it too crazy to have separate navboxes for the chapters? So an enemy from Chapter 2 would have a Chapter 2 Characters navbox on its article. Or maybe we can still have all characters in one characters navbox if we make the per-chapter splits collapsable and only auto-expand the ones relevant for the current article? I agree having it be as long and obnoxious as it is now is worst-case, but it’d be great to find a way to still include every character and not have to worry about what and what not to include.
I do like the idea of Chapter navboxes, but I'm not sure how that would work for characters that appear in multiple chapters.
Do we place each Chapter navbox on their page? That wouldn't look good at all, especially on mobile devices where the navboxes are expanded by default.
Maybe an extra major characters navbox along with the others?
I like the idea of showing a part of the navbox with a “show all” button to show the rest. That way, we can specify the world that the character appears in (Hometown, Castle Town, Card Kingdom, Cyber World, TV World, The Legend of Tenna, Dark Sanctuaries) and have the navbox display only characters from that location, plus major and other characters.
I like the Characters article but… I’m not sure if it needs to be an article? The category seems to be doing a good job at providing navigational aid and this is just a differently sectioned Category:Characters.
I forgot to mention this in my earlier post, but the Characters draft is different from Category:Characters since there’s no duplicates, which the Category currently has.
The reason there are duplicates is because the current characters category transcludes its subcategory pages onto it. This has the side effect of excluding numerous characters because they aren't on the transcluded category pages. If we end up turning this into a category, it will overwrite the current category with the one we drafted, with no transclusions.
We’re supposed to be steering away from Categories, right? One of the issues we’ve had is that some Categories like Shadow Crystal bosses and alternate route had too much important info on them.
Here are the three questions an article must have an answer for in order to stand on its own:
What would link to the article?
What would the article be categorized under?
What would the article's relevant content look like
If an article candidate fails to answer one or more of these questions, then maybe it's time we go back to the drawing board.
Right now, I believe that the characters article struggles to answer questions 2 and 3. Sure, the characters article can just be categorized under the characters category. However, if we allow the category and the article to exist at the same time as we have them now, then we would just have duplicate formatting for both since we currently group characters in galleries.
The question then becomes: is there a better way to format the characters article such that the article and the category can exist at the same time?
I think the question is, is there something that a user would expect to see on a characters article that does not include just navigating between different characters?
I think the issue was that the pages had too much prose on them. Combine that with the fact that we were linking to them a lot meant that they were better off in the article namespace. By comparison, the characters page, like Kocka said, is just a reformatted version of the category page.
On the other hand, the issue we're going to run into is the fact that we're probably going to be linking to this page a lot (because of main characters, Chapter X enemies, etc.). Would it be okay to keep the page as a category knowing this?
Like I’ve mentioned in Discord: we already got search queries for enemies by Chapter, and it’s possibly by readers who want to know who is where or to try and keep things spoiler-free as possible.
We probably want to factor this would look for other articles too: for Cyber World, we’ve listed them as “inhabitants”… but they are all text-only in the infobox. What about the Chapter 2 article, if people want to see the characters?
This is more of a problem for large locations with many inhabitants, such as Hometown and will only get worse as we add more NPC pages. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy fix for this since this parameter is useful on smaller locations. Maybe we can just replace the whole thing with a link to the page with the full list?
We can have a mention of that in a subsection and include a {{For}} for the complete list.
In other news, we have pushed these pages out of the draft space. They have overwritten the current category pages, which were littered with unnecessary transclusions that consequently did not actually include every available character. This has been applied for both Undertale Wiki and Deltarune Wiki.