They/them has been a disambiguation page for a while, as it reached many hits in SearchDigest, likely due to people looking for Kris's pronouns. At least on two separate occasions, the question of why haven't we made a similar page for other pronouns has been raised, to which the answer was: nobody searched for them, and maintaining four separate lists of characters using pronouns is an unnecessary amount of work for something nobody searches.
But now we have the technology to automate this. Here is a draft listing all characters using certain pronouns, together with their citations. What do you think about having this as a page, then redirecting users who search for pronouns to it instead? I remember a couple requests to have a listing like this before, and "Pronouns" has 152 hits in SearchDigest, so I think it would have utility.
Relatedly, Kris pronoun citations could be automated such that the citation content is stored on a Kris/Pronouns subpage that would look like this, and the citations would be autogenerated from it. This is middle ground between axing the citations entirely in favor of a subpage, and keeping them on the page: they become more maintainable and easier to edit, more readable for people who want the details of each citation, while preserving the old look that people have gotten used to.
Thoughts on this?
Oh, look, it's that disambig I created that ended up being controversial. Back in January, my intention with that listing was to really just to put a link to the Kris article at the place where searches for "they/them" go, because it wasn't showing up at the top of the normal search results for whatever reason.
The master listing of all pronouns seems like a great page to have, but I suggest that it would be better if, like on the existing they/them page, there was a split between "exclusively referred to with X/Y pronouns" and "sometimes referred to with X/Y pronouns" to prevent confusion. (And also because having the first character that comes up when searching "they/them" being Ralsei is going to be extremely inflammatory. Sidenote: is there some way to sort Kris to the top of that list?)
To be clear, this would be a subdivision of each list, like so:
he/him
The following characters are referred to using exclusively he/him pronouns:
The following characters are sometimes, but not always, referred to using he/him pronouns:
- Ralsei[3][4][5]
- Bloxer[6]
- etc.
The Kris/Pronouns subpage looks fine; I'd like the pile to stay and moving the actual citation text to a different page would cut about 20k bytes off Kris's article.
If I have one suggestion to make, it's for the top-level lists to be numbered, so you can see at a glance that there are 33 citations in Chapter 2, compared to 4 in Chapter 3 and 12 in Chapter 4.
This split would require to move characters with non-noteworthy they/them references (like Noelle and Alphys) to "sometimes referred to with X/Y pronouns", which will create even more confusion.
I propose to keep the parentheses from articles instead:
they/them
The following characters are referred to using they/them pronouns:
- Ralsei ("Dark Vine" title)[120]
- etc.
Both of these measures seem like a good idea.
Is a full pronouns page really that necessary? It feels like it'd drag on for too long for something that's not really that important. Personally I think that the approach of making disambiguation pages for each pronoun would make a bit more sense, plus those could also list uses of pronouns outside of characters (like in the track "ANOTHERHIM"). In fact I tried doing a disambiguation page for He/him like the one for They/them, but it got deleted.
That's unfortunately true.
I was thinking about it from the angle of the parser for the infobox parameter (Module:Pronouns's put()), which has no way about knowing about those pronouns not put into the infobox. The readers probably don't care about these or want to see them, but they do make the "exclusively referred to" phrasing incorrect.
There might be a way to get around this by just rephrasing the sentence preceding the "exclusively" list to instead communicate "this is the only pronoun set in their infobox"/"this is the only pronoun set used in notable instances", but I can't think of a concise, but correct wording that qualifies Noelle for this list but not Ralsei.
On the other hand, though, this page might be the best place to go into all the nitty-gritty details and codify exactly what makes pronouns notable for the wiki's purposes (as debated several times on the Ralsei thread).
I thought of suggesting persisting the parentheticals, but it would (besides adding complexity to the pronoun parser) only be useful for a few characters. Ralsei specifically has parentheticals to very precisely clarify the pronouns which have caused so much debate, but parentheticals wouldn't help with most other characters.
For example, Watercooler has no business appearing to be at the same "level" of she/her in the master list as, say, Queen or Orange ā but adding a parenthetical to the main article would be redundant right next to Watercooler's other pronouns ("it/its,[1][2] they/them,[3][4] she/her[5][6]").