Talk:Appearences Section

I designed this page as a prototype for an idea I had on how character pages should be done. Instead of all the titles showing up throughout the text, I placed them in their own section below. I believe this makes for a neater and more organized page. I'm open to suggestions, comments and criticism of course, but I like it and if we get a general consensus on this, I can start converting everyone. So what do you think? The original page is unchanged for comparison to the Maggie the cat (prototype) page. Thanks. --Matt 08:42, 27 December 2007 (CST)

Interesting idea. The history section in this article is neater, but now we cannot tell where the information in a particular section came from. If I wanted to know when Talon revealed his feelings for Maggie, this page doesn't actually have that information. And if we are not putting citations in the body text, where do we link to specific responses at Ask Greg (if and when it is appropriate to do so)?

I do like the Appearances section. It would be nice and useful to have all appearances listed in one place (although episode titles should not be italicized). But in my opinion, by removing the episode citations from the body text, we've lost more than we've gained.

We could... just thinking now... we could use the new section as a sort of References section as they have at Wikipedia. That is, we include small links ¹ throughout the body text, which users can click on to be directed down the page to the references section, and the number indicates the appropriate episode.

This is a simplification of the system used at Wikipedia, because MediaWiki reference tags don't seem to work on GargWiki (I've tried before). If we wanted, for example, to be able to link back up the page to the citations, then we'd need to make it more complicated, perhaps by using templates.

In fact, this is the system described here at Wikipedia, which was the first footnote system they used and which has been obsolete for a very long time. More recent, but equally obsolete methods can be found here and here.

This might be more trouble than it's worth. -- Supermorff 11:16, 27 December 2007 (CST)

I totally understand your point about in which episode stuff happens, but in my mind, the history sections are such a jumbled narrative anyway (with C-i-T info to boot) that often the episode notation after a paragraph doesn't really reflect what was in that episode anyway, which means it was false information. For instance, in the current Maggie the Cat page, we have a mention in the first paragraph about her coming to New York to be an actor and all that. The first episode reference we see is Metamorphosis, but this information was not revealed in that episode. So, to me adding an appearences section is more informative, if not more factual. Not to mention it reveals more information than the original format shows such as which episodes she appeared in, but did not have lines and which episodes mentioned her. Another example is that last paragraph. It is only a couple sentences, but it mentions things that occur over several episodes (or issues in this case). If we were to cite all those stories after that paragraph nobody would know what happened in what story either. If we could figure out a working footnote system, I suppose that'd work, but it might be better for those footnotes to take you directly to the episode page itself rather than further down the page you are on. Or so it makes sense in my mind. --Matt 11:32, 27 December 2007 (CST)

Yeah... yeah, that could work. Instead of scrapping the citations throughout the body text, we just change the format. So instead of ("Metamorphosis") we have ¹ or something similar to that. We can include these smaller citations in more appropriate places, even more often. And we can keep the Appearances section as you've done here.

I don't think it's a problem that the first citation after the first paragraph is for "Metamorphosis" - CIT information, by definition, is not referenced in any episode anyway. All the other, canon info from the first paragraph is from "Metamorphosis". It would be nice to have a Ask Greg citation for that CIT info. -- Supermorff 11:42, 27 December 2007 (CST)

Yes, I like this idea A LOT. With that system we'd have either yellow footnote numbers linking to episodes or blue footnote numbers linking to Ask Greg stuff. I could go ahead and start putting the footnotes in Maggie the cat (prototype). This would make a big project even bigger, but I think it is well worth it in the end. --Matt 11:45, 27 December 2007 (CST)

We could go a step further, and create templates so that we don't have to type out the whole <sup... whatever each time. We could include it all at Template:Ep or something, so all you'd have to do is {{ep|Metamorphosis|1}}, for example. It would be simpler if they weren't numbered (and we used an asterisk * or something), but we could do it either way. -- Supermorff 11:53, 27 December 2007 (CST)

I'd appreciate some simplicity like that a lot before starting on this project (assuming at least a few more people like the idea). I don't know much about Wiki-coding though, so I'll leave this in your hands or someone else's. In the meantime, I added the episodic footnotes to the prototype page. --Matt 12:00, 27 December 2007 (CST)

Down here

1. Like this!