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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tarquin (talk | contribs) at 07:41, 26 July 2002 (moving...). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Election Results

Strong consensus to move away from slashed titles. Majority against pipes (but see Danny's possible joke).

Split, albeit good-natured, on disposition of minor characters (may I suggest more discussion? Could lead to a standard we apply to similar subpage groups).

No one wants to eliminate "such trivia"; trend toward well-written articles that are important and/or interesting.

Vote here on the Great Reorganization (D'Oh):

Nearly all voters (6 to 1) want to eliminate the slashed subpages:

Most voters (5 to 2) would like to eliminate the need for pipes:

Consolidate minor characters (4 to 3 with comments):

Having such trivia in Wikipedia at all (various comments):

  • Eliminate all Simpsons articles:
  • Keep Simpsons articles (at all costs):
  • Whatever, as long as they're properly formatted: --KQ, Jeronimo
  • Keep within perspective: Ed Poor, Danny
  • It's all part of the rich tapestry, but let's try & write as much on Art, Science and Literature as on TV, please! : Ed Poor, Tarquin
  • Any article with interesting, well-researched, well-written content is welcome. Stubs should be avoided. --LDC, Ed Poor, mav (strongly)


Note by jheijmans:

As with the Lord of the Rings characters, I'd say each character should get its own article. I noticed there such small characters as Arwen showing up there, so that could be done for the Simpsons as well. Jeronimo

As with the Lord of the Rings characters, I'd say that if there was ever a place for a non-flat database, this is it. Is there going to be a page on the guy who cringes when Bart flies by on his skateboard?Ortolan88 14:36 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)
Quick! tell me his name! I'll add an article for him... Ed Poor

Danny, thanks for voting. You'll notice that I have suspended my reorganization efforts for the duration of the election. Everyone, I'm going offline now, but the polls will remain open. Good night. --Ed Poor


I just tested the waters on moving the dreadfuly named The Simpsons/Marge to *shock* Marge Simpson. If all the characters were moved in this way then linking to these articles will be as easy as [[this]]. I've already done this with the Star Wars and Star Trek articles and the result has been increased contributions to those article (who wants to write [[Star Wars/Han Solo|Han Solo]] each and every time you want to link to an article about, *gasp*, Han Solo -- there simply ain't anybody else using that name that is near as well known as the Star Wars character). Recently this has also been done for the Middle-earth articles and I think it will soon be time to do the same to The Simpsons articles. I say we kill the / pages! --mav 17:53 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

I was going to suggest that the characters could all be organized under The_Simpsons/..., and redirect pages could be used to point to the clumsier headings, but I see the problem with this idea. If Homer_Simpson redirected to The_Simpsons/Homer, the problem is that other articles can't use [[Homer_Simpson]], because the software doesn't do multiple indirection (to avoid loops?) I know many of you are already aware of this, I'm just explictly pointing it out to others who aren't. Marknau

I have already moved and changed all the links for The Simpsons/Homer to Homer (The Simpsons) is this a problem? I did a similar move fo the Character page... -- *<:@)

Actually there is a larger problem with this: Users, especially new ones, will not know that the more sensible redirects extist and will only see the / page title or the parentetical ones and they will tend to use pipes to link to these articles when they could simply use a free link (example: [[Homer Simpson]] instead of [[The Simpsons/Homer|Homer Simpson]] or [[Homer (The Simpsons)|Homer Simpson]]). --mav

How many other Homer Simpsons are there? --KQ

I enterred Homer Simpson into the search function of ussearch.com and received 52 hits, bur none of them in Springfield. Eclecticology
There's a Wallis Simpson and potentially one of her ex's Ernest Simpson... - I don't know it just seems that some conflict might be there or appear in the future with one of the Characters and then one of them would be the exception to the rest... -- *<:@)
Sorry not clear, here's an example: Say the Simpsons introduces a character called Wallis Simpson, then the Simpsons (prolly minor) character would be "Wallis Simpson (The Simpsons)" whereas all the other would be Homer Simpson, etc. -- *<:@)

Yes, but that would be one inconvenience rather than several dozen. --KQ

Yes, please don't use parentheticals until an actual ambiguity presents itself -- this is what they are for. [[Homer (The Simpsons)|Homer Simpson]] is little improvement over [[The Simpsons/Homer|Homer Simpson]]. --mav

I agree. What if in 300 years there's a Paul McCartney that is much more famous than the one in The Beatles? We can't predict the future, and we shouldn't try to. Cross that bridge when you come to it.  :-) --KQ


Mav, Lee, KQ, I am going to move articles like The Simpsons|Homer Simpson to either

--Ed Poor


A whole new can of worms

The page name Characters (The Simpsons) seems a bit odd. Is it disambiguating the word "characters"? Doubtful. Might be better as:

  • "List of Simpsons Characters" - mav (If all the page is going to be is a list, then name it correctly)
  • "The Simpsons (characters)"
  • "The Simpsons: Characters"
  • "The Simpsons Characters"

Yes, it should be "The Simpsons characters" or "Characters from The Simpsons", and it should list all characters: those about whom only a line or two is written should simply include that short gloss here. Any about whom there is more extensive writings should briefly gloss and then link to their own article. Which characters "deserve" an article of their own is not a relvant question--the only issue is which chracters do, in fact, have a real non-trivial article of their own? If someone wants to write an essay about Maude Flanders or Comic Book Guy, that's fine with me. But until they do, if all we have is a brief one-line desctiption, it should just go here. --LDC

The software should simply remove characters trailing the '/' in link text. example: The Simpsons/Lisa Simpson should display as Lisa Simpson. Another example: United Stated of America/Maine should display as Maine. Why not? By the way, if two people edit an article at the same time, the effect is that the last person to submit overwrites the changes of the first one to submit. Not smart. Rlee0001 16:14 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)

Slash is just a character like any other; older versions of the software treated them specially (though not quite as you suggest), and we had many long days of discussion about it, and decided it was a bad thing. We don't want anything in the software to usurp the author's human choice about how to organize and structure information. Wiki pages are one single flat namespace.

Are you sure about the edit conflict problem? If you can reproduce it, please file a bug report, but it seems to work well in my tests, and we've done some pretty extensive testing. It is true that it's not possible to edit conflict with yourself, so if the two people editing an article are actually logged in as the same user, they will indeed overwrite each other--that's by design; you presumably know when you are overwriting your own work. But the software shouldn't let you overwrite anyone else's work. it should present the "Edit Conflict" screen and let you resolve the conflict. --LDC

And yet another day in which the Recent Changes page is inundated with banal Simpson trivia! How about an in-depth character analysis of Snap, Crackle, and Pop next. We could link that to Rice Krispies and get 3 more articles out of it. Danny

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