I came to this wiki to help clean up some messes that a few people seem determined to keep adding to as many wikis as they can find. During the past month I have seen more instances of this, and I have also seen that this wiki seems to be losing its focus in three main areas:
- The name of this wiki
- Constantly changing definitions
- Categories
The name of this wiki
The name of this wiki is "Wickedpedia, the Disney Villains Wiki", not "the Antagonists Wiki". There have been a few actors and non-Disney characters added, but many people seem to think that if a character provides any kind of obstacle to another character, no matter how small or insignificant that obstacle might be, then they need to be labeled as an antagonist and added here.
Being an antagonist doesn't automatically mean they are a villain. A villain is "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot".[1] It is that deliberate effort to hurt other people that makes an antagonist a villain.
If a character cannot be proven to be deliberately hurting other people, then they are not a villain and they should not be listed on this wiki. If they aren't in a Disney movie or TV show, they should not be listed here.
Constantly changing definitions
Going along with this is the tendency to label every character as an antagonist or villain. But more important than that is the fact that the people who want to label characters as antagonists can't decide on what kind of antagonist a character is.
For example, the Health Inspector from Ratatouille has been called a "minor villain", "Master of Evil", "Not always evil", a "minor, but true villain", "secondary antagonist", "minor antagonist" and "supporting antagonist". Is any of that correct?
No.
He appears at the restaurant to do his job (investigating a rodent infestation complaint), opens the door, sees rats all over the kitchen and tries to run away. At no time does he deliberately hurt anyone. The closest he comes to being an antagonist is that he would have been able to call in pest control officers if Remy's family had not first caught him and tied him up. He does get the restaurant shut down later, but that's simply a part of his job, not anything special he does specifically against Remy and Linguini because he doesn't like them.
Some characters are just minor characters without needing to be labeled as an antagonist.
Similarly, in the past four years, Henry J. Waternoose III from Monsters Inc. has been called five kinds of villain 8 times and eleven different kinds of antagonist 65 times. In many cases, the same person changed it several times, and most of those times it was different than what they said it was before.
The people adding this cannot make up their mind.
Categories
The categories are a mess. There's over 800 categories with some of the most ridiculous names I've ever heard. Three examples:
- Villains trying to kill the hero, defeat him for good, take over the world, spread chaos, mayem, destuction and doom, win and even be incharge
- Extremley power-hungry and extrdoinarliy greedy villains and scums
- Immature, whiney, impatient, grumpy and bratty villains who get easily angered, complain all the time, whine, fuss and yell a-lot
Those kinds of categories are an opinion and are not really suited to organizing pages.
Some characters have three or four dozen categories on them. That's way too many, and most of those are the kinds of frivolous categories shown above. On some of the stub pages, there are more categories than information about the characters.
The categories need to be cleaned up and trimmed down to a managable number.
What's going to happen
There are other wikis that I really need to be working on. But because of the mess this wiki is in, I am going to help clean it up.
- The categories are going to be simplified and consolidated. The number of categories on each character's page is going to be reduced to less than a dozen.
- The page for any minor character who isn't a villain is going to be blanked and marked for deletion.
- Any statement about how a Disney villain is similar to or inspired by a non-Disney villain is going to be removed. Characters are "similar to" other characters because there are common themes in literature and the arts. So unless someone involved in a story specifically says that a different character inspired their character, similarity or inspiration is going to go.
- The squabbling is going to end over what kind of antagonist a character is. Because no one can make up their mind and because the same people keep changing what kind of antagonist they say a character is, I'm going to make the decision. Characters are going to be described without using the word "antagonist" in any way, shape or form.
I know this is not going to be a popular course of action. But since people put this wiki into this state, I'm going to clean it up. And I have the patience to see that it gets done.