I have finished coming up with a plan for overhauling this wiki. It is a very big change on how things look. At least half of it probably won't be popular but it's necessary to fix some long-standing problems.
What it comes down to is there have been a lot of abuses of both infoboxes and categories going on for almost a decade and they're going to stop. Starting today, the following goes into effect:
- It is no longer necessary to start each page with sentences like "Sid Phillips is the villain of the Pixar movie Toy Story." This is Wickedpedia, the Disney Villains Wiki. Identifying characters as a villain on the page is redundant.
- Likewise, we will no longer use categories that have "villains" or "antagonists" in their name, for the same reason.
- To prevent edit wars, confusion and contradictions caused by trying to assign specific antagonist levels and the accompanying antagonist fussing, only three character descriptions will be used: "main characters", "secondary characters" and "minor characters". Anything below a secondary character is by definition a minor character. See Help:Antagonist-Protagonist levels for more information.
- The Character infobox has been redesigned and pared down so only relevant information about the character. Information in fields like "Goals" will not be displayed and will eventually be removed. Infoboxes will no longer be a dumping ground where everything is stuffed into it at the expense of the main part of the page.
- A new Standard Article Format help page has been established that identifies where information that used to be in the infobox should now be placed.
- All existing categories are being deleted. We're getting rid of the TV Tropes categories and starting over. Categories will be used to organize the page, not a place to stuff factoids at the expense of the main part of the page.
- A limit of 12 categories will be enforced. If more than 12 categories are added, they will be deleted. See the Categories section of the Standard Article Format for what categories are allowed.
- Steps to curb speculation abuse and twisting characters to make them evil will be taken. Warnings about category spamming, antagonist fussing and deliberately-wrong categories being added will be given, with blocks if necessary to curb them.
- The Antagonist fussing policy will be enforced with blocks.
For more details on the changes to character pages, refer to the Overhaul change list.
Even though I have been talking about these issues during the last five years in my previous blogs, actually implementing changes to fix those problems is happening more suddenly and rapidly than you might expect. I realize that the changes will not be popular with everyone and people will start clamoring to put things back the way they were.
If that is to be done, then those people must also come up with procedures for dealing with the problems that will also come back. Those problems are listed here.
Until then, work now begins on the cleanup and overhaul.