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Contents 1 Characters by Ability & Profession 2 Characters by ability 3 Thanks! 4 Category:Characters by ability 5 abilities 6 professions & similar categories 7 Both.. 8 String . . . or nothing? 9 of Shoemakers and things... 10 And another thing... 11 Doctor characters 12 Doctors 13 Missing! 14 Characters 14.1 Reply on Characters

Characters by Ability & Profession

Bufocalvin and I previously discussed some of these format issues but I'm not sure we've reached a consensus on what format these categories will take. Larry7639 has been diligently converting the existing subcategories to lower case but now we've run into some issues regarding whether we'll be using "doctor characters", "fictional doctors" or "characters who are doctors".

Also for "Characters by ability", in cases where adjective forms such as "telepathic characters" and "telekinetic characters isn't so simple, do we continue in the same vein with "superhuman strength characters" or do we use "characters with superhuman strength"?

I think these are some of the pressing issues that need to be settled before we do too much more work on these categories.

--MarshAngel 21:47, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

Characters by ability

Ok, so I know I goofed up on "Characters by ability", but I'm fixing it. The only thing that should be different when I'm done is that "Characters who Fly" I have been remaking into "Flying characters". This seems clear to me, though I guess it could mean on an airplane. Personally, I don't like to see a bunch of things under "C" when I go to "Characters by ability" but I'll go along with putting "Chararacters" first for clarity's sake, though I disagree, because it looks wierd and makes it complicated. But "Pilot characters" is also a separate thing under "Characters by profession".

Other than that, I have already changed "Characters with superhuman strength" back to "Superhuman strength characters" and and I'm working on repairing the rest. Is this all right?

Also: I have made "Lost Characters" into "Lost characters". Again, I'm trying to move things to "sentence case" eventually, like you said.

Tell me what I did wrong, and I'll fix it, I swear!

Larry7639 21:56, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

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I don't think it's a matter of right or wrong, it's just that we all need to discuss and decide to do one thing and stick to it so we don't keep undoing each others' work.

If you don't want the characters all under C, then you can alphabetize the listing. It won't change how it appears but it will separate it alphabetically so that "Characters with superhuman strength" will be listed under "S"

 [[category:characters with superhuman strength|superhuman strength]] 

--MarshAngel 22:29, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

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Thanks!

Thanks for starting this, MarshAngel! And Larry7639, it sounds like you've been doing a lot of work! Since we decided to convert to Sentence case (first letter capitalized) rather than Title Case (like the title of a book, each significant word capitalized), there have been thousands of manual changes to do, and will eventually be tens of thousands. That part of it is pretty simple, except for the question of phrases. I, for instance, prefer Voice Artists as a title, rather than Voice artists. it feels more like a proper name, a job title, rather than simply a phrase.

On the characters: I think, Larry, if they =all= started with Characters, the alphabetization would be more obvious. A viewer's eye would go to the end of the category title, rather than the beginning, and the user would find the desideratum. However, I do agree that "Characters who use telekinesis" is clunkier than "Telekinetic characters". I personally don't like the use of nouns as adjectives. For example, I wouldn't use "Telekinesis characters". I'm not jumping up and down on any of the options yet.  :)

I'm interested to see what decision we reach. We've been good at that as a group.  :) I've got plenty of other things to do for the conversion, so I'll wait on the characters until we figure out the path.

I've been working on the Decades category recently. I'll keep working on that for now. I'm really happy that MarshAngel has been able to keep up the contributions while this is happening.  :) Larry7639, I'm looking forward to your next articles, too.  :) I set an arbitrary goal of 10K articles by April 1st, even though that looks pretty unlikely.

--bufocalvin 23:15, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

Category:Characters by ability

I went ahead and did "Characters by ability" using the titles, like "Telekinetic characters" and the like. Personally I like it this way, but if you would rather do it with all starting "Charaters who..." I won't mind changing it back. Anyway, click on the convenient link below and look at it and see what you think.

I agree about "Voice Artists". As you will see, I did the same thing with "Martial Arts characters" rather than "Martial arts characters".

Larry7639 23:56, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

abilities

I think trying too hard to be consistent may be working against us. I personally don't find a problem with having "telekinetic characters" and also using "characters who enter dreams". Ideally, I would like to keep the adjectives first followed by characters whenever possible (as in the case of teleporting characters), making exceptions only in cases where it becomes bad/awkward grammar or unclear.

For example: I think "Energy emitting characters" is pretty clear and not overly awkward. However, "Healing characters" is a bit vague. Does "healing" mean healing oneself or healing someone else? I would recommend "characters with healing powers". Another awkward category: "Superhuman strength characters". The adjective doesn't immediately imply ownership. In this case I prefer characters with superhuman strength". The issue here is that if we go with the latter, doesn't it make sense to go with it for all similar categories? so then "characters who emit energy?

Prime example of a category I can't figure out: "Limited time characters". It's incredibly vague. Limited time for what? life? job? to break out of prison?

On the plus side, for the moment, the number of these awkward categories are really quite small. The categories I have the most issue with are:

• "Eidetic memory characters" vs. "characters with eidetic memory"
• "Force field generating characters" vs. characters who generate force fields"
• "Intangibility characters" vs "Intangible characters" or "characters who control density"
• "Mind control characters" vs. " characters who control minds"
• Magnetism characters" vs. "Characters who control magnetism"

professions & similar categories

My personal preference is to prefix fictional ie. "fictional martial artists" as opposed to "martial arts characters". I find the latter both vague and awkward. I think adding "characters" to the end of a real-life career implies that this particular talent sums up the character rather completely, because fiction is filled with character types who aren't complete people. For example, if I saw a character listed under "martial arts characters" my first assumption is that this character spends all day in a dojo breaking blocks and yet it my be just an incidental part of the character who is primarily a professor who just happens to be able to kick butt. I think just prefixing fictional to a profession gets the idea across that they are a fictional counterpart to the real thing as opposed to an archetype.

--MarshAngel 08:37, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

Both..

Both of you make reasonable arguments. I, for one, think consistency is important, so that future contributors won't have to make judgement call on what's awkward and what's vague. Personally, I see no difference between "Fictional shoemaker" and "Shoemaker character", nor do I have a problem with "Character who are shoemakers" as long as its alphabetized under "S" like Marshangel demontrated. Then, we probably should include all of the characters under the "Characters who are..." format. Still. the way I did it seems the simplest to me personally.

OK, we all disagree. Now what? Any suggestions for consensus?

Larry7639 13:20, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

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String . . . or nothing?

How does "with" sound as a possibility?

• characters with eidetic memory
• characters with force fields or
• characters with force-field abilities
• characters with intangibility
• characters with mind control
• characters with magnetic abilities

How could this be phrased without "character" and still indicate its fictional nature? I am not sure. "Fictional" seems to work well with professions but not so well with abilities. MarshAngel, any suggestions?

And then, what about the possibility of leaving out the "character" tag altogether? If a character with mind control is categorized under "mind control," what will be lost in terms of search abilities? Bufo, what do you think?

As Larry points out, "characters who are shoemakers" is much longer than "shoemaker characters." And, to me, "characters with shoemaking abilities" does not sound helpful. So I'm wondering what all of you think about just plain "shoemakers" . . .

—Candy

scifiadmin1 18:56, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

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of Shoemakers and things...

The problem with just "shoemakers" is when we get to "authors" or "actors". Is it a real author or an author character in a story? I don't love "fictional shoemakers" because it sounds like someone's pretending to be a shoemaker. Butthat's just my take. I could live with it. To me "Characters" is more literary. I know we're dealing mostly with TV, Movies, and Comics, but let's not forget that Science Fiction is originally literature.

So now we've got "Characters with teleporting abilities" versus "Characters who teleport" versus "Teleporting characters"? See.."Fictional Teleporters" just sounds silly. The first example (Characters with teleporting abilities") makes it clearer we're not talking about some Star Trek red shirt who used a transporter. So then we'd have "Characters with intangibility abilities"? No, we'd have to make it "Characters with intangibility" and "Characters with superhuman strength" again. Or.. we could use the word "powers" if the ability is truly science fictional. So.. "Characters with intangibility powers" sounds good. While "Characters with teleporting powers" and "Characters with shoemaking abilities" both sound good. Hey..maybe I've got something! It even addresses the "one aspect" objection, making it clear that this is something the character "has", not his whole definition like with "Shoemaker characters".

"Characters with forcefield abilities" sounds weird. Wouldn't it be "Characters with force field generating abilities"? See.. we're getting back to "Force field generating characters" after all.

What were we talking about? :)

Larry7639 20:53, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

And another thing...

I do think "Healing characters" is a bit vague, because we don't know if its a Doctor, someone who magically heals others, or someone who "regenerates", thereby healing themselves. How about "Healing Powers Characters"? I know, yuck!

Here's what I really think. "Healing characters" works. Its vague, but its simple, and could include people who heal others or themselves - it doesn't matter. If it was a Doctor, it would be "Doctor Characters" or even "Healer Characters". If they just regenerated, then it would be "Regenerating characters".

Boy, this is confusing. This all started for me because I just wanted my Comic Book characters to integrate with the TV and Movie characters in categories like "Superhuman strength" and "Genius". You know, so Braniac 5 would be in the same category as Kyle XY because they were both geniuses.

Maybe I should just go back to writing articles.

Larry7639 21:22, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

Doctor characters

I noticed Dr. McCoy was on the Most Wanted list, and it surprised me that he was among the missing. So...I did a little research and did his initial article.

Then I noticed that some Doctor characters were under "Characters who are doctors" while others were under "Doctor characters". This, to me, seems the height of stupidity.

So...I went with my personal preference, and put them all under "Doctor characters", which I still prefer. But if the group decides differently, I'll cheerfully change them back to "Characters who are doctors". I just feel for the integrity of the site, it needs to be one way or the other.

Crusher, Flox, Frasier, and Bashir need to be under the same character as McCoy!

Larry7639 22:43, 17 March 2008 (EDT)

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Doctors

FYI, it wasn't stupidity, it was transition. We had consistently been doing Doctor Characters (just like we had consistently been using Title case), and it takes quite a bit of work to change from one style to another...tens of thousands of manual changes in the Title case instance. The kind of confusion that created, is, I think why this discussion was begun. I think we agree that all of those characters should be in the same category: the question is what that category should be called. Once we have a strategy, than we have two responsibilities: new articles, and the conversion of old articles. I'm glad you've been able to work on the conversion. Thanks for working on this!

--bufocalvin 09:38, 31 March 2008 (EDT)

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Missing!

Okay, I haven't been staying on top of the discussion, because I've been working on other things than characters recently. But what happened? When I go to the Characters category, there are virtually no articles! Have people been systematically removing the Characters category from characters? If so, I'm curious about the logic. As a first time visitor, I would go to the Characters category, not see anybody, and figure there wasn't much in Scifipedia. There were hundreds of articles, which now would appear to a casual observer to have been deleted. Where did they go?

This may tie into a fundamental issue. I think articles should be in their primary category first: characters in characters, novels in novels, movies in movies, and so on. Within that category, there are subcategories. Everything in the subcategory should also be listed under the category. I've taught very well-received classes on database design. There may be some confusion here about "normalization", thinking that it isn't a good idea for an article to appear in more than one category. When we list an article in more than one category, we are not being redundant with the content: the content only exists once. A second categorization is not a duplication of the material: it is simply another way to find it. I would expect McCoy under characters, but also under Star Trek characters, DeForest Kelley characters, Characters who are doctors (or doctor characters), and so on. Certainly, though, the first place I would go to look for McCoy is under characters, and not finding him there is disconcerting. My instinct here is to go back and restore those prime categories, but I don't want to do it, and then have people undo it for a perfectly good reason that I just don't know yet. So, what's the theory?

Thanks!

--bufocalvin 09:38, 31 March 2008 (EDT)

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Characters

This is where I fundamentally disagree. Every character is connected to a specific work, novels, series, movies etc. Listing characters completely unconnected to each other in one general category doesn't really aid in usability. It's just there to be there. It's not really an issue of duplication, I just don't see where it serves any usability, given the high likelihood that if you're looking for something specific a search will do the trick. I also don't think navigating by category is a particularly easy or popular way of searching....now made slower by the fact that long lists in categories has already lead us to create sub-folders anyway. It is easier to follow a hirearchy from a familiar article at this point than to navigate through the categories as they exist because the top categories now require a lot more selection to get where you want. If we're going to be creating so many subcategories it makes more sense to use them for specificity than being general, particularly when it comes to categories in which the extensive listing will cause it to expand to several pages.

It may be a failure of imagination on my part, but I think it's unlikely there are many people looking for a character with no clue as to the original source.

--MarshAngel 10:15, 31 March 2008 (EDT)

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Reply on Characters

Yes, this does seem to be a fundamental difference, and fortunately, one of the few we've had.  :) I like multiple approaches. Sometimes, I might want to see everything about a series. But yes, there, are times when I'm a browser. I might want to go from one characer to another in a characters category. It's not that I don't have any idea of their sources, it's just that I'm in that mood. Look at the books that are out there: no question that books on specific properties, like Star Trek or Doctor Who have been successful. But so have books like Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Superheroes or Vincent Terrace's Television Characters. Having a "prime directory" :) and hyperspecificity both appeal to me. If I found one character who could talk to plants, I wouldn't mind pulling that thread (characters who talk to plants) to see where it leads.

Focusing on one approach does have its advantages, of course. Making it effective for people who browse as well as for people who concentrate makes it less than optimal for either. That just isn't my philosophy when putting information out for the public.

I won't undo what you've done.

--bufocalvin 11:43, 31 March 2008 (EDT)

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