Talk:Cosmo and Wanda

Is there any evidence that this was actually authorized by Hasbro or someone in the Transformers brand? Because I really don't think that this kind of third-party social media posting falls under our purview. Grum (talk) 07:02, 7 December 2022 (EST)

Its an official ad by Nickelodeon so it should count. --GobotsFanForever (talk) 07:09, 7 December 2022 (EST)

If nothing else, it's a cross-social-media promotion for the current Transformers show by Hasbro's production and broadcast partner for that show. If we don't want to give each of these their own page, we could have a single group page like the Memobots? Or even just a subsection on the Nickelodeon page? --Riptide (talk) 10:16, 7 December 2022 (EST)

It think this is fine and harmless. If we're keeping Lizard based on one obscure callout on the packaging, we can do the same for media tied with Transformers. Saix (talk) 10:26, 7 December 2022 (EST)

I think the important thing to remember here is "official Nickelodeon ad". As far as we can tell the Transformers brand itself wasn't involved in this art at all; it's not showing up on any Transformers-related social media pages, or anything officially connected to the Transformers brand. Even stuff like the Lizard was a physical product advertised as "featuring Transformers technology" which at least indicates that there was at least a negligible level of involvement from the Transformers team somewhere along the line. It's also probably noteworthy that, from what I can tell, none of the social media captions actually use the phrase "Transformer" to describe the characters other than in the context of advertising the Earthspark show, which suggests that people involved in this were writing around trademarks. As a result, the immediate jump to making wiki pages for these characters seems, at least to me, like a scenario where Cartoon Network's Twitter page retweeted something like Derrick Wyatt's Ben 10 fanart and we made an article for it—even though Hasbro doesn't seem to have signed off on any part of the project. Obviously, these kinds of scenarios will always be grey areas, but in this case I think the apparent lack of Hasbro involvement suggests that this is a case where we err on the side of caution.

Beyond this, I think we need to lay down some concrete guidelines dealing with these kinds of commercial-exclusive crossovers, because I feel like we're already starting to bump against the limits of "notability". Like, The Hub did a promo where the Fraggle Rock characters talked about the Transformers, does that mean they should get a page? There's that one commercial where Bumblebee goes to Walmart with Lightning McQueen and Cinderella, do they get pages now? At most, I think these kinds of outside-Hasbro licensee things need to be restricted to a note in the relevant character sections, or, in the case of these Nick crossover things, a brief overview in the notes of the actual Nickelodeon page. Grum (talk) 20:14, 7 December 2022 (EST)

Right. I feel like this is something that should be -at most- rolled up into the Nickelodeon page, but is not something that should be divvied out into a bunch of individual pages. It's riiiiight up against the border of "Robot Chicken did a skit about Transformers and we don't cover that no matter how many voice actors from TF they hired". --M Sipher (talk) 20:23, 7 December 2022 (EST)

Not only does Nickelodeon have the official license to Transformers tho, but these are also official ads for EarthSpark.--GobotsFanForever (talk) 20:26, 7 December 2022 (EST)

Nickelodeon being liscenced to make a specific series doesn’t automatically mean these images are official Transformers media. Indridcold13 (talk) 20:33, 7 December 2022 (EST)

I asked pretty much this same question at Talk:Kenny McCormick, a page that was made solely on the basis that a commercial for Paramount+ included both Transformers and South Park. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 18:11, 8 December 2022 (EST)

I mean, a major question that needs to be asked is "what purpose does having a bunch of individual articles for a dozen gray-area Instagram doodles of not-Transformers characters serve?", especially as they're shitting these out at a distressing rate. It's not like any of these pages will be informative; they'll just be "this Instagram doodle was posted". It's not like anyone's going to LOOK for them. It's not like any Hasbro licensee can DO anything with them in any way that would necessitate expanding the article in the future. And in the absence of genuine usefulness... they're not funny either, especially the more they do it. Roll 'em up into a subsection on the Nickelodeon page. --M Sipher (talk) 02:17, 8 December 2022 (EST)

I’m in full agreement. These are only peripherally related at best. We can link to them or make them a gallery on the Nickelodeon page, but they don’t need to be split into individual character pages for each one. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 03:30, 8 December 2022 (EST)

At the very least tho, Raphael's page should stay because he had an appearance outside of these social media posts.--GobotsFanForever (talk) 05:55, 8 December 2022 (EST)

As far as I can tell, there’s no indication of copyright on any of these images for Hasbro, which suggests to me that Hasbro has no involvement whatsoever in these, which I think is a major point against having them. Escargon (talk) 07:19, 8 December 2022 (EST)

I think the gallery Gherkin just made is perfect and should be the extent of our coverage. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 09:49, 8 December 2022 (EST)