MediaWiki talk:Community Portal

This is the place for discussion of topics that affect the entire wiki. Some topics that would ordinarily be here have merited their own pages:

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Moving From Wikia: Arriving Leaving Complaints New Ad Policy: Ads Bookworm Database-Crash: Damage Control Central Project:Bookworm Crash Leaving Take 2 Server Move: Arriving Take 2 Relicensing: Relicensing Dealing With Vandalism: Vandalism GoBots Sister Wiki: Discussion on the place of GoBots in this wiki Wiki Technical Information: A Not So Brief Summary of the Horrible Things That McFly and Co. Have Done To Keep This Wiki From Melting Down

GoBots 2015

Hey guess what - people are using AVP to try to settle this internet score too. What a shock, I know, right? Multiple wiki editors said the scores of new one-sentence-one-source GoBot articles should all be made into a single list, read commentary here: http://www.allspark.com/forums/topic/101932-tfwikinet-thread-30/page-96

Before very many more one-sentence-one-source articles get installed, I think we should at least have some discussion here. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 13:38, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

I say make an exception and do a full coverage on Gobots.--Primestar3 (talk) 13:48, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Completely sold on combo pages by Tindalos: we already do include Related Characters on pages like Susan Hoffman, Collins (Movie). We could easily do a Guardians#Minor Guardians and Renegades#Minor Renegades for people who haven't got enough to them. (Like, Cop-Tur and Zero gets a lot said about them but Fly Trap does not) Groups like Puzzler could be all stuffed under the Puzzler page. (The Axiom Nexus Renegades, I'd cheat and say keep them on their own pages since these are meant to be Transformers in-universe.) --Charles RB (talk) 18:49, 18 October 2015 (GMT)

Most of the Gobots described by RR are getting more than one note name mentions. History, alt-modes, personality, the works. I wouldn't just conglomerate them all together. Escargon (talk) 13:59, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

However, I wouldn't be opposed to consolidating articles like Puzzler, since he's practically a drone, and the Dread Launchers and Secret Riders, since all of them share history. Escargon (talk) 14:07, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

I think making a list page is better than having numerous pages with short texts.--Primestar3 (talk) 14:15, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

If we don't do them all, combining Puzzler, Launchers,and Riders is a good idea anyway.Charles RB (talk) 19:18, 18 October 2015 (GMT)

Proof-of-concept page for if we want to list 'em up: put it under fiction (so that's easier to find), put the main Gobotron and the in-universe TFs up top, and stick the details of the minors under that. tfwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Renegade&oldid=1016174 Charles RB (talk) 19:20, 18 October 2015 (GMT)

I've been doing most of the Renegade write-ups and most of them seem to be more than just name drops. Generally we get a name, a personality, an alt mode, and often an adventure. That's easily enough for an article. For the exceptions, like Puzzler, a single overarching page isn't a bad idea, but maybe not a necessary idea. The information on the Guardians is much more sparse, and having big lists for most of them could probably work. I haven't been writing them up due to how little there is on most of them.

I am not sure where the idea comes from that having eighty small articles is a bad thing, though. The Wiki has always erred on the side of inclusiveness, which leads to pages like Spike's booty call and Moe and DeForest High, things which are also one or two line articles about people and concepts that only appear in one source. I'm not sure why this is any different. If anything, there's way more interest in the GoBot material, as evidenced by how many people are asking questions about the Renegades and how many likes and shares those pages are getting.

I'm also seeing, both in this thread and in the thread linked to, lots of interest in wikiing up the entire "Challenge of the Gobots" cartoon. McFeely, Khajidha, Saix, Sorenson, originally, and now Primestar and Gearshift all seem to be in favor. On the other side, Walky, M Sipher, Thylacine. It seems odd to me that, with the momentum apparently leaning 2:1 towards documenting all of "Challenge of the Gobots", we're talking about curtailing the bits and bobs that are definitely for sure Transformers canon. --Giggidy (talk) 15:49, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Logistical question: Do enough people have the GoBots DVD (or, cough, other sources) to write them up? (We are still lagging in fleshed out UT character pages, after all, and I think more people own those shows). -- Charles RB (talk) 19:20, 18 October 2015 (GMT)

Well, episodes are on the internet.--Primestar3 (talk) 16:01, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Episodes aren't licensed by Hasbro, so we cannot write them up and place them here. Ever.

Giggidy: this is different from the silly jokes you refer to because at least those jokes are contained within licensed Transformers material. The GoBots AS PEOPLE REMEMBER THEM - the cartoons, characters, and toys - were never released under a Hasbro license, except for a tiny minority of exceptions in text stories. Even IF we settled for allowing independent articles for everything AVP said, it could never, ever contain any material more than that, because Hasbro didn't publish it and doesn't own it.

All in all I am extremely disappointed by the... I guess, poor sportsmanship, pettiness, and entitlement... of the pro-inclusion side. This has been rehashed and reargued and relitigated year after year after year after year with very clear reasons why they do not belong, and for some reason people think none of that matters because GoBots were just cool! Well, Samhain and the Bogey Man from the DIC Ghostbusters cartoon were just cool and we've got the Ghostbusters in here as an in-joke, but we don't freaking add in Samhain the demon from a DIC cartoon through overeager bootstrapping. We also don't add in the very awesome and well-loved Dark Phoenix by extrapolation just because the Allspark Almanac mentioned an M'kraan Crystal.

The MOST that could EVER be included about any of these GoBots is the stuff AVP writes, because at least that IS put out by Hasbro. I and quite a few others think that even that much material isn't much at all and since it's coming in a rapidfire slew for a lot of characters I think a list format collection is worth discussing. If a lot of people really really really disagree, then I could rationally grasp the argument that through the loophole that has been cheated into existence they have grounds on which to disagree and the articles containing the AVP material could hypothetically each stand on their own. But that's ALL that can go there. Only AVP. No cartoon, nothing else. And even that should not be taken for granted by the pro-inclusion side. They really have to sell their case, because from here it's STILL way too heavily predicated upon "oh-come-ON!"-ism. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 16:18, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

This isn't about winning arguments from years ago-most of us weren't even signed up when the AAII came out and everybody got into a whole mess over that. Many of us honestly think that documenting the series is something that we should do and within the jurisdiction. You can disagree with putting it up on the wiki, but don't just throw about terms like "pettiness" and "entitlement" cause you don't like the opposing sides argument or the fiction causing it in the first place. Escargon (talk) 16:46, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

I would suggest Hasbro's ownership or non-ownership is irrelevant. We document many things not owned by Hasbro but merely associated with them, including the entire Japanese franchise (owned by TakaraTomy) and the entire film franchise (owned and copyrighted by Paramount, with only the Transformers elements used under license from Hasbro). --Giggidy (talk) 16:50, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Ownership by TakTom is just as legitimate as ownership by Hasbro, and licensing is just as legitimate as ownership. Things that are neither owned nor licensed by a company that actually produces real Transformers, such as a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, are not legitimate for inclusion. Otherwise we'll be throwing in fanfic and third-party toys and Family Guy episodes with TF "appearances." --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 17:04, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

There is a possible justification for their inclusion that would still bar those other things. We could decide that having had the GoBots declared to actually be TFs in a multiversal sense means that any material that was officially produced about them is now open for inclusion (the fact that it was officially produced under the auspices of Tonka would be a mere detail). This would not open the floodgates for fanfic, 3rd party materials or Family Guy. --Khajidha (talk) 17:47, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

That concept has been decided-against, here, many times. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 18:19, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Saying that we've voted against something in the past is not a strong argument for why we should vote against it now. Things change, the population of editors change, our understanding of the material changes. Gay marriage was illegal, now it's legal. I'm not saying you're stomping on my civil liberties, but you really need a more compelling argument than "we've said no before." Besides, you're the one who jumpstarted this conversation.

My point with Paramount was that there are elements that we document fully that aren't owned by Hasbro. They're owned by another corporation, and are used adjacent to Hasbro material. Hasbro doesn't own, say, Seymour Simmons. Paramount does. But we document him because he's a Transformers character. Likewise, Hasbro doesn't own some elements of Challenge of the Gobots, Hanna-Barbara does. But Kenner did license certain elements to Hanna-Barbara to make the GoBots cartoon, and Kenner is now Hasbro. Effectively it's the same situation legally. We do the same thing with other crossovers, like DreamMix TV World Fighters or the Avengers book.

And even if it wasn't, our decisions about what's in scope and what isn't is just that, our decision. It's reached by consensus, after reasoned debate. If the consensus is that Gobots is close enough, passes the squint test, we certainly could choose to include it. You're acting as if your statments are akin to "it's obvious that water is wet", a fact, when in fact they're closer to "marriage has always been defined as being between a man and a woman," a social convention. --Giggidy (talk) 18:35, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

I just saw this in the morass of text, and fuck you for equating "not including GoBots cartoon" with "ban gay marriage". REALLY tempted to drop a ban on you right now for that little act of vileness. Holy fucking shit. --M Sipher (talk) 18:53, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I am not purporting to cite stone tablets from a thousand years ago - I am referring back to the conversation FOUR MONTHS AGO directly above this one. Your reference to DreamMix proves my point perfectly: we include things that had an official Transformers creator stamp at time of publication, like Simon Belmondo, and NOT ancillary same-universe stuff that DID NOT, like Sypha Belnades. Ditto for Avenger characters that never had the stamp like the Brothers Grimm or whatever. We don't get to enjoy our way past the clear concept of who really owned and licensed what and when. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 18:55, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

So we've got the two positions:

a) GoBots the cartoon is not Hasbro licensed or involved in any way; we should only properly cover GB stuff in Hasbro-approved stuff like Fun Publications, AVP, comic homages etc

b) Approved stuff has now made so many GoBots nods and explicit references to the show (all the way back to 2007 and almost 2004) that this is no longer a big jump but a natural thing to do.

without much budging. We could put it up to an editor vote? --Charles RB (talk) 18:49, 18 October 2015 (GMT)

It might be a bit off topic, but are you sure about Simmons? Hasbro put out a Human Alliance toy with Agent Simmons. I don't have the box and didn't read all the fine print, but the front of the box has "Agent Simmons™" next to a Hasbro logo. One movieverse character that might be wholly affiliated with paramount and not Hasbro might be Bendy-Bus Prime. - Gimmick (talk) 19:00, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

We include stuff that includes Transformers even without an official Transformers stamp, like Unfoldings!. And the conversation four months ago looks like it was 4 in favor, 3 against, so it's not really a great argument for you. --Giggidy (talk) 19:10, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

How in the world can you imagine an issue of the GIJoe comic starring Transformers to NOT BE official licensed product? --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 19:24, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

I didn't say that it wasn't licensed. I said it didn't have a Transformers stamp. --Giggidy (talk) 19:39, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Also by my count of the last conversation it was 2 in favor, 4 against, 1 seemingly not strongly decided, and 1 recusal due to professional conflict of interest. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 19:50, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

My count: McFeely, Khajidha, Saix, Sorenson, for, Walky, M Sipher, Thylacine against. Sorenson's position was clear. And M Sipher also worked professional on GoBots, so if we're discounting Sorenson, we should probably discount Sipher as well. --Giggidy (talk) 20:22, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Unfoldings is Hasbro-stamped though, and we don't describe much of the Joe plot.

Either way, if it was that close a call last time, should we just aye or nay it?--Charles RB (talk) 00:14, 19 October 2015 (GMT)

It's been like four hours. This is a big decision and should have at least 2-3 days debate. Honestly, I haven't even decided how I feel, I just think Thy's arguments are pretty weak. That doesn't mean there aren't some strong ones. Let's not go calling for votes just yet. --Giggidy (talk) 19:18, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Help:Official info: the first sentence under "What constitutes official information?" seems relevant here. There is no way anything included in the movies is anything less than relevant to this wiki. --abates (talk) 19:26, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

"Simply put, anything coming either directly or indirectly from Hasbro and/or TakaraTomy, or from other official parties such as (currently) IDW Publishing, Paramount Pictures, Fun Publications or other companies officially involved with the Transformers brand."

Right. And since Kenner is wholly owned by Hasbro, then despite being owned by Hanna-Barbara, GoBots was (retroactively) coming directly from Hasbro as much as the movies are. Then the only question becomes is GoBots a Transformers subline. Hasbro and FunPub seem to feel that it is, and have been using the name andconcepts for decades.--Giggidy (talk) 19:39, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

The key - and wrong - word being "retroactively." Takara's Diaclones became Transformers, and there are occasional Diaclone references we catalog. But we do not catalog 1970s-80s pre-Transformer content as anything beyond curiosities and footnotes; they don't get their box-back name-dropped characters and events covered here; in fact the "Cymond" content we have is new, not vintage. The same goes for Macross and Beetras and Brave as well. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 19:57, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Also, I feel that I should point out that some members of the Wiki are at TFCon at the moment and unable to take part in this discussion. --abates (talk) 20:05, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Another excellent reason not to rush into any hasty votes.--Giggidy (talk) 20:16, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Well I'm back and guess what? Fuck individual articles. Stuff them all into a single "Renegade" article. The idea of a ton of two-sentence articles from a singular source that is blatantly doing this to ramrod shit we have repeatedly and recently said "no" to remains goddamn stupid and counter-productive. There's better arguments for documenting everything G.I. Joe than GoBots, and we're not fucking doing that. MAKE A SEPARATE GOBOTS WIKI. --M Sipher (talk) 20:29, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Except since the whole thing's started, it's moved on from name drops to actually expanding the histories of the characters, which is why many are turning back to the idea of individual Gobot articles. There's plenty of G.I. Joes and Cobra members who do nothing of note in the series they appear in with the TFs, but the only consolidated one is the Dreadnoks since they share most of their appearances together, which could work for Puzzler and others like that. Escargon (talk) 20:54, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Making the separate Go-Bots articles doesn't take away anything from the rest of the wiki. And if they're short articles, well, they are what they are. We have recorded the entirety of Transformers fiction covering their subject on one page, and that fiction is very sparse, but it is accurate, and faithful to the wiki's mission of documenting information. Beyond that though, I'd say I'd vote against merging in information about non-Hasbro/Takara/whatevs owned properties into the articles, such as the Go-Bots cartoon. A sister wiki seems like it would be the best idea, though I can't volunteer my services to completing it as of right now, as I'm pretty thoroughly engaged on other projects on THIS wiki. --Ascendron (talk) 21:13, 18 October 2015 (EDT)

Call for Vote

It's been a week since this last came up and I know there are people still pissed that GoBots stuff is added at all, so can we pull the pin and decide? We all know the arguments by now. Whether we should reduce most of the existing GoBot pages or leave them (this seems to be all they're getting now Renegade Rhetoric's ended) is an important but I think separate issue to: include GoBots fiction in its entirety on this wiki or do not include anything but what comes out under Hasbro material.
At this point I've swung round to being against adding Challenge material; it should have its own wiki, which could be created tomorrow if people wanted. --Charles RB (talk) 01:19, 26 October 2015 (GMT)

I vote for leaving the Go-Bot articles as we have them now. They're hardly "two-sentence articles" for the most part, and whether we personally like something or not hardly has bearing on its inclusion in the wiki. Lots of people hate The Beast Within, but its here. And AVP has more people involved in its production, and more research put through it than that comic did. When there's going to be a Go-Bot's wiki, we'll link it in the articles like we do to other outside wikis. --Ascendron (talk) 21:36, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

I'm in favour of keeping the existing AVP, FunPub stuff too. Just draw the line there and all. --Charles RB (talk) 01:40, 26 October 2015 (GMT)

By the way, thanks to all the editors who have been working hard to keep all the Guardians and Renegades articles updated! It's a big help, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates it greatly. --Ascendron (talk) 21:44, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

I've been thinking on this and, despite the relatively weak arguments against including Challenge material, something about including it feels off to me. I think intellectually the case for inclusion is very strong, but I think emotionally it'd probably feel better somewhere else. I'd agree with Charles about voting on against full-on-wikifying Challenge. I've also been one of several people writing-up the GoBots articles and I'd strenuously disagree with deleting them. There is plenty of information on even the scantiest of them, including at the minimum names, factions, actions taken. The wiki is replete with articles for less. In the case of virtually every Renegade, we get at least two adventures, personality, and alt modes. Some Guardians get similar treatment. A few characters have visuals. It'd be silly to torch them.

As I said, I've been thinking on this and I think there may be a compromise solution between the two extremes, one of a big list due to a relative paucity of material, the other of wikifying everything from Challenge. I propose we only wiki up what's actually been said about the characters in a Transformers medium... but, to give the articles a little more oomph, we add in a main picture from Challenge if (and only if) there is no official Transformers image available. We've in the past shown a willingness to use these images in the notes section, so we'd only be bumping them up to the top. The copyright shouldn't be an issue, Challenge of the Gobots sports a Tonka copyright, and Tonka is wholly owned by Hasbro. This way we're still limiting to the "facts" of Transformers, but the articles will look and feel a little more robust. Only one image per character, and then only if they haven't gotten an official illustration. Thoughts?--Giggidy (talk) 21:45, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

It is unacceptable to catalog "Challenge" here. It is not and never has been owned by a Transformers license-holder, and I can't fathom how this could be seen as a weak argument. Even if AVP made every GoBot article 20 pages long, the cartoon never had the stamp and so any form of systematic involvement should be out. If that means a whole slew of articles with no main images, then that is the price for creating so many individual articles instead of a list. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 21:55, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

http://machinerobo.wikia.com/wiki/Gobots

Have fun. --Monzo (talk) 21:57, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

I feel like everyone's forgetting that even before AVP came into play, we had images from COTG on the wiki-Cy-Kill, the E-Hobby pack, Doctor Braxis, all in the notes section. The ones that didn't, I think nobody just felt like adding them. Fracture had Crasher's image in her notes section, and Deadlift had Spoons. So, yes, as long as they're in the notes section, with the images having all the copyright information. they'll probably be fine.

As for the wiki, I feel like a great many of us would rather have a sister site than some ad-filled mess of a page. My computer can't even handle going on it for a full minute without making me restart it. Escargon (talk) 22:02, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

What Thy said. This is not fucking up for debate. All the AVP end-run wank isn't going to change the FACT that large swaths of the GoBots IP are NOT owned by Hasbro, including the cartoon and toys said cartoon was derived from, the latter being owned by a direct competitor to both TF-owning companies. Frankly, I'm not even sure what, if anything, Hasbro DOES own from that IP, given they haven't used an overtly-GoBots Trademark in what, a decade? At best they MIGHT still own the name "GoBots", and I mean "own" in the sense that "nobody's bothered to challenge it so far". --M Sipher (talk) 22:15, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

My two cents is that despite my personal wish for all GoBots information to go on tfwiki, I say that as long as this wiki's rules are based on Transformers information (Hasbro, Takara, etc.-only), then the non-Hasbro owned CotG cartoon and such doesn't go on this wiki. In addition for convenience of navigation for GoBots fans, a sister wiki for GoBots would help for finding strictly GoBots information. Also, if we were to put CotG on the wiki, then on principle would we have to add in Robotix and all the Cymond Cluster franchises (Brave, Zoids, etc) because they're in the Transformers multiverse?

With regards to GoBots material in Transformers works ("Withered Hope", Renegade Rhetoric, the hopefully upcoming "Spatiotemporal Challenges", etc.), I say that it goes on the wiki because it was distributed through a Transformers medium. And gets individual articles as does G.I. Joe or anything like that. And given the influence of GoBots on Transformers, I agree that we make the exception to use limited CotG screencaps as the main pictures for GoBots characters on the wiki since we've been doing that for years in notes sections. S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 01:42, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I vote against turning an EXCEPTION from like 4 pages into THE RULE on a hundred. "Challenge" screencaps should not be used as main pics on every single GoBot page. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 11:21, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Reiterating this point: since the individual articles already exist it's probably just easier to leave them. However, I strongly suggest a total block on any further use of any unlicensed GoBots media appearances, of any kind. No more "Challenge," no more coloring books, not even as Notes, let alone as main pics. If folks want to leave up the small handful of longstanding examples we've got, eh. But since there a very real distinction between GoBots IP that is allowed / available and that which is not, we should draw a firm line, stick with it, and prevent any further inclusion of material that doesn't pass the usual rules of ownership / licensing. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 19:03, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Oh, yes, nothing past the requirements should be included. I do agree with that. And I doubt we'll have any more Gobots related stuff for AVP. Escargon (talk) 19:08, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Nays are having it so far.
Giggidy's suggestion of putting screencaps in Notes for some pages seems like workable, unless there's acopyright issue o people will consider it thin-edging the wedge --Charles RB (talk) 08:04, 26 October 2015 (GMT)

I might've been in favour of it before, but I too have swung around to thinking the Challenge cartoon doesn't fall within our remit, as a piece of media that was not ever, and is still not, owned or licensed by a Transformers rights-holder. I'm not averse to using screencaps from the cartoon for pictures, though. I'd also say we can definitely merge the components of Puzzler and Monsterous into singular articles under the combiner names. - Chris McFeely (talk) 06:49, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Much of the story information that AVP revealed about the GoBots characters is straightforward recapitulation of episodes of CotG. Do we need/want to put a note to that effect on the character pages? If so, should it just be something general like "events are adapted from the CotG cartoon" or should we note the episode titles for the different events? Should/could we link to Counter-X's episode summaries? --Khajidha (talk) 11:19, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Most of the AVP stuff seems to be original. Where it's not I've been mentioning the episodes. Linking to Counter-X is a good idea. --Giggidy (talk) 11:51, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Not sure how much of a vote is actually happening here, but me and my seven years worth of contributions vote No to Challenge or further GoBots additions to the Wiki. I would remove or block any individual pages for GoBots characters due to AVP. I already think tongue-in-cheek reference pages like Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones are silly, and probably contributed to the all-inclusive mentality people are fighting against here.

Has/Tak only owns a small fragment of GoBots IP. This Wiki, like every Wiki and every fan website on the internet, exists at the sufferance of the property's owners. So while there are in-universe, multiversal collaborations between Marvel and DC continuity, you'll notice they still retain separate Wikis. It doesn't matter how closely related Transformers and GoBots become in the fictional realities -- real world reality has to govern this site.

Personally, I like the way the Marvel Wiki deals with Transformers -- each issue of the Marvel Comic contains an issue summary and cast list of the Marvel story, but the individual links on that page leave the Marvel wiki and go to the Transformers wiki (albeit the wrong TF Wiki, but they are on wikia). There is no Bluestreak (G1) page on the Marvel Database, even though he appeared in a Marvel Comic...just a link to a Transformers wiki that can actually cover the character in-depth as he deserves.

My recommendation is to reduce all of Renegades Rhetoric to a single story page, chronicling the many adventures and details provided by Has/Tak owned Axiom Nexus's Cy-Kill in one place, with no individual Guardian or Renegade pages on this wiki. If and when a functional Gobots Wiki is created, link the characters and concepts to THAT wiki where they can be covered in full. --Xaaron (talk) 11:50, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

That tactic gets my vote. The "minor joke article" was a bit of harmless fun back when the franchise was much smaller, and we do not need to kowtow to it when something comes along to abuse the wiki's "system" to do something of dubious legal standing. (Really ought to look at how the GB page addresses Hasbro's "ownership" and elaborate.) For the quadzillionth time, our "rules" need to be flexible and typically ARE, but some people really just can't handle the idea of not treating everything with the same ironclad law at all times, no matter what affect it has on the overall wiki. --M Sipher (talk) 14:41, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I vote against it. Ultimately passing the buck off to another wiki isn't my idea of being informative. Where others would do that, we work hard to cover as much as what falls within our realm to cover. (Which, as it happens, does NOT include the COTG cartoon) That's what makes us stand out, in terms of both content and quality, above many other wikis out there. And I don't even think the franchise was ever even that small. That was just an illusion created by the fact that a lot of it had gone on undocumented for a long time. People need to stop making this out like its some kind of personal attack against us. What's it gonna harm that there are a few pages out there like the Harrison Ford page article? Are people gonna flip out and swear never to use our wiki again if they stumble across it? Are we going to be sneered at and ridiculed by some internet aristocracy because our "credibility" will be in doubt or something? I doubt its eating up much space in terms of bandwith or whatever. And no one will make any legal advance that has any ground here. Wikis wouldn't exist as a concept if that would regularly happen. Where is the harm? --Ascendron (talk) 14:49, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

That's a "nay" from me on cutting the small number of deliberately silly pages: we're long past the point that this wiki can say that's not on, unless we can say that it puts people off visiting. Casual fans and browsers seem to like them. -- Charles RB (talk) 20:22, 26 October 2015 (GMT)

I wasn't actually advocating removing the Harrison Ford-style joke articles. (Not a fan of taking a whole article to say "Somebody mentioned Broadside (SG) once!", either.) Just pointing out pages like that contributed to the mind set of including articles for every person, place, or thing mentioned in Transformers fiction. The difference, of course, is that no one is trying to write up full articles about the Indiana Jones franchise here instead of making an Indy wiki. --Xaaron (talk) 17:30, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I wasn't either. I'd have thought the intention was clear: that the allowing of "harmless fun" articles of small references from when the franchise was VASTLY smaller was now being intentionally abused as an end-run around something that was decided against long ago for being not-HasTak-owned/licensed, one of the few pretty concrete rules we do have, and a fundamental one at that. Therefore I have no compunctions about making an exception to the general guideline (which we often have to do anyway) and compacting the information to a minimal number of pages... especially given the dubious nature of Hasbro's "ownership" of the GoBots IP (among other IPs mentioned in certain sources). --M Sipher (talk) 18:32, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I actually expected more arguments for adding COTG material - check up the page and there have been more! Interest seems to have collapsed. -- Charles RB (talk) 20:34, 26 October 2015 (GMT)

Honestly, at this point, most-if not all-articles for the Gobots have been created. I really don't think it would hurt anyone to just leave them up. We can argue about all the IP ownership all we want, but as Ascendron already pointed out, we have other articles that don't exactly line up with Hasbro-owned stuff either-Hasbro certainly didn't shout at IDW for including Transformers in a Crossover that also involved a rival company (Playmates and Ninja Turtles). Escargon (talk) 18:39, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

...Are you actually contending that IDW didn't run the scope and parameters of the giant crossover by Hasbro at all before doing it? That the crossover wasn't extensively okayed by every rightsholder involved beforehand? Because there's no other way to interpret what you just said, and that's a staggeringly stupid premise. --M Sipher (talk) 18:49, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Stay classy, M Sipher. --Giggidy (talk) 19:06, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

classy? is this the part of the thread where we equate gay marriage to gobots being on the transformers wiki --ItsWalky (talk) 20:17, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I don't believe he was literally equating the two-he was using a recent example of rules changing from previous. Could he have used a better example? Yes, probably, but I understood what he was getting at, and I say this as someone who would be affected by said laws. Escargon (talk) 20:44, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

No, of course not. However, what I can say from experience: as our audience grew bigger, we did go back and make changes to the older gobots-involved answers. A couple model sheets here and there were deleted, because Warner Bros could have potentially sued Hasbro. I don't think we would've even gone through with Cy-Kill if it hadn't been without someone giving us the okay first-and even then, we made sure to delete an old avatar with Cy-Kill Hanna-Barbara face on it. Escargon (talk) 18:55, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I'd be okay with a separate wiki that we could just link to when GoBots came up. I mean, the GoBots franchise has been basically dead for thirty years outside of a few winks from Transformers (with the exception of the Cy-Kill thing that started this whole debate), so I don't think it'd ever get too out of hand. Obviously time, money, and access to the show are factors in this solution, so it might not be 100% viable. Grum (talk) 19:57, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

Sorry if this is a really dumb question, but if the whole not-Hasbro IP thing matters for this wiki, then what stops sites like the Machine Robo wikia from using any GoBots material at all? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 20:55, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

The rules of this web site have no relevance to any other wikis, and the Machine Robo wikia does indeed include GoBots material. --abates (talk) 22:12, 26 October 2015 (EDT)

I was debating with myself whether or not to make this post, but it's going to bug me if I don't. Here goes. Obviously, a lot of us have become pretty emotionally involved in this topic. People say hurtful and stupid things when emotions run high. But if you're going to debate with someone, its important to challenge their arguments, and not attack the debater themselves... Despite whatever slip-ups may happen. I don't really know any of you. I can't really call any of you friends, because I'm not involved in any forums, and I don't attend conventions... But I respect many people's work ethic here, especially since we're all volunteering our time for the wiki. For the information itself, I get it that people are getting upset that information is being "snuck in" as a deliberate attempt to get it documented on the wiki. But if someone else got the job of getting to create fiction related to the Transformers brand, and used it as they saw fit, well I'm hardly in a position to debate that. They get to do stuff I never will, and as an adult, I have to concede to such defeats. Ultimately, it comes down to this: I believe that, for the most part, keeping the information on separate pages as they are currently is the best and most informative way to share it with whoever chooses to browse our wiki. (Some of the combiner components can be combined, as their importance relates wholly to the fact that they're components to a more important character). If anyone is able to prove me wrong by presenting even a crude mock-up that shows a better way of accomplishing that task, I will gladly change my stance on the issue. But we can do that by being civil and respectful. --Ascendron (talk) 04:40, 27 October 2015 (EDT)

Bottom line, GoBots shouldn't be treated any differently, and certainly not any better, than G.I. Joe on this Wiki. The Joes are a fully owned Hasbro franchise with decades of interactive history with the Transformers brand, BUT...all the images of Snake Eyes or Cobra Commander on the TF Wiki are from TF stuff, not from the Sunbow cartoon that was not connected to Transformers. No one is trying to explain Snake-Eyes' Vietnam origins in his Notes section, unlike the Doctor Braxis Notes section stuffed with COTG references. Because people understand that if you want to read about G.I. Joe, you go to a G.I. Joe website...which this isn't. --Xaaron (talk) 13:02, 27 October 2015 (EDT)

Vote Results

It's been more than 24 hours with no movement one way or the other, and even then, the stuff from yesterday seems like rehashing old arguments. Is now a fair time to tally? The voting is complicated because there are multiple proposals on the table.

• Proposal: Complete cataloging of "Challenge of the Gobots"
  • Supporters: Khajidha

• Proposal: Condensing all Ask Vector Prime GoBots pages down to just one or two master pages, probably Guardians and Renegades or Renegade Rhetoric
  • Supporters: Xaaron, M Sipher

• Proposal: Expand coverage of Ask Vector Prime GoBots to include "Challenge of the Gobots" screen captures
  • Supporters: Giggidy, Chris McFeely, Escargon, Charles RB, S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47, Khajidha, tentative Riptide

• Proposal: Expand coverage of Ask Vector Prime GoBots to include link to Counter-X website
  • Supporters: Khajidha, Giggidy, Riptide, Saix

• Proposal: Treat Renegade Rhetoric like any other source, no condensation but also no expansion such as screen captures
  • Supporters: Thylacine 2000

• Proposal: Pics from outside media goes in the notes section on character pages. Some Go-Bots pics can go there, otherwise wait until Transformers media includes original art of these characters.
  • Supporters: Ascendron

I think I got everyone's position represented. Grum, I'm not really sure which camp you fell into. Regardless, it's clear that there's a solid majority in favor of documenting everything from Ask Vector Prime fully, with exceptions when it's sensible to do so such as with Puzzler and Monsterous. The good news is that this is exactly the current state of the wiki. No further action is required. Though it's ironic and a little sad that it took so much acrimony and name calling to get to the point of doing nothing different than we are now.

I'm less confident declaring victory on the screen capture question. M Sipher, Thylacine 2000, and Xaaron have all made their position against clear, as have the five supporters. I'd be curious to hear from Khajidha, Ascendron, and Grum on that issue before we go expanding them. I'm not sure if their silence indicates indifference, lack of awareness, or simply opposition to that proposal. --Giggidy (talk) 15:43, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

Didn't say anything until now since I didn't really have anything new to add, but I would vote for Counter-X and... maaaaaybe screencaps, but I'm indecisive on that one. --Riptide (talk) 15:53, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

I'm divided about the screencaps... My gut instinct says that it would be a good addition to the pages... But I almost would feel, I dunno, hypocritical giving my full support to their inclusion, seeing as I'm usually very steadfast in my stance of only including stuff that's official. I suppose I can justify it to myself, as their inclusion would do more good than harm as far as how informative they would make the articles... Let's just not go overboard with it? One pic for each guy, maybe less if a single picture does a good job of showcasing multiple characters? --Ascendron (talk) 16:31, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

Yes, that was my original proposal. One and only one, less where possible. Couldn't agree more. --Giggidy (talk) 16:42, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

Actually, I'm in favor of complete GoBots coverage, but have bowed to the overwhelming opposition on that score. TOTALLY opposed to the wholesale reduction approach. Favor screen caps (but expect that not to come about). Favor Counter-X links. I would prefer that the combiner members have their own pages, but the limited information available currently makes the redirection to the combined form page at least as viable a solution.--Khajidha (talk) 16:30, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

If we do include these screencaps, I would also like to request that we make it explicitly clear that they are not owned by Hasbro, and are not official Transformers images on the image's page itself. I was almost tempted to say in their captions on the characters' pages, but even I think that's a bit too extreme. So long as someone can learn quickly that the images do not come from an actual Transformers source if they make the effort of looking up the image's information. --Ascendron (talk) 16:44, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

For full coverage on GoBots as given in any Transformers media. Counter-X links seem like a no-brainer. Saix (talk) 17:46, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

I said on Oct.26, 19:03, that it would probably at this point be best to leave all the articles up as they are. So if the only issue actually up for decision now is whether to include COTG screenshots, then I firmly vote against that, and see it as sufficiently against our rules of documenting official HasTak material that I'm not entirely sure a vote is even appropriate. We agree on AVP - well AVP itself says COTG screenshots aren't HasTak property and couldn't be used, hence why they themselves took down the first Cy-Kill picture. I think people should be satisfied with what they got. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 18:49, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

Sorry, I missed that. --Giggidy (talk) 19:00, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

It's true that it's not in line with our policy entirely, but it would be nice for people reading the pages access to an image on the page, just so that they don't have to go hop over to google or whatever other website to see a visual representation of them. That's my main reasoning behind supporting this idea despite not being 100% behind it. --Ascendron (talk) 19:19, 28 October 2015 (EDT)

At first, I think we could include Gobots cartoon here but now I changed my thoughts. They are not owned by Hasbro. But I wonder if Hasbro buys the rights to the cartoon, can we include the cartoon on this wiki then? I'm just curious.--Primestar3 (talk) 07:12, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

I'd still say no because it's not Transformers. Like I said with G.I.Joe, we don't use images of Joes or Cobras from their 80's cartoon -- only from Transformers-related crossover media. --Xaaron (talk) 10:34, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

<<<<<Not mentioning the Joe franchise character that actually has a non-TF related main pic....>>>>> --Khajidha (talk) 13:58, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

Well we've got Transformers-branded visuals for reference for G.I. Joe characters. Less so for GoBots characters. Would it not be prudent to have visual points of reference for the GoBots who have appeared in Transformers fiction? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 14:25, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

It absolutely would. But we don't HAVE visual points of reference for those GoBots from Transformers fiction. We would have to take images from other fiction/mediums. And if we did it for GoBots, why not add some pictures for Jem, the Inhumanoids' Earth Corps, or the Darkling Lords? The aforementioned Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones pages don't have visual references either, for that matter. The Fantastic Four could probably use a better visual reference than that cropped cover border, so...

Do you see how this snowballs out of control? --Xaaron (talk) 16:08, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

My initial suggestion of just putting a picture in the note section is still out there, by the way. I kinda dropped it because no one really seemed on board... But I figured if we have the leeway to put up pics outside of Transformers fiction there, like we did for the Beast, and for that matter, Cy-kill, we could just do the same for all the Go-Bots characters. I know it's kinda seem like a silly game of working our way through loopholes, but it still is what I would personally prefer... Best of both worlds kind of thing. We still get a visual representation of the character in the article itself, most articles are short enough that the picture would be apparent immediately, but we'd still be sticking to our policy of only using official pictures in the body of the article. The picture is there as an aside, an addition to a note of "by the way, this guy is from this cartoon not owned by Hasbro." Like, look at the Night Ranger article. That's a great article right there! All the Go-Bots articles should be formatted like that. --Ascendron (talk) 16:21, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

That Night Ranger article actually turns me off the idea of putting pictures in the notes section. There's a huge unsightly gap of white space there between the external links section and the box with the categories in it. --abates (talk) 17:02, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

But that's only because that picture is a character model, which is taller than it is wide. Screencaps are wider than they are tall, and wouldn't create nearly as much whitespace! And we could do what we did with the Zebediah Braxis article, where we go in a bit of a brief overview of the character's role in the cartoon/ "Made-up Guy filled the role of the impressionable young kid-appeal character in the Go-Bots cartoon, similar as how Bumblebee did in the original Transformers cartoon." Something like that. --Ascendron (talk) 17:07, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

...Which goes right back to doing what we were complaining about in the first place, which is detailing COTG on the TFWiki! This is how quickly it gets out of control. "Well, we're not allowed to cover Challenge of the GoBots, but these pages would look nicer with some images. Okay, we're allowed to put one image in the Notes section as a visual reference, but now it looks unsightly so we'll add some details about COTG to justify having the pictures. Okay, well, we're already talking about COTG in the Notes now, so..."

- Covering the GoBots material produced under the Transformers franchise...Yes.

- Adding non-TF GoBots material so that the TF GoBots pages look better...No. --Xaaron (talk) 17:24, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

I think it looking "unsightly" is really a minor problem. And I didn't mean covering their every appearance. More along the lines of a blip of information. I'm sure a few characters could have more notes that would be informative and interesting to "pad out" the note section if the white space is that big of an issue, (which I don't think it is... Ugly, maybe, but I'd rather have an article that is "unsightly" than uninformative or goes against the wiki's rules.) Stuff like "he was also voiced by this guy who voiced this transformers character" or "this Transformers character is an homage to him," if stuff like that applies. You know, things that we already do for other character pages anyways. --Ascendron (talk) 17:33, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

Honestly the more the argument for adding in hundreds of unlicensed, non-TF images comes to hinge desperately on "You did it 5 years ago for Dr. Braxis and 8 years ago for Cobra Commander!", the more it starts to be an argument for deleting those pictures from Dr. Braxis and Cobra Commander. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 19:12, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

It's not like there's a shortage of CC images from TF fiction. --M Sipher (talk) 04:04, 30 October 2015 (EDT)

Just to note here, with all the comparisons being made to our handling of G.I. Joe, we've always treated the Joes with more leeway than we have, say, Spider-Man or Godzilla. A lot of our Joe articles include real names and factoids taken from filecards and such, and yes, even in one isolated instance a piece of art that's not from a TF source, because there was no point to the "wilful ignorance" gag, since it wasn't funny - everyone knows who Spider-Man and Godzilla are, but nobody knows who Seymour P. Fine is. There's no need for such wilful ignorance on Go-Bots either, given how repeatedly tied-in to Transformers it has become - it's not a Simon Belmondo or a Solid Snake, it's as much part of the Transformers "family" now as Joe is, even if its situation is a bit thornier. - Chris McFeely (talk) 17:47, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

If I could make another suggestion. Could we maybe forestall this discussion until after AVP has wrapped up? It is what kicked off this whole discussion. I don't want to "encourage" the feature to "spam" a whole bunch of Gobots screencaps... But it has already brought in a little bit of artwork for Go-Bots articles anyways, and with both VP's return to the storyline, and contact having been made to a Gargent Universe recently, any number of things could happen to influence this discussion one way or another, or even render it moot. --Ascendron (talk) 18:06, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

Unless Hasbro buys Bandai and/or Hanna-Barbera, nothing in AVP could change that we're really not allowed to have systematic coverage of Challenge (and that includes screencaps on ~100 articles) here. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 19:08, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

We're allowed to cover whatever we decide is in scope. We have no affiliation with Hasbro. The fact that the copyright notice on the episodes themselves gives ownership to Tonka, a Hasbro subsidiary, is a bonus. --Giggidy (talk) 19:20, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

AVP already HAS posted screencaps that were are using... Not to mention some original art of Cy-kill. It's a longshot, but it's already happened once. --Ascendron (talk) 19:22, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

I actually don't like using most of those screencaps - they WEREN'T posted by AVP, they were posted by dickish users trying to game the system, and were only acknowledged by Cy-Kill. Further, a quick look back at the FB page suggests the question threads they were posted in were deleted. - Chris McFeely (talk) 19:28, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

Just checked, they're still there. However, I wouldn't use them outside the Src page. Escargon (talk) 19:37, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

Hmm... Should we use the pics AVP deleted outside of source pages at all? Thinking about the Cy-Kill profile pic. Not like we don't have another one to replace it with. --Ascendron (talk) 19:43, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

Escargon is correct, we haven't deleted anything recently. Chris is also correct, you haven't seen us post screen captures from Challenge in the pages of Ask Vector Prime. We have acknowledged art and captures that others have posted. Also, regarding this: "Could we maybe forestall this discussion until after AVP has wrapped up?", it might be a long wait. --Jimsorenson (talk) 19:47, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

I hadn't realized that AVP hadn't posted those pics themselves (not gotten to that point yet while working through it in my sandbox. In light of this, I've changed my stance, and changed up there earlier in this thread. I'm now going to stay out of this conversation, since I want to dedicate my energies to other stuff for the time being. --Ascendron (talk) 19:54, 29 October 2015 (EDT)

With no activity on this page for 3 days, I think we can comfortably assess the results. It looks like the vote was better than 2:1 in favor of including Challenge of the GoBots screen captures on the pages, but a healthy caution against overuse. One and only one image per page, and only when official images are not available.

I've also done some homework into the copyright status and it would appear that Warner Bros. is still acknowledging Hasbro's copyright claim. Each Challenge of the Gobots box set and disk is marked with text to the effect of "GOBOTS and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and (C) Hasbro Inc." The only thing Hanna-Barbera lays claim to is the actual compilation of the DVDs, and even that is in conjunction with Hasbro: "Program Compilation (C) Hanna-Barbera and Hasbro Inc." The DVD packaging, however, is off-limits. "Package Design (C) Hanna-Barbera and and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc." The episodes themselves give copyright exclusively to Tonka. Hopefully this reassures some of Xaaron's concerns, which seemed more legal than philosophical. There are links to photos of the copyright notices on my user page. --Giggidy (talk) 01:42, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Or maybe with 3 days of inactivity on this page, we can consider the matter tabled, what with how time after time the more people talk about it and actually listen to counterpoints the more they realize it's a bad idea and (as we see above) come to change their minds to be against it. If the character and animation likenesses are off-limits even to AVP in the last few days, that should give pause. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 07:05, 3 November 2015 (EST)

• WHAT AM I ARGUING AGAINST AND IS ANGER AN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE?!?

SRSLY, though? If some user's posted screencaps make those screencaps TF canon - wouldn't the poster themselves also become canon? Wouldn't Facebook become canon? Draw the damn line, people; we're never going to be a comprehensive GoBots source unless we fully document the toyline and the cartoon. That ain't happening, not on this wiki at least. Accept that, and our mandate is back to recording only what's mentioned in official TF sources, even obnoxiously, willfully fanwankish ones like AVP alas. -- Repowers (talk) 07:41, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Why not redraw the line to include all GoBots materials? No, it doesn't fit the current definition of our mandate but it is a logically consistent one. No, we would not then have to include all GIJoe, etc materials because there is a fundamental difference. GIJoe is in the same universe as Transformers, GoBots have been declared to be Transformers. --Khajidha (talk) 08:34, 3 November 2015 (EST)

You answer your own question: It isn't within our mandate and it's not logically consistent because we really then should put in all of GIJoe but we won't do GIJoe because reasons. This has always been a push to change the scope and inclusion criteria for this wiki due to arbitrary personal favoritism. It could only be indulged through this sort of arbitrary personal favoritism. That's not what standards are for. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 09:36, 3 November 2015 (EST)

You missed my point. It's not within the current mandate, but we could redraw the line to make it our new mandate. --Khajidha (talk) 10:08, 3 November 2015 (EST)

I would further suggest that we've settled this issue, at least until something new comes along to change it, so this discussion becomes a distraction from a genuinely unsettled question. I'm not saying your arguments are invalid, Khajidha, I'm saying that everyone's heard them and there was a clear and convincing consensus against you. Sometimes when that happens, the adult and mature thing to do is concede that you're in the minority and move on. --Giggidy (talk) 09:41, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Go. Make. A. GoBots. Wiki. "Problem" solved. -- Repowers (talk) 19:31, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Vote Results again for reals maybe? Focus only on Screencapture

• Proposal: No Screen Captures
  • Supporters: Xaaron, M Sipher, Thylacine 2000, Repowers, ItsWalky, Nevermore, Chris McFeely, Ascendron

• Proposal: Expand coverage of Ask Vector Prime GoBots to include limited "Challenge of the Gobots" screen captures, either in notes or main page
  • Supporters: Giggidy, Escargon, S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47, Khajidha, Saix

• Proposal: Screen captures on a case by case basis
  • Supporters: Abates, Charles RB, Riptide

This is where the current vote stands focusing entirely on the issue of screen captures. Repowers, I took the liberty of adding you to the no column. Please feel free to remove if you like. Thylacine 2000, I respect your passion but there is a difference between "my argument convinced one guy to change his proposal from screen captures in every main page section to screen captures in every notes sections" to "my argument is so good I've picked up supporters in droves." You've said lots and lots and lots of words on this subject and you're still losing 2:1.--Giggidy (talk) 09:02, 3 November 2015 (EST)

And you've said some pretty outrageous and dishonest words on this topic, including immediately above this. At the very least, Ascendron, Escargon, and McFeely changed their positions to be against. This is the second time in a week that you have just happened to get the results wrong in a way that just happens to benefit your side. It is really depressing, though no doubt I only feel that way because I'm a violent gaybasher or however you choose to characterize this dispute. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 09:23, 3 November 2015 (EST)

I think including one image for informative purposes in the notes section is fine—just as a "this is what this character looks like". This isn't what I want, but I feel like it's a fair enough compromise. Saix (talk) 09:17, 3 November 2015 (EST)

I don't think I have misrepresented their positions, but if I do I apologize. Ascendron said he was moving to notes. McFeely came out in support of the screen capture proposal but didn't like the current way screen captures posted in the AVP comments and acknowledged by Cy-Kill were handled. Not sure what you're talking about with Escargon. But, to do due diligence, I'll follow up with all three. And I am not, and have not, and hopefully will not attack your character in any way. Also, as far as I can tell, going over the edit history, if I got the first vote wrong it was because I conservatively underestimated support for my proposal. --Giggidy (talk) 09:27, 3 November 2015 (EST)

I only said my vote on including everything from Gobots probably shouldn't count since I worked on the thing. Escargon (talk) 09:31, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Well, it would appear that an apology is in order. You, Thylacine, indeed had a better read on the vote than I. --Giggidy (talk) 09:04, 4 November 2015 (EST)

I'm in favour of CotG screencaps, but only in the notes. Main page inclusion is a step too far, I think, and would be more prone to "well we already do [x] why not include the whole thing". --Riptide (talk) 11:00, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Point of order: since the inclusion of COTG screenshots is still a potential legal issue, and one of the votes in the No column is from the guy who owns the Wiki, is a democratic vote really the proper resolution for this matter? --Xaaron (talk) 10:37, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Again, the DVDs (photos on my user page) recently released and still being distributed by Warner Bros. give copyright of everything Gobots to Hasbro, and gives the "program compilation" a shared copyright between Hasbro and Hanna-Barbera. But, this is ItsWalky's wiki. If he feels that a vote is out of order I will shut up and graciously concede defeat. --Giggidy (talk) 10:42, 3 November 2015 (EST)

I think the fact that AVP was not able to use screen caps from Challenge of the GoBots trumps any copyright notices on the DVD box sets, however in this case I don't think it's relevant to this Wiki being able to use them in the notes section of articles. We're talking about a bunch of articles about characters with very little fiction and no visual representation, so the question becomes a matter of "will including screencaps really make much of a difference to the information they contain?" I think screencaps make sense where a GoBots character has a visual representation like Bug Bite and we want to compare what they looked like in GoBots fiction to what they looked like in Transformers fiction, but not so much where the character has no Transformers representation to begin with. In this case I think it's more effective to just include a link to a GoBots site which would give more information about the GoBots character as well as visual representation. --abates (talk) 15:04, 3 November 2015 (EST)

TL;DR. My comment: Full inclusion of HB GoBots. Yes. Over my dead body.--Nevermore (talk) 13:59, 3 November 2015 (EST)

The "slippery slope" argument is winning me over. I'm still in favour of limited screencaps: the ones acknowledged by AVP, the model sheets and such for key people like Bug Bite, the original Cy-Kill profile (even if we scrap the rest I'd argue for this to come in under the same reason Cobra Commander's got that kick-the-dog one, i.e. it looks better). We're likely at the limits of limited already though. Who else could we reasonably add? --Charles RB (talk) 20:26, 3 November 2015 (GMT)

My suggestion would be screencaps, at a maximum of one per page, for 1) those characters with major enough appearance in Transformers fiction (e.g. the e-Hobby GoBots and Cy-Kill, probably a few others), and 2) those with visuals acknowledged by Ask Vector Prime. Otherwise, links are fine. --Riptide (talk) 16:02, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Another three days with no activity, and I'm big enough to acknowledge that the momentum has shifted. I count 8 against screen captures, 5 in favor, and 3 in favor of limited. Basically a tie, and I think ties need to go to the more conservative, i.e. not my, position. As with article creation, the screen capture issue seems to go to no change from our current policy. A long and and acrimonious road to get to the point of no change. I apologize if my arguments along the way caused offense. Hopefully we can move on. --Giggidy (talk) 08:49, 6 November 2015 (EST)

Fair's fair -- you help me dispose of Nevermore's dead body, and we'll call everything even. --Xaaron (talk) 09:06, 6 November 2015 (EST)

Who's that Pokemon character?

I'm going through posting pics up for Cybertron's Most Wanted, but need you guys' help to identify some of these guys! This is the first character I can't identify. (He is listed as the question mark in the number 7 slot of the featured characters section.) He's not Starscream (TransTech) as I initially thought. Starscream appears later in the issue, and is definitely visually distinct. This is the second character I can't identify. (The green one, not Windblade, listed as the question mark at #23 in the featured characters section). Although there is a slight possibility that he's supposed to be a generic, I highly doubt it since every single other character on the page is a specific guy or gal. Ascendron (talk) 15:26, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

Maybe the first guy is just Starscream misdrawn? This post and picture from the Rook blog indicates so. [1] S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 16:17, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

Ah, well, if that post says so. That's also a much nicer version of the image I just uploaded... Ascendron (talk) 16:37, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

By the way, what about that dog-looking thing on the streets on page 1? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 16:45, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

That's just a turbofox, I believe. Not an actual "character" per se. Ascendron (talk) 16:53, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

Actually, Jesse's said on the Allspark that it's meant to be the wolf Mini-Con from Classics. Escargon (talk) 18:22, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

Shows what I know. Ascendron (talk) 18:27, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

Here's another guy I can't identify. He's mostly obscured by text boxes, which makes it even harder. However, he's in the same panel as the other unidentified green guy, as well as the two Windblades. He may or may not be a double to the other green offworlder, considering who else is in the panel. In any case, we're looking at the back of an orange head, big green shoulder kibble, with some yellow details on the arm from the looks of it. Ascendron (talk) 17:10, 14 August 2015 (EDT)

Here's another bunch. I Think the red guy's Ironhide? But the vents on the side of his head are throwing me off. The two bug guys at the bottom, I have no idea. Ascendron (talk) 22:39, 15 August 2015 (EDT)

And another. I'm assuming some of these guys are homages to non-Transformers franchises. Ascendron (talk) 23:42, 15 August 2015 (EDT)

Hmm. The guy on the bottom left of the one with Hellbat looks like a Kamen Rider that Matt drew in Spotlight: Trailcutter. Escargon (talk) 19:12, 16 August 2015 (EDT)

Oh, yeah! The colour scheme between this one and "V3" are pretty different though. Is it patterned after another character of that franchise? That way I can give it a "nickname".Ascendron (talk) 20:12, 16 August 2015 (EDT)

Don't know much about it, sadly. Escargon (talk) 23:05, 16 August 2015 (EDT)

That "unknown inmate" is totally based on Kamen Rider Amazon. -Ookalf (talk) 19:34, 16 August 2015 (EDT)

AllSpark Almanac

So I noticed this guy in the second AllSpark Almanac. I was not gonna bother with it, but then decided of anyone might recognize it as an actual character, and not just some generic critter. Mainly because, this is the AllSpark Almanac, and it has homages and Easter Eggs out the wazoo. If no one can think of anything though, I'll just assume it's a generic that's not noteworthy. --Ascendron (talk) 16:43, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

Catillia, according to Forster's deviantart. Also a snake on that page is named something like 1412 or something like that. Escargon (talk) 16:54, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

Thanks, I looked it up, and he says he "stuck in" his real life snake (named 1812). I don't particularly feel that's worth including. If anyone feels otherwise, I can be persuaded to upload the picture and make the page, however. --Ascendron (talk) 17:21, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

Apocrypha and Vector Prime

There have been a few parallel discussions about apocryphal works. Alignment, Doomsday Redux!, Bumblebee at Tyger Pax. User Grum went ahead and removed the Apocrypha template from Bumblebee at Tyger Pax, prompting a short discussion. I put forth the question on Doomsday Redux!, and by extension on the other unreleased Energon comics that scripts are available for, and got little response. Alignment had quite a robust debate when the AllSpark Almanac came out, but not much since then. All three have been declared to have happened by Vector Prime, and in their primary universes as opposed to in some splinter timeline. Is there value to keeping the Apocrypha template, versus just having a note detailing the unusual circumstance of the publication? It seems like something that should get a greater discussion than it's getting. --Giggidy (talk) 00:05, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

They're. Still. Fucking. Apocrypha. --M Sipher (talk) 03:36, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

Since Doomsday Redux was approved by Hasbro and declared to be canon even though it was unreleased, I think that one maybe merits a little more discussion. The others, not so much; even if they're canon from an in-universe perspective, they still aren't Hasbro-approved. --Riptide (talk) 05:07, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

A story that was officially commissioned and scheduled, then yanked because of licensee bankruptcy, should be listed as no different than a canceled toy. An explanatory note afterwards can be enough. But something that was never licensed cannot be licensed after-the-fact just through assertions and "oh, come on!"-ism. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 08:04, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

I tend to agree. I'd suggest that Vector Prime's statements be added to the notes section, and perhaps the stories be slotted into the appropriate position in the navigation track. --Giggidy (talk) 09:23, 18 August 2015 (EDT)

Galvatron II style linking

So I've noticed that there's been some disagreements on how to organize articles such as, say, Spychanger Prime or Balancing Act Prime. Perhaps we could implant a Galvatron II style system; link both in the main article, along with a suite. Also it could be used for the Thirteen and their Uniend selves, for the time being, I suppose. Escargon (talk) 19:37, 25 August 2015 (EDT)

What if we did something like this for Screech since he is 1 version of G1 Skids? Or Razorclaw since he's 1 version of Tigerhawk? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 19:51, 25 August 2015 (EDT)

Quite honestly, I don't think I would have a problem with that. Escargon (talk) 19:54, 25 August 2015 (EDT)

Seems promising. Maybe sandbox one? --Giggidy (talk) 21:39, 25 August 2015 (EDT)

Unfortunately, I couldn't make a sandbox to save a life. Escargon (talk) 21:49, 25 August 2015 (EDT)

There are a couple of other characters that might also benefit from this - BW Megatron and Noble, Overlord and Gigatron maybe... I think it's probably worth looking into. --Emvee (talk) 14:17, 1 October 2015 (EDT)

I've added a suite to the (hopefully non-controversial) example of Silverbolt and Jetstorm. What do we think? Does it work? --Emvee (talk) 04:06, 31 October 2015 (EDT)

I like it. It's simple and elegant. --Giggidy (talk) 08:50, 31 October 2015 (EDT)

I find it pointless and cluttering. We don't slap "Galvatron" into Megatron's suite, despite better character continuity than Silverbolt and Jetstorm. Saix (talk) 09:04, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Oh yeah, I forgot that time Galvatron got turned back into Megatron at the end of the series --Emvee (talk) 12:16, 3 November 2015 (EST)

I guess you did? Saix (talk) 13:23, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Granted, but you're both stretching the definition of series and opening up a bit of a can of worms regarding where we draw the line at different "versions" of the same "character" anyway. G1 Galvatron and Megatron were treated separately mainly because the sheer volume of material for both meant it made sense for us to do it that way but all the times G1 Bumblebee became Goldbug (and sometimes went back again) are all covered on one page, as are UT Cyclonus/Snow Cat, Tidal Wave/Mirage, G1 Overlord/Gigatron, Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime and all the UT Megatrons and Galvatrons. Yet BW/BM Waspinator/Thrust, Rhinox/Tankor, Silverbolt/Jetstorm and Megatron/Noble are separate pages. That's a whole other debate and I don't particularly want to dredge up any of those cases as they've all been done to death a million times before (except for maybe Overlord/Gigatron, I feel there's a clear split that could be made there and linked this way) but I do think this as a good way of dealing with what we do have. It doesn't take up a lot of room and it would only apply to a handful of cases at best anyway. --Emvee (talk) 16:09, 3 November 2015 (EST)

In the case of the Vehicon generals, that's because they're different characters that happen to use the same sparks as pre-established characters. The others are functionally "same guy, but with a new name". I thought that was clear. (Megatron as Noble is detailed on his page, so I dunno why you brought him up.) Saix (talk) 01:53, 4 November 2015 (EST)

Looks fine and dandy to me. --Charles RB (talk) 20:34, 3 November 2015 (GMT)

Notes and images

I seem to remember that there was some clever way of adding notes so that they don't break onto a new line when up against a left-aligned image, but for the life of me I can't find it by searching. Can anyone hit me up with the codez? --Emvee (talk) 05:27, 17 September 2015 (EDT)

Timelines fiction release order links

I have noticed that where it is so, a Timelines story's primary previous or next story arrow points to the BotCon comic if it has the closest release date. However, the primary previous and next story arrows on BotCon comics' pages always point to other BotCon comics because they actually have a "Volume" order to go with. It seems inappropriate to me a story point to another which is not also linked to it. So what do we do, for instance, with "Burning Bridges", the first non-Facebook Timelines story to come out after BotCon 2015's "Cybertron's Most Wanted" and "The Return of Blurr"? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 00:39, 18 September 2015 (EDT)

I think the idea of putting all of the disparate Timlines stories in chronological order for the template is stupid. What exactly is gained there? Saix (talk) 12:43, 18 September 2015 (EDT)

It was probably workable at some point, but it's long since lost any functionality, I think. We keep winding up with stories that have like three or four "previous" or "next" links. - Chris McFeely (talk) 15:19, 18 September 2015 (EDT)

Right. It's excess that only exists to do stuff like link "Collections" to "Head Games" because... why? How does that really help readers? It really should just be limited to the specific media (script readings, etc.) and continuity (Wings Universe, etc.), not a grab-bag of random stories that just happen to be under the Timelines banner. Saix (talk) 15:29, 18 September 2015 (EDT)

Would anyone object if I went and removed all previous and next release order story links, leaving in only previous and next continuity story links? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 14:38, 1 October 2015 (EDT)

Harmonic resonance

So throughout Ask Vector Prime, the theme of "trans-dimensional harmonic resonance"/"quantum harmonic resonance" has come up as an in-universe explanation for most commonly used characters (i.e. the franchise tropes of Optimus Prime, Megatron, Grimlock, etc.), design re-use across continuity families (i.e. pre-Transformer toys which got recycled as Transformers toys), mistaken use of story elements which seemingly don't belong (i.e. Armada Beast Wars in "Fire in the Dark"), other things (i.e. RiD Unicron as a seemingly mundane Transformer who (not) coincidentally became a universe-destroying planet), etc. Do we want to make a page(s) about this and how should we handle it? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 21:23, 9 October 2015 (EDT)

Same way anything else is handled? Create an article and document the things VP said about it? --KilMichaelMcC (talk) 21:25, 9 October 2015 (EDT)

Online Transformers Games help request

So, I've recently been frustrated with the fact that many online games have been taken down, making it really hard to create articles for them. I've been doing well creating articles for them up to now, either finding copies of the games on other websites or cobbling together articles by watching play-throughs on Youtube. However, I've hit upon my first real snag with "Transformers Prime: Beast Hunters Game." I can't find any footage of it whatsoever anywhere, and the game doesn't seem to load on the Hasbro or Hub website. I never played the game, so I can't create anything from memory either. Anyone has anything to help me out with this? --Ascendron (talk) 22:29, 17 October 2015 (EDT)

Repurposing vs Multi-family toys

Over on the discussion about Clampdown, M Sipher raised an excellent point about how silly it is to not have the Clampdown Kreon on the Clampdown Robots in Disguise page. This dovetailed nicely with my own musings on the subject. Right now, technically, the way the wiki is organized if we wanted to have that toy on two pages we'd have to arbitrarily declare one Clampdown to be a repurposing of the other, which I find to be ridiculous. I had a discussion on one of the talk pages about removing the repurposing label from toys that were simply imported from one continuity family to another, only to be shot down.

As a compromise position, I've worked up a related idea: "multi-family toys". That is to say, a toy that seems to exist more-or-less unchanged across multiple families. This seems like a distinct idea from a straight-up repurpose. To me, at least, there seems to be a fundamental difference from someone like Armada Dirge, which is a brand-new character based on a toy with a different name and bio, to someone like IDW's Lockdown. Furthermore, Ask Vector Prime has formalized the idea that Hasbro's been running with, namely that a character can comfortably exist across multiple continuity families and that this is no big deal.

This is my go at introducing the idea: User:Giggidy/Sandbox/Multi-Family Toys. Any feedback would be appreciated. --Giggidy (talk) 16:34, 25 October 2015 (EDT)

I agree with Kre-O but ROTF Lockdown figure didn't meant to be G1 Lockdown when it was produced. He meant to be Movie version of Lockdown. so G1 version is indeed a repurpose.--Primestar3 (talk) 10:01, 31 October 2015 (EDT)

I like the idea of separating the concept of "Foo was repurposed as Foo" from that of "Foo was repurposed as Bar". I still think it would be better to have the Kre-O and various Iocus-cluster toys on their own pages while leaving only a heading and a link out from the pages of characters they are visually based upon.--Khajidha (talk) 10:53, 31 October 2015 (EDT)

I don't feel strongly one way or the other about Kre-O. I'm solidly on-board with the way the merchandise is currently handled and disagree with making Iocus-cluster pages for all the merch. I can see how it's an intellectually coherent position to want to do so... but I don't like it. If we do decide to keep merchandise on its own page as its own character as well as on the local pages, then I'd consider it a Multi-Family Toy. --Giggidy (talk) 19:28, 31 October 2015 (EDT)

Multiversal singularities

Now that AVP on Facebook has publicly acknowledged the splintering of singularities (albeit via a now semi-unaware TransTech Vector Prime), should we merge all the Thirteen's mainstream multiverse and Aligned pages together? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 14:59, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Having waited to see how it all shook out, yes, I still stand by the original suggestion I made a couple of months ago, which is to merge the individual incarnations of the Thirteen's pages into singular ones (except for Alpha Trion and Aligned Optimus Prime), treating them more as concepts that will probably require "conceptual history" sections. - Chris McFeely (talk) 15:04, 2 November 2015 (EST)

What about the SG versions of Unicron and Primus? We typically give new pages to SG versions of characters, as per countless previous discussions on separating out the SG versions of other characters from their positive polarity counterparts. Except, since it's Primus and Unicron we're talking about here, them being them and their SG versions being SG versions of them makes this a little fuzzy. --Sabrblade (talk) 15:20, 2 November 2015 (EST)

I completely disagree with Chris's proposal and would rather treat them like every other character, but my opinion doesn't mean much, so. Saix (talk) 15:40, 2 November 2015 (EST)

I'm kind of torn on this. On one hand, splitting by continuity family will lead to pointless micro-articles like "Vector Prime (TransTech)", and don't even know how one would begin to deal with Fun Pub Nexus Prime. On the other, Aligned Megatronus really has very little to do with Dreamwave Fallen and ROTF Fallen and having them all on one page would seem antithetical to the goal of accessibility. Jalaguy (talk) 16:33, 2 November 2015 (EST)

I, too, am torn. I like keeping the Aligned stuff separate. Maybe just go case-by-case? Like, the Movie Fallen could probably be split from the Dreamwave guy, but I'm not sure Vector Prime (TransTech) is a thing that needs to exist. Do any other members of the Thirteen have a substantial amount of fiction to them?--Giggidy (talk) 16:48, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Maybe use suites? And like, point out that they were all at one point considered to be incarnations of The Same Dude. I wouldn't be opposed to merging most of the Aligned Thirteen, though. --Riptide (talk) 18:48, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Using suites does sound like a good idea, particularly for the SG versions of Primus and Unicron. It keeps them together with the main versions allowing them to be separated onto their own pages. I like it. --Sabrblade (talk) 19:26, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Me too. Seems like a good compromise for the cases where we do decide to split. I still think we should avoid articles that are too short. --Giggidy (talk) 19:29, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Also if we utilize a suite, then we can keep main version(s) of guys like Primus or Unicron at their own namespace. S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 19:55, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Suite's suit. We should do that. --Charles RB (talk) 20:43, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Summary of the multiversal singularities:

• Unicron (G1, UT, Movie, Animated, Aligned, Kre-O, SG) — I think UT, Aligned, and SG can support their own pages; the others are minor versions based on G1.
• Primus (G1, UT, SG, Movie, GoBots, Aligned) — Only UT and SG really stand out.
• Prima (G1, Movie, Aligned)
• Vector Prime (UT, Movie, TransTech, Aligned)
• Alpha Trion (G1, RID, UT, SG, Animated, Movie, Aligned, Kre-O)
• Solus Prime (Aligned, G1)
• Alchemist Prime (Aligned, G1)
• Nexus Prime (G1?, Aligned)
• Onyx Prime (Aligned, G1)
• Amalgamous Prime (Aligned, G1 [sorta])
• Liege Maximo (G1, TransTech, Aligned)
• Megatronus/The Fallen (G1, Movie, Aligned) — Movie could really, really stand to be split out.
• Optimus Prime (lol) — lol

My feelings if we're going the "we don't want small pages" route. Saix (talk) 20:42, 2 November 2015 (EST)

You know, another thought just crossed my mind. Why didn't we think of using a suite for the many versions of Sideways too, instead of turning his disambig page into his main page? --Sabrblade (talk) 22:00, 2 November 2015 (EST)

Because then we'd have to put the explanation of his whole deal on all the pages. I think that putting a suite on his pages isn't a bad idea, but I do like the set-up we have now. --Riptide (talk) 07:12, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Agree on splitting out Movie from the rest of the Fallen's page; SG and Aligned Unicron's are different enough, and with enough fiction in the latter's case, to get a-splitting. --Charles RB (talk) 20:43, 3 November 2015 (EST)

Movie Fallen should definitely split.--Primestar3 (talk) 14:12, 4 November 2015 (EST)

I don't really think that UT Primus is that different from G1 Primus, or at least from the G1 Primuses of fiction that was contemporary of the time (Dreamwave, late 3H, early Fun Pub, etc.). Granted, back then was when the singularity concept was in full swing so UT Primus was viewed as the same dude as G1 Primus anyway, but I don't see anything in particular that would distinct UT Primus from 2002-2006 G1 Primus that much to separate him out. After all, the heavily Marvel G1-influenced Primus/Unicron/Thirteen backstory of that era of was attributed to both the G1 and UT versions of Primus via things like 2004's The Ultimate Book (G1 Primus), the Armada Fleer trading cards (UT Primus), and even Takara's "World of the Transformers" website that told the backstory with imagery of Armada Unicron, Cybertron Primus, and Cybertron Vector Prime (and War Within's G1 The Fallen) among the Thirteen. --Sabrblade (talk) 02:46, 6 November 2015 (EST)

Formatting of Year pages

So I noticed the pages for 2007 and 2012 are formatted VERY differently from any other Years' pages, being built out of subpages. As a result, the parent page ends up taking on any categories its subpages are tagged with even if they're not really applicable to the larger page (Toys, Media, Games, etc.), plus it creates an inconsistency with the rest of the Year articles. (Plus I'm not so sure this subdivision really makes the editing or upkeep process any easier). Should we move all the information to a single page like the other Year articles, or perhaps change the rest to match these two? -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 14:08, 4 November 2015 (EST)

At one point we had all the year pages with separate subpages at one point, and then they got merged and then some of the pages got separated again. I'm not sure that there's any benefit to having subpages for each section. It just means the smaller pages come up pointlessly when you do a search or sometimes when you hit the random page link. --abates (talk) 14:41, 4 November 2015 (EST)

Understood. I've gone in and moved all the 2007 and 2012 content (and 2006, which I guess I missed the first time) back to their main pages, and tagged the subpages with speedy deletion. If someone could take care of those, it'd be much appreciated. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 16:28, 4 November 2015 (EST)

Why is Glyph not credited in the Character Roster list for the G1 episode 'Five Faces of Darkness part 4'?

She is an official retcon, no different than a bunch of other Botcon retcon characters (eg. Ion Storm), or 'Acid Storm' who was retconned by another official means.

Was her exclusion from the Character Roster done on purpose, or simply forgotten and needs updating?

Update: I've made a change to include Glyph on the 'Five Faces of Darkness part 4' Character Roster...but I do not have the information as to when she appeared, in relation to all the other characters. All the characters have a number beside them to indicate the numerical order they appeared in. So, does anyone know Glyph's number? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Zackmak (talk • contribs).

1) Please sign your posts.

2) Please don't make edits to fiction you have not personally watched or read, because of the very problems you suffered above. --Xaaron (talk) 10:46, 23 November 2015 (EST)

Still getting used to how this works. My apologies for the newbie mistakes. Wondering though why even one of the many TFwiki administrators don't make the change? It seems like a no-brainer...but that's why I asked the initial question - to find out why she was left out of the 'Character Roster'--Zackmak (talk) 18:17, 28 November 2015 (EST)

Because editing the wiki is not an automatic thing. Saix (talk) 18:33, 28 November 2015 (EST)

Page names for planets

Some planets in Transformers with numbers in their names are variably parsed with the number in regular Hindu-Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, or in words. (i.e. Hydrus Four) When I search on the wiki, I generally think of Roman numerals by default, especially since Transformers is science fiction. Does anyone else think that we should put planets' pages in Roman numerals as long as such parsing is not overshadowed by different parsing? S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 20:03, 20 November 2015 (EST)

So, if I am reading your proposal correctly, you suggest that if there are two canonical parsing of the name of a planet, and one uses Roman numerals, that one should have primacy? --Giggidy (talk) 22:16, 20 November 2015 (EST)

Correct. That is, as long as a different parsing is not more prominent. S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 17:51, 22 November 2015 (EST)

I guess I don't see what that gets us. Mind you, I don't see any harm either, I'm just not sold. What are we doing now? Most prominent? First official text parsing? --Giggidy (talk) 18:37, 22 November 2015 (EST)

I thought it would help navigability. Not sure what we're doing now, but I think it's first official text parsing. S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 18:53, 22 November 2015 (EST)

I guess you can put me down as a tentative yes. --Giggidy (talk) 19:14, 22 November 2015 (EST)

I think that seems unnecessary so long as there's a redirect in place, which there should be if the planet has been named with Roman numerals in fiction. --abates (talk) 20:24, 22 November 2015 (EST)

Italics in headers for toy sections

I've noticed that most pages' toy sections don't italicize the toyline section name, but some do. Examples: in my memory, Optimus Prime (G1)/toys and Optimus Prime (WFC)/toys have never italicized their toyline name headers but the Brawn (G1) page currently does. Do we have a rule on this? If we do I haven't been able to find it. S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 17:51, 22 November 2015 (EST)

Proposal: Temporary Moratorium on AVP

After GoBots, after Ulchtar, I think we have decidedly reached a point where the act of editing the wiki according to the latest "official" information is getting in the way of wiki informativeness and quality standards. To be frank, the privilege of creating canonical material has been perverted for the sole purpose of changing this website. I propose a two-week cessation on adding any material to this site that appears on AVP or any of its upcoming iterations. I would like to see what discussions we have here, and how the pages are modified, when we're not lurching to the organ grinder's tune.

If people think this suggestion is totally out of line, by all means say so. If they agree, please say so as well. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 18:01, 30 November 2015 (EST)

That's actually exactly what I was considering suggesting. This is all getting a little silly; I'd be more than happy with that, as it'd curb "to-the-wiki"-ism while not banning AVP content entirely for no real defensible reason. --Riptide (talk) 18:45, 30 November 2015 (EST)

YES! So much yes! (with the sole exception being the archiving of AVP-and-its-ilk Facebook posts onto their respective archive pages). --Sabrblade (talk) 18:48, 30 November 2015 (EST)

I'm not really sure what this is supposed to accomplish. I've never had a hard time ignoring the parts of something that annoy me or that I have no interest in. If a robust discussion on a minor character like Ulchtar bugs you so much, maybe you should take a two-week moratorium from editing the wiki. I vote no. Fine. --Giggidy (talk) 19:09, 30 November 2015 (EST)

Are you familiar with the expression "the straw that broke the camel's back"? Ulchtar isn't The Thing, but The Latest Thing In A Long Line Of Things. I say yes. --Andrusi (talk) 20:13, 30 November 2015 (EST)

Yes. --ItsWalky (talk) 19:51, 30 November 2015 (EST)

I'm down, and let me add this to it: going forward we put stuff from AVP and its mutations on the same waiting period as all the other FP stuff we've had basically forever. No, it's not part of the "paid content" blardeeblar. But maybe it'll help stem the blatant wiki-gaming going on, and also cut back on the amount of corrective/speculative editing, especially when they have to apologize/retcon/whatever something posted two days prior. Maybe trim it to two weeks rather than one month, but still. The immediate TO THE WIKI! needs to fucking stop. --M Sipher (talk) 19:58, 30 November 2015 (EST)

Since Escargon brought this to my attention, I'm going to break my usual policy about commenting on my own work and vote yes. It won't kill anyone to wait a couple of weeks to edit this stuff, and may in fact improve the caliber of the questions we're getting. --Jimsorenson (talk) 20:17, 30 November 2015 (EST)

Yes. In addition to the reasons mentioned, this should stop the back-and-forth occasionally seen of
1) AVP posts something.
2) Someone rushes to add it to the Wiki
3) Someone else disagrees with the interpretation of AVP
4) First someone goes back to AVP and asks for further clarification on the first post
5) AVP responds
6) Second someone is too busy arguing on the Wiki to check for updates
7) First someone does victory lap because official source confirmed their idea
8) Third someone stops by to say this is why they hate AVP.
We are all children of the internet. We like winning arguments. But being able to ask official sources in real time to contribute to internet arguments tends to escalate the arguments and the tensions underlying the arguments. New information comes in? Fine -- let's let it breathe for a while before deciding what to do with it. --Xaaron (talk) 21:10, 30 November 2015 (EST)

Regarding what I said above about updates made to the Facebook post archives being the sole exception to this, it has been suggested that those should have at least a one-day wait after each post is made on Facebook, which sounds reasonable. --Sabrblade (talk) 00:07, 1 December 2015 (EST)

I can get behind this. I've drawn attention to this resurgent "OMG TO THE WIKI" attitude while commenting on this problem before and putting a cap on it sounds good. - Chris McFeely (talk) 08:06, 1 December 2015 (EST)

Since the idea of immediate-term write-ups is apparently problematic to a large number of editors, is there any reason to limit the 2 week cooling off period to just the FP material? Given concerns about spoilers and similar (if less heated) arguments about interpertation of ongoing IDW offerings, perhaps a 2-week wait should just be the standard wiki policy for all fiction. --Giggidy (talk) 07:38, 1 December 2015 (EST)

You KNOW all "immediate-term write-ups" is not the issue at play. Don't even. --M Sipher (talk) 08:00, 1 December 2015 (EST)

I actually don't. You and Chris both talk about "TO THE WIKI" as if it's a well understood problem without explaining why. Chris, meanwhile, posts detailed summaries of the comics before American comic shops even open. Aside from some people not liking Ask Vector Prime, I honestly don't understand the difference. It offends my sense of order, but I will admit that's probably more my problem than yours. --Giggidy (talk) 19:24, 1 December 2015 (EST)

The difference is that comics- and the information they reveal- are set in stone; people can't just obsessively demand answers from James Roberts/John Barber/Mairghread Scott about background trivia just for the sake of changing the wiki. Grum (talk) 19:40, 1 December 2015 (EST)

I guess I see. Maybe. Maybe not. Looking at the Ulchtar thing, which apparently was very annoying for people, there was a question asked on the 18th of November. Then an answer on the 28th of November. There were a few follow-up questions but none of them got an answer. The answer was never edited. Then there was three days of debate about what the implications of the answer meant. I don't see how, if we had the debate from December 13-15 it would have been appreciably different, or less annoying. But then, I didn't find the debate annoying in the first place, so again, this could point to my inability to understand such things. --Giggidy (talk) 19:59, 1 December 2015 (EST)

This is a recurring, AVP-specific problem that doesn't affect other prominent fiction. The Carcer thing was an isolated incident. - Chris McFeely (talk) 08:06, 1 December 2015 (EST)

ThisIsWhyWeCantHaveNiceThings.jpg --DrSpengler (talk) 09:22, 1 December 2015 (EST)

So, like, are we starting this today or what? I will of course respect the consensus and wait till the 14th if we are, but Cy-Kill just had a new adventure if we're still debating. --Giggidy (talk) 13:26, 1 December 2015 (EST)

I'm going to assume that, yes, this is starting today, and that current content will be added no sooner than two weeks hence, December 14. --Giggidy (talk) 19:24, 1 December 2015 (EST)

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Does anyone object to me making a page for Mystery Science Theater 3000 now, rather than waiting the 2 weeks? I only ask because the latest AVP plugs the MST3K kickstarter campaign, which is over in 4 days. Given the time-sensitive nature, it seemed an exception might be warranted. --Giggidy (talk) 14:47, 7 December 2015 (EST)

Results

"I would like to see what discussions we have here, and how the pages are modified, when we're not lurching to the organ grinder's tune."

It looks like the discussions we have when not lurching to the tune is... more of the same. --Giggidy (talk) 10:48, 11 December 2015 (EST)

There are 63 new "official facts" about Grand Galvatron hitting the wiki every single day, most of them by wiki editors feeding them through a revolving door Facebook page in order to validate their own ideas? I must've missed it. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 11:36, 11 December 2015 (EST)

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were complaining about an argument about Ulchtar, one which Grand Galvatron has already exceeded in length. One that started when someone saw some half-translated info and immediately declared TO THE WIKI. --Giggidy (talk) 11:44, 11 December 2015 (EST)

Notes and whitespace issue

A while back I put up some notes in several characters' pages, in order to include a link to the The Transformers: The Movie's adaptations within those pages' fiction sections. Unfortunately, it didn't work out quite as well as I wanted. Unlike the Live-action film series, where a similar note would always come up at the end of a section's write-up, the note came right in the middle of the section for many Generation 1 characters. On top of that, because of how some images were included in the section write-ups, several characters got large amounts of white-space in their section write-ups to accommodate the note.

At the time, I had heard that there was a piece of code that could fix the white-space issue, but I've been looking for a while and found nothing. (The closest I got to any sort of result with was: <div class="floatright">Text on the right</div> but that didn't solve much either.)

I'd still very much like to keep the links to the movie adaptations on those characters' pages, as those are still pieces of fiction wherein those characters appeared. But at this point, I've given up on finding a solution that will make the note look like less of a mess. And I will admit that the amount of white-space the note sometimes generates is rather unseemly. I figured a note pointing out that characters appeared in an adaptation of the G1 cartoon movie could be put at the bottom of the article, in the "Notes" section.

Either that, or I could double up links within the cartoon section like this: The Transformers: The Movie Transformers: The Animated Movie Transformers the Movie. I'm also open to any other suggestions. Either way, I wanted other people to weigh in and give their opinions before I started any kind of wide-spread editing. --Ascendron (talk) 17:07, 3 December 2015 (EST)

I think the extra storylinks look lot better than a note. It's what we already do for flashbacks. Saix (talk) 18:10, 3 December 2015 (EST)

Multiple storylinks make me think that there is something more to be written up, rather than them being multiple versions of the same events. Putting a note at the end of the page seems to divorce the adaptations from the source material. My personal preference is for the note templates, regardless of the whitespace issue. --Khajidha (talk) 18:39, 3 December 2015 (EST)

I'm not convinced that multiple story links or notes are needed at all, at least on a character page. If there are multiple tellings of the same event, probably a character only needs the primary one. Then, anyone who clicks off to the primary story can see a note that there are other adaptations. I'm not sure it adds anything to Bumblebee, for instance, to know that yes, he did this in the Transformers movie but also in a novel and a comic and a story book. --Giggidy (talk) 18:48, 3 December 2015 (EST)

I'd rather keep some indication of which adaptation which character shows up in on their own pages, considering it is inconsistent from character to character how many adaptations they show up in. Some characters show up in all of them, some show up in only some of them, and others show up in none of the adaptations. --Ascendron (talk) 19:02, 3 December 2015 (EST)

I guess I just don't see what the value is of that. Especially because the adaptation itself will have the character roster. Mind you, I don't feel particularly strongly about it one way or the other. --Giggidy (talk) 19:07, 3 December 2015 (EST)

Proposal: A "Former multiversal singularities" category

As probably know, a recent story has split up multiversal singularities into separate characters, or something like that. Because of this, the "multiversal singularities" category has been dissolved, and is no longer linked to on character pages. But why? The idea of multiversal singularities shaped several years of Transformers fiction. My proposal: a "Formal Multiversal singularities" category, so that we can acknowledge the characters who were once multiversal singularities while not inadvertantly implying that they still are multiversal singularities. Thoughts? -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 01:22, 13 December 2015 (EST)

Isn't that, like, only the Thirteen, Primus, and Unicron? Saix (talk) 02:04, 13 December 2015 (EST)

Yeah. So it'd be an easy thing to do. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 03:15, 13 December 2015 (EST)

Or we just re-instate "Multiversal Singularities" as a category because categories have NEVER been predicated on current status. BW Blackarachnia doesn't lose her "Predacon" category because she ultimately ended up a Decepticon after being a Maximal for a while. --M Sipher (talk) 17:01, 13 December 2015 (EST)

Did we ever have that category? I mean, we should, but yeah, we wouldn't have removed if we had for exactly the reason Sipher states. - Chris McFeely (talk) 17:51, 13 December 2015 (EST)

I checked a few relevant articles at random. Went back to last version before this October. Couldn't find that category in their category lists. --Khajidha (talk) 20:04, 13 December 2015 (EST)

I was probably mistaken. I probably just happened to notice Unicron/Primus/one of the Thirteen didn't have a multiversal singularity category on their page, and assumed that it was deleted because of the because of the retcon. My bad. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 13:49, 14 December 2015 (EST)

Vandalism

Um, yeah. So one of the pages on the Wanted pages list is...Spiral Vagina. That means that someone tried linking to a page called Spiral Vagina at some point. I'm not really sure how to handle that or who to let know about it, so I'm just posting it here. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 18:27, 15 December 2015 (EST)

Genital System. I'm very sorry. Incidentally, if you wanted to find what pages link to that, you could have used this page: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Spiral_Vagina --Riptide (talk) 18:32, 15 December 2015 (EST)

Oh. Thank you. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 18:54, 15 December 2015 (EST)

"Kiss Players! No, It's Really Not Vandalism, This Actually Happened." --Xaaron (talk) 21:33, 15 December 2015 (EST)

The entire page should just be this discussion. Chip (talk) 05:44, 21 December 2015 (EST)

I seriously want to make that page, but something so epically horrible might need s comitte just to handle the comedy potential. Lush City (talk) 08:52, 18 December 2015 (EST)

We're all sick of arguing about GoBots

But here we are again. I restate my position as detailed in an AllSpark post: since moving to its own page, with Cy-Kill returning to his own universe and talking exclusively about "unmade" GoBots episodes, "Renegade Rhetoric" has become GoBots fiction, not Transformers fiction, and we do not cover GoBots fiction. Events from Challenge of the GoBots "season 2" do not warrant coverage on the wiki, and I think that any events described from the original, actually-existing cartoon should be reduced to minimum, and all GoBots characters only mentioned in these stories consolidated into simplified "List of Guardian" and "List of Renegade" pages with only brief write-ups, linking readers to our archive of the Facebook posts if they want the full scoop. Characters such as Cy-Kill and those who have actually appeared in Transformers-universe stories should, of course, retain their own articles. We have editors actively working in bad faith, manipulating Renegade Rhetoric by asking leading questions to force the inclusion of GoBots on this wiki when it has been repeatedly decided that it won't be, and I am all for an exception being made so that this type of behaviour is not rewarded. - Chris McFeely (talk) 19:48, 6 January 2016 (EST)

THIS WEBSITE'S EMPEROR-KING AGREES --ItsWalky (talk) 20:03, 6 January 2016 (EST)

Thirded. GoBots fiction, and cheating, do not belong here. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2016 (EST)

100% agreement. --M Sipher (talk) 20:06, 6 January 2016 (EST)

EDIT: See BelowEscargon (talk) 20:07, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I'm in! -- Repowers (talk) 20:11, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I don't mind either. If nothing else, this entire debacle has taught us that GoBots and Transformers will never be able to peacefully coexist, on toy shelves or otherwise. Grum (talk) 20:50, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I vote yes. Consolidate the GoBots pages, keep the Renegade Rhetoric page and archive. I would argue that this is a case similar to how we only documented the issues of the GI Joe Marvel comic that contained Transformers; once it stopped being Transformers, we stopped covering it. Also, you know, hopefully this will mean people will complain about the Facebook pages less. --Riptide (talk) 02:47, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Changing my vote. The RR page links to the Club page. AVP references and comments on RR. This is canon just as everything else, gaming the system or no. I may be weary, but I won't buckle. Escargon (talk) 20:23, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I second Escargon. S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 21:21, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I don't think anyone will be surprised that I disagree. There seem to be two arguments. 1, it's not Transformers fiction. 2, editors working in bad faith. Going case by case, 1: I don't see how Renegade Rhetoric is GoBots fiction and not Transformers fiction. It's being broadcast on Axiom Nexus News, on Cybertron. It stars Cy-Kill, the hybrid Hanna-Barbara/TransTech version. It features a number of characters who are proper Transformers, from the Aligned continuity and the Unictron Trilogy, and more who are powered by sparks stolen from Mirror Alpha Trion's lab. That seems to be the main intellectual foundation for the argument, and I'll grant that it's novel, but I think it's flawed. 2: Were some editors (including me, I'll admit) asking leading questions? Yes, we were. It seems to have largely stopped, mostly because the column stopped rewarding it. But that applies to ALL of Ask Vector Prime, and that's undoubtedly canon. Are we going to start trying to look at the motivation of every creator now and altering coverage accordingly? Milne draws Hot Shot as dead to poke at Walky, should we undocument that?

And now, additional factors. I hate making slippery slope arguments, but really, the real reason we're having this conversation and everyone knows it is that there's a sizable block of people who don't like the content. That's what all of this boils down to. And if the wiki starts picking and choosing what to document, or at what detail to document, based on that, then it will have well and truly lost its way. Because if we decide that we can come up with a pseudo-logical justification to exclude this content, then we'll use it as precedent and do it again. All of Ask Vector Prime. Kiss Players. The Beast Within. That weird retcon about Cyclonus and Bombshell from a video. Big swaths of the Dreamwave run. I don't see it ending. Yes, people are sick of arguing, but this policy will lead to more, not less, arguments.

Another, lesser factor, is that these pages are already made. So we're proposing going through some 200 articles that are already created in compliance with this wiki's policies and changing them due to an exception, making more work for ourselves to make the wiki less informative.

And a third factor, is that these posts are popular. Ask Vector Prime's readership is in the thousands. Every post gets liked, shared, commented upon. People are enjoying it, and some of them will come here to see what we have to say about it. The cost of having a possibly extraneous article is negligible, but the cost of not having an article is real.

I also think that we should do what we always do on weighty matters, and have the debate first and THEN call for a vote. I would suggest that all the "seconded" to the proposal are premature. --Giggidy (talk) 20:38, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I'm with Gigs, I know we are volunteering, but this s still service, and we are still educators. There is a responsibility to inform the populace, if RR content was exclusively GoBots, there may be some argument, given we don't cover FunPub Gi Joe fiction or even Diaclone fiction(if it exists) even though the later is a TF universe technically. But given the bleed of TF lore and concepts I feel it is in our scope. Also it's kind of really petty to ignore like, reams of content because of a parliamentary beef. I vote to keep the GoBots season 2 stuff. Lush City (talk) 23:07, 6 January 2016 (EST)

the real reason we're having this conversation and everyone knows it is that there's a sizable block of people who don't like the content. That's what all of this boils down to.

NO. No. No no no. I don't give a rip about the content itself either way. (I mean, okay, I think the endless supply of numbering universes and other such non-story wankery is dumb and pointless and has made a Big Giant Thing of something that was meant to be just a sidelong atmospheric technical footnote in a couple of years-ago stories, but that's not the point.)

No. The point is that this content is being created explicitly and for no other purpose than to circumvent the wiki's rules, to alter its content and organization, by fans who otherwise were unable to get their way on the very content in question. It's not being done as part of a story in any meaningful sense. It's not a unintended side effect by some uninformed pro writer. It's not part of a carefully considered larger universe. It's not something dictated from on high within Hasbro. It's purposefully, transparently, and most of all pointlessly manipulative, seemingly all because a handful of OCD minds can't handle the thought of a 30 year old cartoon not being related to another 30 year old cartoon.

THAT is what I and, I presume, other editors don't like. Because it's bullshit. Canon generated by bullshit -- maybe we should consider treating it accordingly. -- Repowers (talk) 20:53, 6 January 2016 (EST)

This is true, but irrelevant, the wiki picking favorites with the AVP 2week limit was down the slope enough but using the out of universe background of something as an excuse to ignore fiction is totally hugged. Its not as if Jim and co are mindless robots, this is official fiction with all the research, skill, heart and passion that entails, blanking it out and other such special efforts is parliamentary minutiae. Who cares if people are gaming the system, the writers are big boys, they know what they are doing and in fact are often intimately aware of how this goes down. We have to stop acting like AVP is some puppet of a nebulous group of wiki villians instead of a dozen grown ass men and women making editorially supervised official fiction that happens to be done by fans like so many other franchises. We can't play diddle the lasagna with our rules just because the creators are iniated into our wanky insanity, if Ichikawa is going to make a Prowl 2 madcap adventure, Jim is going to make Cloud G1 for some reason and GoBots stuff starts bleeding, who are we to judge? That's basically with this whole thing, the wiki's "purity" is to be impartial, if snarky, recorder, we log it all and may be smart asses about it, but it's all in.

Besides the funpub stuff doesn't have the HB/Bandai legal issue anyway. Lush City (talk) 23:19, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I call bullshit on your bullshit. Because if you have been reading Renegade Rhetoric, it's hilarious. It's practically daily new episodes of an 80s cartoon that get the tone spot-on perfect. It's passionate, it has good stories, it even manages to have good characters despite most episodes being about 2 pages long. And none of it is about circumventing wiki rules. If it was, they'd have stopped doing it once they got everyone in, but they haven't. They're telling new stories, and they're quality, and I defy anyone who is actually reading them to disagree with that. Because, really, I'd love a show of hands, how many of the people who are voting no have actually read a single Renegade Rhetoric Season 2 episode? --Giggidy (talk) 20:57, 6 January 2016 (EST)

You yourself said you and others "were asking leading questions until you stopped getting rewarded for it." This is not the place for such a "reward." That kind of "reward" does not belong here and the entire mechanism for gaining it is what really subverts our rules for inclusion. Any alleged humor in Renegade Rhetoric now is just, as the saying goes, the fruit of the poisoned tree. Also, the debates have been had, since 2007 at least. Also also, "people will want to come here to see more RR/GoBots articles" leaves me quite unmoved. They can see RR on RR, they can read about GoBots on Counter-X, and in the year 2016 they can make their own GoBot wiki. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 21:20, 6 January 2016 (EST)

Your "fruit of the poisonous tree" argument leaves me unmoved. Because, according to this proposal, ALL OF THAT STUFF WILL STAY. Because that's all from the Axiom Nexus bit not covered by Chris McFeely's proposal. So you'll leave the poisonous tree, and get rid of all the fruit. Because that makes sense. --Giggidy (talk) 21:23, 6 January 2016 (EST)

This was created because the fans voted for it, after a whole month of guests colummist. Some of these fans have been taking advantage of it, yes, but that's not why it was created.Escargon (talk) 21:00, 6 January 2016 (EST)

The thing is that the RR stories are funny and clever and well-written, but fundamentally they don't have anything to do with TFs. They're using characters and settings that were never created by Hasbro/Takara. If, say, Renegade Rhetoric wrote a story where Cy-Kill was on an adventure and bumped into Optimus Prime, then yeah, that particular escapade could be added to the wiki, but fundamentally Renegade Rhetoric is Gobots fanfiction; well written fanfic, but basically completely outside this wiki's coverage sphere. Grum (talk) 21:20, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I vote no to this proposal as a whole. Whilst I'm not a fan of wiki gaming, the GoBots stuff happening these days is nothing like that. They're fun stories for the sake of fun, and I'd be sad to see them banished. (I could probably deal with "List of Guardians" and "List of Renegades" articles, though.) Sky Shadow (talk) 21:10, 6 January 2016 (EST)

Yeah, or at least group articles for a good number of them. Escargon (talk) 21:11, 6 January 2016 (EST)

If I say yes, will people actually go back to making significant contributions instead of complaining about everything AVP does? Saix (talk) 21:15, 6 January 2016 (EST)

No. If you say yes to this proposal, it will lead to more arguments, more complaining about AVP, and then Thy will say, "hey, it worked well for GoBots, let's undo all 1000 AVP articles." Remember, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I urge you to vote with your conscience and not give in to a crowd to try to forestall an argument, for this change WILL open the floodgates. Plus, it will lead to people spending time UNDOING informative articles they don't like rather than making informative articles they do. --Giggidy (talk) 21:19, 6 January 2016 (EST)

It was really a rhetorical question. I don't give a fuck about GoBots being on this wiki because it doesn't impede my ability to edit pages I care about and I really wish people would focus their energies they clearly have on filling out articles and not complaining. Saix (talk) 22:01, 6 January 2016 (EST)

Just upthread you were saying that this is allegedly "really" about people just acting out of some low personal distaste for GoBots. Yet this is now the second time in as many days that you've posed your own actions as being some sort of reaction / pre-emption of me personally. Do not do that again. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 21:49, 6 January 2016 (EST)

Actually, I meant a low personal distaste for the FB content. Happy to clarify. And yes, I dropped your name with a probable course of action. That was probably crossing a line, and I apologize. On the other hand, was I wrong? Are you willing to commit to no further proposals, votes, or executive actions to try to minimize the footprint of AVP? --Giggidy (talk) 23:15, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I didn't even think about this, but it makes a lot of sense. Any breaking of the rule of putting What Is Canon before anything else (when that's been the wiki's entire modus operandi up until this started) is a dangerous path to follow. Sky Shadow (talk) 21:25, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I got Armada and Energon DVDs for Christmas. Sure. Escargon (talk) 21:17, 6 January 2016 (EST)

Like Escargon and Giggidy, I am against this proposal. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 21:34, 6 January 2016 (EST)

So I'm only a recent editor of this Wiki, but I've been reading it religiously for years. And as a deeply devoted and long time TF fan, despite what some may feel, AVP, RR, and the collective of Club FB Pages have been some of the most entertaining pieces of TF canon. Yes, Go-Bots has a different lineage than the rest of Transformers proper, but at least since the Almanacs, and especially through these FB Pages, Go-Bots has become recognized as legitimate canon within the TF Multiverse. While I admit to being a completionist, and ideally, I'd love to see the entirety of Go-Bots, Brave, Zoids, etc. covered on this wiki due to their relation with Transformers; but worry not, for I understand that realistically, that truly would become far too distractedly cluttered - which is why I can even agree with not having extensive coverage for anything Go-Bots related that is outside of anything under the umbrella of Transformers. But as it was mentioned earlier, Renegade Rhetoric is treated with the same regard as Ask Vector Prime, Spacewarp's Logs and all the Axiom Nexus News Pages. It may not be "directly" Transformers, but it's far more intertwined than the 80's cartoon. No, people shouldn't be abusing to ability to have canon produced just for the sake of the Wiki, but that REALLY doesn't seem to be the case with what RR is producing currently. They're great stories in good fun, and I believe they should be treated as being just as much canon as any other TF media. I vote to include it. Hail Cy-KIll! IKY

I vote Yes for removal. Let the Talk:Main Page read forevermore: THE FUNNY STAYS. GOBOTS DO NOT. --Xaaron (talk) 22:24, 6 January 2016 (EST)

A lot of people seem to be in favour of retaining them because they're good, entertaining stories, but I don't think anyone on the "get rid of them" side is disputing that. The issue is they are GoBots stories, not Transformers stories. --abates (talk) 23:51, 6 January 2016 (EST)

I posted a detailed rebuttal as to how they're Transformers stories. The fact that it's done under a Transformers license. The conceit that, in universe, these are pirate broadcasts on Axiom Nexus News. The fact that many of the Renegades are, in story, Cybertronians. (Puzzler, Monsterous, Wendy's GoBots, more.) The fact that Cy-Kill is the TransTech design. The fact that Vector Prime comments on the occasional question posted on Renegade Rhetoric. It brings us to a fascinating philosophical question... what is a Transformers story? But these stories seem to fit. Just as a thought experiment, if one of the issues of Transformers: Sector 7 followed around, say, Rasputin for a whole issue, and didn't have any Transformers in it... would it still be a Transformers story? I guess I'm saying that yes, it would. --Giggidy (talk) 23:55, 6 January 2016 (EST)

If an issue of Transformers: Sector 7 did not have any Transformers in it, I think people would be asking IDW some rather pointed questions about WTF they were doing. Also I think the important part here is these are still GoBots characters, even if they have been relabeled Cybertronians. If the club started producing Voltron fiction where the Voltron lions were actually inert Cybertronians, I think we'd avoid detailing that too. --abates (talk) 00:31, 7 January 2016 (EST)

I don't think either hypothetical is helping the discussion. (The answer is that we would detail both because they unambiguously fall under the Transformers brand.) Saix (talk) 00:46, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Walky Calls It

So anyway, I see a bunch of votes in favor from people who've actually been on this site more than five minutes, versus mostly one folk who's admitted they've done exactly what was pissing us all off to begin with -- ie, asking AVP stuff for the express purpose of making stuff canonical. Like, literally gaming our decade-old website in bad faith. With that in mind, INCLUDING THE KIND OF IMPORTANT FACT THAT THIS WEBSITE IS NOT ACTUALLY A DEMOCRACY ANYWAY, I pass Chris McFeely's motion, as your Emperor-King. It is done! Discussion over, forever and ever and ever. The wiki is saved. --ItsWalky (talk) 06:14, 7 January 2016 (EST)

One person? I count at least 7, with only one who had just signed up. Escargon (talk) 06:21, 7 January 2016 (EST)

And just because you own the wiki, doesn't mean that all decisions are up to you, nor are they all necessarily correct. Ex: The splitting out of the G2 Gobots pages from their main G1 versions. Escargon (talk) 06:29, 7 January 2016 (EST)

I mean... it kind of does? He owns the place. He's the head admin. He has veto power. The userbase voting on things is just convention, not actual rules. --Riptide (talk) 06:59, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Sigh, "more than five minutes" was hyperbole. What I meant is editors who have been here since 2006 instead of WEEKS. --ItsWalky (talk) 06:33, 7 January 2016 (EST)

First recorded activity of Sky Shadow: August 2011. My first recorded activity: Febuary 2013. S.H.I.E.L.D Agent's: April 2015. Giggidy's: June 2015. Foffy's: December 2015. Escargon (talk) 06:41, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Thank you for helping me out! You're handing my own point back to me giftwrapped. --ItsWalky (talk) 06:45, 7 January 2016 (EST)

I doubt this counts for anything, but I've been reading the wiki since, like, 2011 or so. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 06:54, 7 January 2016 (EST)

So, Chris makes a proposal at 19:46 on 1/6. This is something that he's specifically floated past the forum where old-school wiki editors hang out and driven up buy in, so they he naturally gets a slew of votes immediately, sans any discussion. I rebut, to the best of my ability, and over the course of (checks watch) eleven hours, votes start to come in on an admittedly hot-button topic. A disproportionate number of votes come in from the younger, newer editors, many of whom seem to have come in specifically because of an interest in the material being covered. (Which, in and of itself, might tell you something.) The vote starts to not go towards the proposal, so, again, after less than half a day of debate, Walky calls it. Not because he's so clearly winning, but specifically because he's losing. Well, yeah, I guess it is your wiki, but I never got the impression that this meant the rest of us don't have a vote. I find that highly dispiriting.

Now, again, I'll point out what I said above. Normally for big decisions, we have a discussion. There's a back-and-forth. People state their cases, other people answer them. And we have a bit of that here. But normally we'd debate this for two, three days, let everyone have their say before we even START voting.

As to the quality of the editors, you're absolutely right, we're a younger crowd. But three of us voting are in the top 10 for number of edits in the past month, and I'm much lower than I would have been before the 2 week delay on Ask Vector Prime. Hell, Foffy the Sheep ALONE has more edits in the past month than EVERYONE voting against him COMBINED. SHIELD too. We're the actual worker bees, keeping the wiki running.

I would suggest that our perspectives matter. I would suggest that it's normal and natural and healthy that the new guard looks at what the old guard is doing and says "we can do better" and vigorously attempts to do so. And, further, that it's normal and healthy for the old guard to look at what the new guard is doing, and say, "those crazy kids. They're ruining everything. Why, in our day..." And then the new kids can learn from the old, and the old can perhaps temper the new, and everyone wins. But short-circuiting that process because we're new and young is absolutely the wrong move, sends the wrong message, and will cause more harm than good in the future. I urge you to reconsider, and let the discussion and eventual vote run its course. Because, again, the cure may be worse than the disease.--Giggidy (talk) 08:28, 7 January 2016 (EST)

A bit of a digression, but I don't think what you said about me and several others being top contributors is very accurate. If I make 200 edits to fix a link (such as going through pages and changing every instance of [[Lightfoot]] to [[Lightfoot (Masterforce)|Lightfoot]], for example), have I really contributed more than someone who made one edit to write an entire summary? That's a matter of opinion, really. To clarify, I'm not saying that people who make minor edits are worthless, I'm just saying that the number of edits you make aren't necessarily a good representation of how much you've contributed. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 13:55, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Chris, Walky, Thy, Sipher, Repowers, Grum, me, Xaaron, Jalaguy and Tigerpaw28 vs Escargon, SHIELD, you, Lush, Sky Shadow, Foffy, and... IKY, who I've never heard of before. That's 10 to 7 in favour, even without Walky's proclamation. I'd argue against Walky using veto power here if there was a clear consensus against it, but there isn't. --Riptide (talk) 08:49, 7 January 2016 (EST)

I'm, uh, late to the party, but I would definitely throw my support behind the McFeely Proposal. And that's coming from someone who'd fight tooth and claw to keep other AVP content on the wiki. But regardless, Walky still had every right to call it as he did. Jalaguy (talk) 09:12, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Also late to the party, and also in favor of McFeely's proposal. As he said it is effectively Go-Bots fanfiction. There's next nothing in the Rhetoric answers that actually ties it to Transformers fictionally. Tigerpaw28 (talk) 13:06, 7 January 2016 (EST)

There's not a clear ANYTHING, because the debate lasted less than 12 hours with many prominent voices having yet to weigh in. What we have is schism, and typically on an issue this big we want an overwhelming majority. The vote is extremely skewed by the front waiting, due to drumming up support for the proposition offsite. More than half of the yes votes came immediately after the proposition was made, with no votes trickling in gradually but steadily all night.

But, really, Riptide, your opinion doesn't matter on this at all. Neither does mine, or Escargons. Walky has decided that this topic doesn't warrant debate, so the only person whose opinion matters on undoing this decision is Walky's. I'm hoping he at least reads and consider is my argument. --Giggidy (talk) 09:02, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Well, yes, that's my point. We have a schism, which is why I think it's fair enough that the head admin gets to call it in the absence of an overwhelming majority. Should he have waited longer? Probably, but I don't think the concept is inherently unfair. --Riptide (talk) 09:06, 7 January 2016 (EST)

The seniority argument is a bit creepy though. Do we really want to say "you've only been here since last June, you count less"? I've been here since 2007, I don';t think it helps anyone if I can pull out the Old Guard card if I'm having a spat with someone more recent. --Charles RB (talk) 14:23, 7 January 2016 (GMT)

Giggidy, whatever you have to say on this matter is absolutely worthless to me. As you yourself have admitted, you tried to create canon on this wiki by gaming AVP for answers. The problem is you. Why would I listen to you? The weeks-old folks are in the top edits now? That's because the current AVP-heavy focus is discouraging all the other regular editors, because it's such an avalanche of bad faith canon addition that to some it just doesn't seem worth it any more to contribute. If there's a dispute? One side Asks Vector Prime. It's a fucking cancer. It's squeezing out the rest of this wiki. Nobody's here anymore to finish up articles that need updating, they're just here to create canon via AVP. That is how my limited time is wasted on here now, managing all this dumb AVP shit, and lately I've found it too aggravating to even bother. If you keep making this whole enterprise a worthless bad-faith chore? Yeah, the website's going to go away, because why am I spending fucking money on this? So, yeah, I kinda do make the final call! Super sorry, guy who's only been here since June and only does the shit that frustrates everyone else away from here! --ItsWalky (talk) 13:34, 7 January 2016 (EST)

That's...really meanspirited Walky. You have every right to make that call, but a wiki like any community is a evolving system, if the majority of the user/editor base has shifted to Y, then as a wiki, Y is the nature of the scene. The idea that the community doesn't matter because of what the owner believes is a real strike against the spirit of this all. A straight vote would have been fine, but the precedent that if the editors shift one way that the wiki tells them to hug off, instead of the wiki naturally evolving with it's users is a dangerous precedent. We all came here as a celebration and communion of our fandom, what fandom means and how we express that differs but we all hold the true heart of the fan within us, and no one deserves to be shut down because there passion doesn't match up totally with anothers. To a significant portion, that Ask Vector Prime shit is there Transformers, it's there fandom, and cutting it out or stomping it down because you feel it should not be here is to neglect the heart love and passions others have for this. I spent all of my college career and most of High School here, I have spent hundreds hours on this site being whisked away into this fantasy; seeing countless adventures and mythos and drawing connections and ties between lore like some comparative mythologist of old. That was my fandom, that was my passion, and I know it is not yours and I would never say yours doesnt have a right to exist; we are equal here and there is no reason why we cannot peacefully and respectfully co exist and give proper due to all facets of the fandom. This is a demographic shift, a culture clash, between the "original" community (itself not how the wiki began as) and a newer culture grown from the seeds sown by our for bearers and a shifting attitude in the media that has changed this little mystery cult over time. But that's okay. Fans have grown up gone pro, influenced fiction, beget fans of there own and now what they bred has come into it's own. I am not asking for a free pass on anything, I am not trying to fight for special treatment, all I am saying is that differing views and experiences of the fandom and the wiki itself should be allowed to exist , grow and change without one voice lording dominant because they are the owner.

You know what Tf means to us, you know what it means to all of us. We all do. So please dont declare this war, please, allow everyone on the wiki the right to act edit and function for the harmony of us all and our readers. We can do this, together. Lush City (talk) 22:19, 7 January 2016 (EST)

I, uh...

Huh.

I honestly thought I was helping. --Giggidy (talk) 14:55, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Epilogue: It's all over but the crying

This was supposed to be a short reponse to Lush City, but it quickly grew, and as it did so, I began to re-evaluating my initial opinion on this matter. Bear with me through this wall of text, won't you please?

*clears throat* I think part of the reason some many of the editors on this wiki, including myself, have grown to resent GoBots so much is because of the mass amount of bullshit that is generated every time they're discussed. This discussion grew more in a day than most others do in a week; even big, huge drawn-out arguments like the Grand Galvatron fiasco that have reached an ungodly length pale in comparison to this one, and there are several other GoBots discussions just like this one. You know what they all have in common? They NEVER. GET. ANYWHERE. This exact discussion has been rehashed several times over the course of the past 6 years or so, and I imagine that's pretty tiresome for the people who have been here to each and every massive GoBots bitchfest unfold one after the other. Hell, I've only had to deal with one day of GoBots discussion and I'm already sick of it! I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to deal with this shit on multiple different occasions over the course of several years, but I bet it's unpleasant.

When we first starting mentioning the GoBots and making pages to discuss their relevence to Transformers, it was like taking a puppy we found on the street and bringing him into our house. He was so cute and harmless, how could we not let him in? So we fed him and played with him and took care of him. As we did so, that cute little puppy slowly but surely grew into a vicious 80 pound behemoth that had a trail of destruction following it wherever it went. It may be the cutest dog ever, but it's harassing the neighbors and covering the house in fecal matter. Not only that, but it ate the sofa. It's more trouble than it's worth.

Dog metaphors similes aside, seeing this discussion has really changed my tune regarding Go-Bots. It's fun to have it, yes, but not fun enough to justify the massive bitchfests that take place every time someone tries to discuss what the length and scope of GoBots coverage should be. When Walky said he was ending this argument, I don't think he was just talking about this one particular instance of the debate that took place over the last 24 hours so much as the entirety of the various GoBots arguments over the past six years. And perhaps it's for the best; it seems that the inclusion GoBots on MediaWiki has brought nothing but suffering. I think we should really only be covering GoBots stuff from official Transformers fiction, and if we're honest, Renegade Rhetoric no longer falls into that category. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 00:42, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Somewhere around this point, I remembered that Walky had already kinda-sorta ended the debate. (I say "kinda-sorta" because it continued on in spite of this to some extent.). I took a look at what I'd written, said to myself "Well, shit. I gotta do something with that." So I slapped this note on here and posted the whole kit and kaboodle onto the community portal, relevance be damned. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 00:42, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I get what you are saying, but does that make GoBots the problem, or the fighting? Even so, I don't see that as a necessarily bad thing. We come together, debate, and reason out the best course of action, then keep on it until the situation changes and we come to a new consensus. That's exactly what a healthy Parliamentary body should do. When RR came up we discussed it and came to a decision, what I was showing concern about was Walky using judgment calls to prerserve demographic integrity, it felt a lot like there is an image of who this wiki is for, and that it would be enforced despite the actual editor/userbase. The idea that a wiki, or any community is served by the people instead of the other way around is a dangerous precedent so I am concerned of what will happen with future "culture clashes." Lush City (talk) 12:41, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I say leave tomorrow's worries to tomorrow. We'll handle them when we get to them. --Ascendron (talk) 13:16, 8 January 2016 (EST)

You make a good point, Lush City. Yeah, we will have to get together and lay down the new rules for this or whatever, but it's best if we give everyone a little time to simmer down and take everything in before we do so. This will eventually all be worked out in good time. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 15:24, 8 January 2016 (EST)

how unfair do i have to make this place for lush city to leave --ItsWalky (talk) 15:32, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Let's not be overly harsh. We shouldn't make people feel like they are unwelcomed unless they are being purposefully offensive, or disagreeable for its own sake. Or are outright breaking rules. --Ascendron (talk) 15:49, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I am being exactly harsh enough. I'm pretty sure I kind of said to end all this shit because it's strangling the fucking wiki to death! Being able to put a foot down like that is WHY WE HAVE ADMINS. But sure, by all means, let's argue GoBots for the sixteenth billion time and continue to alienate everyone, because having someone even nominally in charge is fascism i guess. --ItsWalky (talk) 16:13, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Isn't Lush City the guy who argued that IDW somehow wasn't G1? Escargon (talk) 18:20, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I'm sorry that I came off as disrespectful, that was not my intent. I just wanted to say that so long as people are able to abide by administrative decisions, and respective the of the hierarchy, I bare no ill will towards them. I didn't mean my statement to be seen as an attack towards you, or an attempt to undermine your authority. It came off that way though, so I apologize again. --Ascendron (talk) 00:58, 9 January 2016 (EST)

Questions and self reflection

So, Walky said basically that I'm the problem, or part of it. And I don't want to be. I've got a lot of energy and I find wiki editing a relaxing way to unwind. I like puzzling through the connections and figuring out those ah ha moments when I feel like I can glimpse into the author's head and guess what they were thinking. So. How do I use that to be useful? I've done thousands of edits since I signed up and I really thought most of them were welcome and appropriate. Please, someone, point me in the right direction. --Giggidy (talk) 18:03, 8 January 2016 (EST)

All I can offer is the same advice from our Ulchtar discussion: "Be helpful, don't just be busy." I mean this as helpful criticism, but you do seem to confuse the two. Above, when you tried to call attention to Foffy the Sheep's value by saying, "Look how many contributions he makes a day!", even Foffy pointed out most of that was just adding links. Valid contributions, no doubt, but it isn't what makes someone a VIP contributor. I've been here since 2006. I created many of the original G1 character pages, filled out the fiction sections for every Mini-Con in the Armada cartoon and every secondary character in Headmasters, but I still consider myself a mid-level contributor at best.

Part of the problem is you came in during the AVP flurry of activity, which wasn't a good example of how the Wiki typically operates. Moving pages back and forth, renaming articles, votes on content...these used to be extremely rare events around here, once every six months or so. So what you might have seen as standard, day-to-day activity here was really a rare hassle becoming increasingly more common and grating on the nerves of the admins and long-time contributors without you even knowing it.

I haven't read through your contributions section, so I don't know what besides AVP you like to contribute. I know some of the fiction sections have become drastically out of date. With so many contributors focused on using AVP or cleaning up after it, pages like Rodimus's IDW appearances haven't been updated in nearly two years! I routinely troll the character stubs section linked on the first page to find things to do. Depending on your preference, there's also Images Needed and Wanted Pages to create linked on the front page, too.

Only other advice I'd offer is, for the moment, work more on contributing to the Wiki in its current format, instead of questioning or trying to change the format itself. That's my advice. --Xaaron (talk) 18:50, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I've found that another good way to help is by going through Orphaned pages list and linking them to the relevant articles, or making sure that the disambiguation pages mention every applicable character. Some of the character disambig pages are missing links to their Angry Birds counterparts, and I suspect that the same may be true for some of the Kreon versions of characters. There's also this list of articles that aren't linked to enough; it might be slightly outdated, but it's pretty useful.
I thought maybe my experience as a fairly new editor might be helpful to you; I hope this turns out to be the case.
(Side note: I was unaware that moving articles and such used to be a rare occurence; I'll try to keep that in mind and avoid such things whenever possible.) -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 19:10, 8 January 2016 (EST)

User:TAZ

Someone should probably ban User:TAZ. For whatever reason, he seems to really hate File:DonMurphy.jpg, and has gone out of his way to either blank the page or removes links to it. (I waited about half an hour before posting this in case he was hoping to get a kick out of someone mentioning him.) -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 18:44, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Done! Jalaguy (talk) 18:48, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Thank you. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 19:23, 7 January 2016 (EST)

Template proposal

I'm getting really sick of cleaning up fiction note templates, so, hey, here's an idea. Every single one from now on has to actually be brought up here before the community before it's implemented and not done willy-nilly by one person or a small group of editors. I realize that, as a wiki, we are going to inherently have continuity boners, but the recent trend of drowning character pages in notes is annoying and intrusive. The idea that we need to mention every point of continuity minutiae even in articles like fucking universal greeting is obnoxious and needs to stop. Saix (talk) 11:13, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I agree. Things like "Regeneration One is a continuation of the Marvel Comics continuity" don't need to be in the middle of character write-ups. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 12:30, 8 January 2016 (EST)

The Marvel thing is a unique case that at least is relevant to character write ups—it tells readers that the Marvel UK stuff mixed into the Marvel US stuff doesn't count. (Of course, this only applies to articles that actually have sections for the original Marvel comics.) The text in the notes could stand to be trimmed down, though. Saix (talk) 12:53, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Do you have some other examples of unnecessary notes we could discuss specifically? I caught the 2001 Car Robots note you mentioned from universal greeting, and I agree it's pointless unless there's actually an RiD vs. CR distinction to be made. --Xaaron (talk) 13:04, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Wings, Classics, RG1 on pages without the continuity they're referring to. Ask Vector Prime. I'm bringing this up now because we need to develop a better way of vetting templates that are theoretically going to be used on many pages. One or two "yes" reponses on some hidden talk page most people don't notice shouldn't be used as a community-wide consensus on things that dramatically alter the reading experience across multiple pages. Saix (talk) 13:12, 8 January 2016 (EST)

And looking at the other stuff we have, Template:Notecmn could easily be made as part of the actual prose and flow more naturally that way, for example. ("In a divergent timeline, blahblah"). Saix (talk) 13:17, 8 January 2016 (EST)

And there's Template:Notemoviebio, which explains what is a regular occurrence in all of Transformers fiction for no real reason. Saix (talk) 13:19, 8 January 2016 (EST)

A similar one is Template:Notetitantlg, which I tried to make pointless when we overhauled the movie character pages a while back and which I think we ditched most uses of, but is still out there. - Chris McFeely (talk) 13:22, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Not quite the same situation, but I'd like to chime in that I'm not a big fan of Template:ongoing. Most of the time, editors completely forget to include it on the appropriate sections, it reiterates something that's obvious ("if there's information missing here, you should add it.") and it's a note that only gets put up so that it can be eventually be taken down. --Ascendron (talk) 13:27, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I agree that it's quite useless when we already have stub templates. Either information is missing or it isn't and people just leave it up on pages that really don't need it because it's not that noticeable. Saix (talk) 13:33, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Ehhhhhn. I'm willing to let "ongoing" live, as, well, there's a TON of "dead" fictions and only a few currently-updating ones, and letting people know which ones are likely to actually continue and not just be a storyline dead-end is at least marginally informative. "Stub" can mean "it came out already and no-one's bothered yet", which is... different than "this cuts off because the scheduled continuation hasn't come out yet". --M Sipher (talk) 08:12, 10 January 2016 (EST)

Also, if you find yourself overburdened with certain tasks, don't be afraid to ask for help. --Ascendron (talk) 13:08, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Thanks for taking care of the CR note. Saix (talk) 13:12, 8 January 2016 (EST)

No prob. As for the RG1 note, I agree that it would look nicer as a single line of text. I'm having difficulty reducing it in length without leaving out something crucial though. I'm putting it on the back-burner for now, but I'll keep it in mind. --Ascendron (talk) 13:18, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Tried cutting it down a bit. The G2 bit was redundant. Saix (talk) 13:43, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Ah yes. Much better. --Ascendron (talk) 13:48, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Yeah, that's equally informative, but also far less intrusive. Nice work, Saix -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 13:53, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I just wanna say that I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks we have too many goddamned templates. Escargon (talk) 15:03, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Two templates for discussion: Template:TransformersComicMagazin and Template:GIJoeTransformersfiction. Necessary or not? I feel like the former states what's already obvious by the fact that it's in its own section ("Comic-Magazin is not Marvel"), while I dunno about the latter. Saix (talk) 15:43, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Transformers Magazin could probably be done without. The {Gi joe transformers fiction} one, on the other hand, should probably be kept. With the way we use the {noteukonly} and generally treat the US and UK comics, I feel that we kinda need to point out "hey, unlike just about everything else from Marvel US, this doesn't actually fit into the Marvel UK 'verse." -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 15:53, 8 January 2016 (EST)

The Joe one is terrible. It's just plopped into the middle of fiction write-ups with no specification as to what text it refers to. - Chris McFeely (talk) 16:04, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Yeah, I can understand the purpose, but the execution just doesn't work at all. And I don't think it belongs on the issue pages. Saix (talk) 16:06, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I don't do much fiction-section work anymore, but if I can identify part of the problem with the fiction itself... unlike most franchises, TFs has a metric fuckton of "major" divergent splinter timelines. I mean, how many different Marvel G1 comic timeline spinoffs do we have now that don't actually relate to each other? It can be difficult at first look of a page to tell the difference between a series of proper, one-timeline sequel-series and, well, the clusterfuck that is post-Marvel-G1-related stuff branching out like a hydra. So I'm loathe to just run with the "well everyone reading thew wiki should know this" mentality.
So, can see why the templates began, but when we started getting more and more branches? A bit out of hand. And worse, it's not quite a thing the base wiki organization tools are good at adapting and making obvious. (Frankly I find it tricky to tell sometimes the difference between a ===-subsection and a ====-subsection, but that's another quibble for later).
I think a good amount of this can be mitigated with some creative rewriting of the sections' openings, "ten years after the battle of Klo" or whatnot. And certainly that doesn't even need to be brought up if it's just a one-off page of a piece of minor technology from one issue of a spinoff. But for larger pages with a buttload of timeline-fragments?
We might want to look into collapsible Notes. Just a single template that can be adapted not just for this, but, well, for anything. Whack it up top, collapsed, have it say "Continuity Note: (more)" (not as a default), then people can click on it and see "well this continuity branches off from blardeeblar and has no relation to blardeeblar". This way the clutter is minimal, the information on our confusing mess of fiction is right at the fingertips.
Just a thought.--M Sipher (talk) 16:31, 8 January 2016 (EST)

This sounds useful. S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent 47 (talk) 16:47, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I love this idea. Collapsable notes could solve a lot of the problems we've been having with the templates as of late. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 17:12, 8 January 2016 (EST)

I just took a brief look at the voiceactor template, since that does basically what I'm looking at, and even that template's workings are beyond my ability to understand and adapt into a collapsible Note. So um. --M Sipher (talk) 18:26, 8 January 2016 (EST)

It depends how you want it to work. Something like {{cnote|text 1|text 2}} to produce:

text 1 text 2

Or just {{cnote|text 1}} and

text 1

It wouldn't be difficult to knock either of those templates up --Emvee (talk) 09:50, 9 January 2016 (EST)

Expanding off of what Emvee posted here, I've worked up a collapsible note template which can display a custom header, custom visible text and hideable text that is either custom or derived from a preset name. The first draft, examples and documentation can be found here: User:Tigerpaw28/Sandbox/Template:CollapseNote. All critiques are welcome. --Tigerpaw28 (talk) 18:50, 9 January 2016 (EST)

Is there a way to put that in a gray box so it matches with the rest of our Notes? I think this has legs. --M Sipher (talk) 23:49, 9 January 2016 (EST)

D'oh! There is. In fact, I actually did have the box but the CSS for it is only available in my personal CSS file at the moment. I'll go integrate that into the template itself for now, then once this is approved maybe it can be moved to a site wide CSS file to reduce template clutter.--Tigerpaw28 (talk) 01:40, 10 January 2016 (EST)

Okay, the CSS is now included in the template so users besides myself can see the gray box. --Tigerpaw28 (talk) 01:50, 10 January 2016 (EST)

I love it. Nice work, Tigerpaw. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 03:37, 10 January 2016 (EST)

Seconded, good stuff. --Emvee (talk) 04:16, 10 January 2016 (EST)

I'll stick the css in the common file when everyone's happy. --abates (talk) 16:29, 10 January 2016 (EST)

Speaking of notes and templates, can we also scrub the IDW notes that say "Revelation was shorter than it should've been because Simon Furman was fired." and the Dreamwave notes that say "Because Dreamwave collapsed, plot threads were left dangling."...unless those notes are specifically contributing something to the character's page? --Xaaron (talk) 13:53, 15 January 2016 (EST)

I'd say yes. Saix (talk) 14:16, 15 January 2016 (EST)

More Prominence for IDW

I'm going to propose a change, because the above discussion reminded me of something I find annoying -- the position of IDW in the Fiction sections. At this point, I believe IDW is the longest running continuous fiction in Transformers history. Yet while the 30 year cartoon and Marvel Comic are easy to pick out due to their position at the top or their multitude of subcategories, IDW is typically found near the bottom of the list, nestled in between Japanese micro-continuities, Sticker Adventures and, god help us, The Beast Within.

Is there a better configuration we could work with? I'd be supportive of a "Major Fiction" and "Minor Fiction" breakdown for the traditional "Fiction" section, if we could all peacefully agree to what counts as Major and Minor. Another thought I had was to do away with the Ongoing Fiction Template, and just have "Ongoing Fiction" automatically at the top and "Previous Fiction" underneath.

Any of this sound worth looking into more? --Xaaron (talk) 21:08, 11 January 2016 (EST)

Absolutely friggin' not, never or ever. Organizing fiction due to perceived prominence is counter to the very spirit this wiki was founded on. (It's also amazingly subjective and would be a headache to argue over indefinitely.) --ItsWalky (talk) 00:36, 12 January 2016 (EST)

Wasn't that the point of changing the disambiguation pages though? So that the more prominent stuff was at the top and had pictures to help people? omegatron (talk) 12:23, 12 January 2016 (EST)

That kind of potential slippery-sloping was why I had misgivings about that change in the first place. But Disambig pages are navigation pages, and articles are not, and I have faith that we can recognize the different needs for pages according to their utility and not just make everything the same just because it makes our brains feel superficially happier. But let me put it this way: Imagine Grapple's page. In a "we put IDW first because it's important" world, a dinky subsection in which he appears in the background twice is given precedence over a Big Looker storybook in which he is a major character. IDW isn't always super important to a character's page just because its fiction's gone on a decade! And here's the kicker -- for those folks who've appeared a buttload in IDW, those sections are split off into their own subpages and navigation at the very top of the page leads you right there, effectively already giving everyone this proposed functionality. And without losing the information of real-world chronological release order that levels the canonicity playing field, I might add. --ItsWalky (talk) 14:00, 12 January 2016 (EST)

Right. The disambiguation page thing wasn't something brought up on a whim. It's not a thing I'd propose for any other "type" of page, because disambig pages serve a different purpose than almost every other. That requires some special consideration. --M Sipher (talk) 14:15, 12 January 2016 (EST)

No, no, no, no and no, with a side order of no and no for dessert. --M Sipher (talk) 04:08, 12 January 2016 (EST)

Just throwing this out there as an alternative suggestion to moving the sections around: what do people think of the idea of bolding major sections in the table of contents, so for Optimus you'd end up with something like this. For the sake of preventing arguments we'd reserve it for the really prominent G1 continuities (G1 and BW cartoons, Marvel, IDW and possibly Dreamwave comics), since it's not generally a problem for other continuity families. I'm thinking this could be done very simply in CSS without having to edit a ton of pages, though it would mean that characters with only an IDW fiction section would have it bolded in their contents listing. --abates (talk) 17:30, 12 January 2016 (EST)

That's got some potential, I think. I don't think single-fiction character with bold in their TOC would be a problem. --M Sipher (talk) 17:48, 12 January 2016 (EST)

This ties into an old proposal from way back that I'd also found in my Community Portal re-read, and was brought up on Allspark (and I'd briefly mentioned here recently); the visual differences between subheaders are really quite minimal. It's hard to tell at a look where one continuity-line ends and the other begins. there's got to be something we can do just visually to make these divisions easier to identify by sight. Can we make the header-text for continuity-breaks centered? If we wanna get fancy, can we make a graphic the header? --M Sipher (talk) 18:47, 12 January 2016 (EST)

Okay, apparently you CAN center section headers. --M Sipher (talk) 19:32, 12 January 2016 (EST)

Did some experimenting and found a way to do this. Requires a little bit of HTML/CSS inside the header but easily doable I think. --Tigerpaw28 (talk) 23:04, 12 January 2016 (EST)

Since the initial concern, at least, was IDW, can someone sandbox a G1 character with an IDW section to see how that might look? Pipes (G1) seems like a good candidate, since he's got a good-sized IDW section that also isn't so big it should just be a subpage. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 23:13, 12 January 2016 (EST)

I've grown pretty iffy on using images as headers, honestly. There's a lotta "standalone" timelines that don't really have logos and having only SOME major headers be logo images... ehhhhhn. Might be best to just stick with text, maybe a thin bar above, with a wiki-wide change to a thicker tier-1-header-bar. --M Sipher (talk) 00:12, 13 January 2016 (EST)

Actually? Second thoughts, no. This would likely start too many arguments. Sky Shadow (talk) 10:05, 13 January 2016 (EST)

The Goal Of The Wiki

(slight editing of something I posted to the Allspark's wiki thread)

A little while back I decided to rummage through the Community Portal archives... from the beginning. The earliest stages, when we were hammering out how to lay out the damn pages, what we should disambiguate by, etc. Saw the suggestions for making information more readily-accessible (character appearance tables, the GO! Box, the navigation templates), the "common wiki" practices we rejected because they just could not apply to this franchise (character infoboxes, for example, thanks to the many many many bodies the characters could have), up through the big move away from Wikia when they started really fucking us over with their ads.

And during that lonnnnng string of arguments with Wikia staff, when we tried (repeatedly) to explain why this "only not-signed-in readers will see the ads so why are you complaining since you don't see the page-ruining ads see this will somehow make money!" thing was utter bullshit...

"We create the content on this wiki FOR casual readers."

Re-read that. RE-FUCKING-READ THAT.

The wiki lost that mentality somewhere. At some point in the last few years, the wiki stopped being about the readers, what would make the vast ocean of material accessible and entertaining to them. It became a micro-minutia-based circlejerk. It became editors confusing anal-retentive busywork (based on the strictest interpretation of rules that always were meant to be applied with a slight degree of malleability because our subject matter absolutely HAS to be handled that way) with productive and useful updating. And with the advent of the Facebook AVP, it became "gee now I can make Real Transformers wheeeeee" with even more micro-minutia and bad-faith gaming of the canon policy that was originally meant to give equal space to the obscure so we wouldn't have the "prominence = more deserving" mentality (plus stuff very specifically made to create circumstances to middle-finger policies that have served us well for a decade prior).

Thus, people who've worked for a decade to make the wiki something huge and special and a wiki other fandoms look at and go "holy shit, we need something like this" find themselves frustrated and edging away as the spirit of the whole thing turns into this sour, solipsistic nigh-gatekeepery up-its-own-ass wank festival, especially when certain subjects just won't. Goddamn. STOP.

From one of our newest regulars:

"Hell, I've only had to deal with one day of GoBots discussion and I'm already sick of it! I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to deal with this shit on multiple different occasions over the course of several years, but I bet it's unpleasant."

So when I see "hey why don't we move IDW sections up because I think it's more important" or "why don't we rename every character in the Japanese-fiction writeups to their Japanese names", yeah, I'm gonna respond harsher because it's kind of hit that point where we have to start bringing the hammer down hard to keep this thing even remotely accessible to anyone who isn't fully engaged in the minutia of TFdom.

I think wiki editors (and others) need to stop and have a good think about WHY they're doing what they're doing, and who they're actually doing it for, and, ultimately, if they should actually be doing it.

There's an important difference between "can" and "should", and too many don't see it. --M Sipher (talk) 04:08, 12 January 2016 (EST)

look i already apologised for the japanese name thing okay

Well, said, though, and you've given me something to think about. --Riptide (talk) 05:21, 12 January 2016 (EST)

...Yeah, I'm taking exception to this.

Because of recent events, I wasn't expecting anyone to jump for joy, but this is a bit much. First of all, "hey why don't we move IDW sections up because I think it's more important" is reductive and dismissive to the facts on the table and the argument I presented. IDW being "ongoing fiction" isn't my subjective opinion, it's a fact. It's also the longest running mass-market fiction not only ongoing right now, but also in Transformers history. So I'm not some weebo saying, "I like Japan, so other people must want Japan to be more prominent, too." (no offense, Riptide -- just for the argument) We were discussing a case of factual prominence, not the "perceived prominence" just inside my own silly head.

And I don't need "We create the content on this wiki FOR casual readers." repeated back to me because it was you, M "Not lovin' this idea" Sipher I was thinking of, saying those very words, which made me think this was a good idea.

Maybe we have different ideas about what casual readers are, but I think of them as new/returning fans who came here because of some ongoing fiction they just saw, and might like to learn more about. If they're watching Robots in Disguise or Rescue Bots, that's cool -- most of those character pages are traceable by (RID) or (RB) disambigs, which is simple enough to figure out. And their Fiction box sections are (mostly) minimal enough to glance over and find what you wanted.

But what about the comics? Well, first they have to know IDW is Generation 1, which isn't exactly on the cover of the comics. Then they have to know the Fiction section on a character's page is organized by release date. You and I know that, but is that rule actually posted in a FAQ somewhere so we could expect a casual reader to know it? The way Sunbow and Marvel subdivide on most pages, a casual reader could be forgiven for thinking the most prominent stuff is already on the top. And even assuming they're visiting the Wiki on a full-screen computer and not a mobile device, for the 1987 guys or earlier "IDW Generation 1 continuity" is likely going to be "below the fold". And if you made it to the end of this paragraph thinking TL;DR, imagine the casual reader going through this in real time. THAT was who I was thinking of when I suggested the Ongoing Fiction content that the casual reader might be looking for when they come here be easier to find somehow.

I'm not trying to throw your words back at you, M Sipher, but again it honestly was a post you made this week defending the Ongoing Fiction Template that made me think of this. You said, "letting people know which ones are likely to actually continue and not just be a storyline dead-end is at least marginally informative". But the current razor-thin, World's Smallest Template Note doesn't really accomplish that. A casual reader may stumble across it by accident, if they squint, or they'll find it if they're already looking for it, but that's it. Floating Ongoing Fiction to the top of the Fiction sections negates the need for the template, lets new readers find what they were most likely looking for more easily, and those Fictions can just as easily be shuffled back down into 'release date order "dead" fiction' once they are no longer ongoing.

If this was a bad idea, fine. But maybe you could provide me a definition of "casual reader friendly", because obviously my WWMSD? bracelet doesn't help when I'm too stupid to know the answer. --Xaaron (talk) 09:09, 12 January 2016 (EST)

There's a Table of Contents at the top of just about every character page. The wiki software even automatically makes a TOC if a page has enough subsections. That TOC has "IDW continuity" in it, which links directly to said subsection. Easy.

Your proposal is nothing but arguments waiting to happen over what's "more important", to become more arguments over which "more important" fiction takes prominenece over the other "more important" (comics or cartoons?) with no actual benefit. It is furniture-shuffling. --M Sipher (talk) 13:19, 12 January 2016 (EST)

Not to put words in Sipher's mouth, but I don't think the main idea he's putting across is really about your proposal, Xaaron, you've just said it at a moment in time in which we are seeing a lot of what Sipher describes (but trying to dub something "more important" will lead to arguments - I remember way back when when people would complain we were putting the Marvel comic ahead of the cartoon). To repost something I've also said on the Allspark - which I don't consider to relate to your proposal, Xaaron - I have been saying for a long time in private conversation what Sipher is saying now, and several months ago, I tried to explain how we're basically responsible for breeding this attitude into our readers. It's the same attitude that caused the AVP brouhaha - we are seeing editors now openly state that the wiki has been a gateway to a lot of this stuff for them, and that they have fixated on the minutiae and the continuity-fondling, which is such a small part of what Transformers, and the wiki, is about that it's the wrong lesson to come away with. Wiki projects ATTRACT those with mindsets focused on categorization, organization, and pattern-observation. It took years before we had editors who were able to reconcile that way of thinking with our "and also fun!" approach, but they now exist, and are more interested in trying to make sure all the headers are precisely the same, that everything is in exactly the right continuity-order and header-structure and category, that all the disambigs are exact - that absolutely everything fits into its little imaginary box, and that nothing breaks the rules by coming out of its box unless there's a seventeen-week debate about it first. ORGANIZATION IS IMPORTANT, but - with the greatest of actual respect to our new editors, because it is thankless hugging busywork and its impressive that you're dedicated to it - as Sipher says, this "moving of the furniture" is all that newer-guard editors actually seem to want to do, or to be capable of doing. It's very, very easy to paste a one-or-two sentence nugget of information from AVP into the wiki, which is why so many people do it and why it got so out of control - but you don't see anyone falling over themselves to add Spacewarp's Log stuff, even before the two-week delay, because it's not presented in nugget form, it's a piece of prose that you'd actually have to - shock, horror - read and summarize, and - oh christ no - it's NOT full of references to pre-existing things so you can't just paste it into existing articles or throw the AVP stub template in. When - just for a recent example - I can go to the article of a major character like Ironhide or Thundercracker and still find tons of material that needs filling in, that says "it doesn't matter that it's been ten years, there is a lot more important work to do than making sure that header is a level 2 or a level 3 one." - Chris McFeely (talk) 13:32, 12 January 2016 (EST)

I just want to be clear that people who take the time to do "busywork" like, say, fixing links so they no longer lead to a redirect page are unquestionably welcome to. That's good, that has a tangible benefit to our wiki (reducing server load). That kind of "busywork" is absolutely okay. It's the seemingly-endless stream of talks about reorganizing hundreds of pages, arguments over disambigs, and yeah, the "easy" trivia-nugget work that's grinding here. --M Sipher (talk) 14:01, 12 January 2016 (EST)

I get the concern over the AVP-inspired editors, and even counseled Giggidy about this very issue above. In hindsight, I probably should've waited for the dust to settle more on the GoBots matter before suggesting something similar for different reasons, but like I said, the idea was sparked by the above discussion about the Ongoing Template.

And I completely agree that a Major/Minor Fiction split would likely lead to more arguments than benefits, which is why I also proposed Ongoing/Not Ongoing. That's completely binary and objective. It's not subject to debate over which fiction is "More Ongoing" than another.

I agree that the IDW links above the main character images remove any need for my proposal...for the characters who have them. My concern rested with characters like Jazz or Soundwave who do not have IDW subpages, and that continuity is 21 or 24 listings down on their Fiction TOCs, nestled between things like Q-Robo and Henkei! Henkei!. But, as I believe Chip suggested on the Allspark, a way to resolve all this is to just be more lenient with allowing IDW subpages in the first place. --Xaaron (talk) 16:31, 12 January 2016 (EST)

I too proposed that. Is there a specific reason why that tab system isn't more prominent. Heck, maybe it would even work for stuff like the Marvel and Sunbow cartoons. Those tabs are a simple and brilliant way to get our readers to what they are looking for. A casual coming here after googling say "Prowl Transformers" needs to be sent to were they need to be efficiently as possible. A page tab on his page header right at the top with IDW staring you in the face ks a good solution that doesn't deal with any of the parliamentary bojangling that's been such a hot topic latelyLush City (talk) 01:25, 14 January 2016 (EST)

Continuity Stream Bullshit

I suggested this on the Allspark, and there's some momentum for it so I'll put it here.

As M Sipher said above, arbitrary furniture movement is bad. That said, all the continuity stream minutae is even worse, and serves only to bloat our pagecount with duplicated information in articles that will only ever be stubs forever. Why do both Primax 984.0 Gamma and The Transformers (issue) exist? Or Marvel Comics continuity if you think the continuity is more important than what the Universal Stream indicator actually decodes to, although if there weren't significant opposition I'd argue that since the stream encoding to a piece of fiction is a 1:1 mapping that we should respect that directly.

Since a Universal Stream page will not contain any useful information other than its actual stream indicator (and VERY occasionally some detail such as "this universe is destroying another one"), I'd like to propose that all universal stream pages either be redirected to the actual single piece of fiction that the stream indicator decodes to, or to the Continuity timeline page that best describes it - and somewhere on **that** page we try and find a place for the universal stream number. Perhaps in the same fashion we originally handled alternate names - directly below the introductory paragraph, in bold?

If this causes problems, feel free to disregard... but I've heard enough discontent about the matter and there's been enough push for it there that I feel confident enough to put my next foot forward on this happening. Sky Shadow (talk) 10:32, 13 January 2016 (EST)

My proposal is that rather than stream pages, major continuities would all get pages. a Marvel g1 universe page, a sunbow cartoon universe a Classicsverse page and so on. Then, stream numbers used in universe would be redirect to those pages. Minor streams would get redirected to the current list pages we have now; AVP additions to minor streams would go in notes on the works main page. (For example, Ulchtar would go in the notes of that videogame)Lush City (talk) 10:51, 13 January 2016 (EST)

I just noted that the already existing Universal Stream pages could be converted into continuity pages in some instances , http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Classicsverse could be simply renamed "Classics Continuity/Universe" for exampleLush City (talk) 11:07, 13 January 2016 (EST)

I'm not seeing how universal streams are logically any different than random crap namedropped without context in stories all the time. Pralmtzurlz VI, Vaulted Heights of K'th Kinsere, and Payload of General Frightening have less content than most universe pages. There also isn't really a way to effectively have real-world information and then fictional universe information on the same article; Transformers: Mystery of Convoy isn't going to look any better if you put all of the To Die Game! stuff on it. (Primax 984.0 Gamma is also not limited to "The Transformers", so, uh, what?) Saix (talk) 13:10, 13 January 2016 (EST)

The difference is those pages are not wholly redundant. For example, yeah, maybe the city "Gygax" only got mentioned offhand in one story. But as it gets a page, it goes in the Category listing of "Cybertron cities" (or whatever it's actually called) and then when, oh, say, a TV cartoon writer wants to look up cities for references...

In other words, BAM, the whole reason we did this wiki. The obscure was given an outlet, and it got used again. And this is far from the only instance.

But this is not a functionality that serves any real purpose for the named Streams. You need to know the code to make any sense of them, at which point you can easily make up a code for any piece of fiction that exists. And every piece of Transformers fiction that exists IS canonically its own universe, and simultaneously wholly-subsumed parts of other universes, because of quantum (read: pseudoscience arglebargle translation of a meta-based concept with no real defined rules because we, and I literally mean WE as in me and Trent, made it all up and jesus on a tilt-a-whirl some people think way too hard and too rigidly about this). All these pages do is create a hoop for people to jump through unnecessarily. We don't need the pagecount bloat.

If people are REALLY concerned about stuff not from, say, that one storybook that some FunPub gag-strip or Facebook post placed some wacky new event, then there is a simple solution. NOTES SECTION. One bullet point is really all you need in the overwhelming majority of cases. Something else, a subsection under notes called, oh, "Use in Other Fictions" will cover it. --M Sipher (talk) 15:49, 13 January 2016 (EST)

Yeah, the "club fiction adds a bunch of stuff to some random micro-continuity" scenario is really the only one where the stream pages are even remotely good for anything - the Shell Game/Megazarak universe springs to mind - and in those cases it is potentially useful to have the info from a bunch of separate AVP things (or whatever) collected. But as you say, Sipher, that kind of thing could happily live in the notes section of the fiction article. Jalaguy (talk) 16:06, 13 January 2016 (EST)

From a group complaining about "moving the furniture around", there sure have been a lot of suggestions recently about deleting a lot of pages and taking all the info in them and putting them onto slightly harder-to-find pages. I'm not even sure I have an opinion on this proposal, but the observation struck me as odd. --Giggidy (talk) 16:09, 13 January 2016 (EST)

Context is important, and the context here is bandwidth issues and reader experience. Those are fucking important. Every time we bounce a reader to another page, that's another tick on our sever, and these pages are, as noted, almost wholly redundant info when we could send them to a page that has the whole thing. And you're gonna sit there and claim that a listing of made-up words and number gibberish is somehow easier for a reader to use than just putting the relevant information on a page titled in plain English they're vastly more likely to find on their own. Okay, sure, whatever. --M Sipher (talk) 16:17, 13 January 2016 (EST)

I think at the very least, there's little reason to argue that stream indicators for major continuities shouldn't just redirect to the continuity page, i.e. Primax 984.0 Gamma to Marvel Comics continuity. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 16:35, 13 January 2016 (EST)

Let me put this another way... the stream pages feel akin to having a page for "Khrapovik" then listing only the things Prime Ratchet did in the Russian comics on it. Again, technically a different universe, sure, but it's part of the bigger universe and splitting it out really only obfuscates info in the name of pedantry, and it's just better off folding it into the main. --M Sipher (talk) 17:09, 13 January 2016 (EST)

That makes a lot of sense to me. This might be one of those situations where we want to use flexibility. If there is a continuity page that already exists, maybe the redirect goes there and we have a fiction section. If there's a universal stream and little else, maybe that can just go away. And if there's a lot of information about the stream, maybe we just keep it. --Giggidy (talk) 23:06, 13 January 2016 (EST)

So should we start compiling solutions for wn eventual vote. I'm behind the idea of replacing stream pages with pages for the continuity. In fact I think a good way to deal with extra Avp infor is to use are already existing arrow system. Thede added storiee are just like,say Regeneration One added to the end of Marvel US in a way, so for example. Mystery of the Convoy would get an arrow that goes to To Die Game, Shell Game would get an extra a avp write up detail.

But over all I am for us having Continuity pages instead of streams. Like was said above we don't need Primax Whatever Gamma AND Marvel US continuity pages. Lush City (talk) 10:30, 14 January 2016 (EST)

Alternate names

When we mention a character's alternate names (i.e, on X's page, we note that "he is sometimes known as Y), there seems to be a bit of confusion as to exactly where we do it. Some pages place such information near the top in the continuity note, whereas others put it at the end of the opening paragraph. Is there a policy on this? I don't particularly care one way or the other, I'd just like to see them made consistent. -Foffy the Sheep (talk) 01:08, 17 January 2016 (EST)

I prefer them to be in the top rather than in the bio.--Primestar3 (talk) 14:54, 17 January 2016 (EST)

Parodies

I think we should have one page that lists notable parodies and stuff. Just to get them out of the way. HarbringerOfDoom (talk) 08:29, 20 January 2016 (EST)