MediaWiki talk:Community Portal

This is the place for discussion of topics that affect the entire wiki. For less wide-reaching subjects, either use articles' individual talk pages or our Discord server.

Some topics that would ordinarily be here have merited their own pages:

	Specific Discussion Subjects
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

Press release or logo for 30,000 articles?

Is it worth putting something together as we get very very close? Maybe something like:

• 3 from Thrilling 30 logo
• 0 from the 40th logo
• 0 from the Vector Sigma "Featured" logo
• 0 from the cosmic-streaking O in the TFTM opener
• 0 from GO!

Just a suggestion.... --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 13:45, 10 November 2023 (EST)

If we wanted to go down that route, maybe tie into some of the contemporary material? Say, the "O"s from Energon Universe or Evolution? (Though the latter isn't exactly straight-on...) --Broadside (talk) 14:38, 10 November 2023 (EST)

Sure! I lean towards the Energon Universe choice. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 15:48, 10 November 2023 (EST)

Apologies, I've corrected the count on the main page as it was inaccurate, so we're not as close as it looked like we were. --abates (talk) 16:20, 10 November 2023 (EST)

That just means we have more time to decide and, if so, pull things together. :) -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 16:51, 10 November 2023 (EST)

Feels like we just leapt up 40 new articles in the last 2-3 days. Is it worth putting a graphic together? --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 22:47, 18 January 2024 (EST)

"Multi-pack" vs "gift set" and suchlike

Incoming semantics, but... as I've been going through the toy entries, been trying to standardize/streamline a lot of stuff, and I think maybe a set of consistent terms/definitions for "a bunch of separate toys packed together" is in order. So lemme throw this out here for discussion/future reference...

• Multi-pack — A pack of toys where the contents (or at least most/some/any of them) are exclusive to this release, not sold in other packaging. Most multi-toy releases nowadays would fall under this umbrella by default.
• Gift set — A pack of toys where all of the contents are/were concurrently (or close enough) sold individually as well, without changes, in the same market. Like all the various G1 combiner sets.

The latter brings up the question of if we want to label all the Takara "VS" packs and the various UT-era "VALUE PACK!" sets under that umbrella, which I'm ambivalent-to-marginally-in-favor-of over. Especially as Takara's been putting out new "VS" packs where the toys are new decos not available elsewhere... also we kinda made up the "VS pack" term anyway, as memory serves, so. --M Sipher (talk) 20:15, 8 January 2024 (EST)

Hasbro has used the word "Giftset" to refer to unique variants not available separately. I'm inclined to think we shouldn't directly contradict that. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 21:21, 8 January 2024 (EST)

and damn but does that article need updating. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 21:22, 8 January 2024 (EST)

I'm inclined to think that Hasbro uses lots of terms in ways that are not exactly conducive to organizing a wiki. --M Sipher (talk) 21:29, 8 January 2024 (EST)

More bullet point insignia?

Okay so... I recall there were some other possible faction symbol bullet points we could maybe use. I ran across a few with this batch of toy pics we might consider adding. I'll list them here, see if people can think of more. I feel like there might be a couple more two-faction matchups out there.

• Rescue Bots
• The various BotBots squads
• My First Transformers

I'm not un-convinced that we should have the bespoke insignia for stuff like the Disney Label, since they do use them on the packaging. So uh... there. --M Sipher (talk) 01:51, 13 January 2024 (EST)

Also, while looking at the list of all the bullets on the template page... maybe we should see if we can split the list up a smidge? Like, put all the mutli-faction icons in one section, a section just for BotBots since there's gonna be quite a few of them? Alphabetizing them might also be in order. (I have exactly zero idea how those templates are coded, so uh, lemme know if that's doable.) --M Sipher (talk) 04:42, 13 January 2024 (EST)

There's also the Star Wars Transformers... though I'm not sure if using Star Wars insignia falls too much out of this wiki's scope, although we do use at least use them on the actual characters' pages (see Darth Vader). Turborun (talk) 10:34, 13 January 2024 (EST)

I don't think we'd use SW insignia because, near as I can tell, the toy packaging doesn't mark the toys that way. --M Sipher (talk) 05:27, 14 January 2024 (EST)

Idea for reducing the size of toy sections by compacting unchanged toy entries

I've come up with an idea that I think would make toy sections on character pages a little better and more intuitive. Instead of having a long list of entries for multiple releases of the exact same toy completely unchanged, we could just compact them all in a single entry, describing how the toy was available both individually and unchanged in a bunch of multipacks. This could be especially helpful with toy sections that are way too long, such as both the Movie Optimus Prime and Bumblebee toy pages that have been subject to a lot of discussion already.

I used the 2007 Legends Class section of the Movie Optimus Prime toy page to make a quick example out of it. The entries would be reduced from four to two toys, since 3/4 of them are the same toy anyway, and a lot of white space would be removed. As for the images of the multipacks, I don't think we would be losing much in removing them since the wiki has never prioritized images of packagings for anything really and, as I know is written somewhere in the "rules", the wiki isn't supposed to be used as an image hosting website in the first place.

So, any thoughts? --Fritz (talk) 20:18, 20 January 2024 (EST)

We used to do this and it was actually kind of worse. There's also complications when unchanged toys end up being sold under different franchise headers, and when you add in all the other bullet point data a toy/set might have, you could end up with a lonnnnng list of bullet points before you get to the actual writeup, plus describing the multi-packs' contents... you're not really saving space while also kinda hurting the demi-chronological flow of the information. And deleting the multi-pack package imagery feels very wrong. It's one of those cases where there's no real ideal situation, but there's a least-bad one.

That said, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to make sure the first entry mentions these "repacks" alongside the redecoes and links to the relevant items. --M Sipher (talk) 21:34, 21 January 2024 (EST)

Good points, as usual. Now that you mentioned it, I think I do have a vague memory of this being done in the past. I was going to suggest the repacks from different toylines should remain separate, though. My mentality was that maybe we could have a way to highlight the "main" releases (original and redecoes/retools) from the "minor" ones (unchanged repacks) to make it easier to identify in a glance how many actually-different toys were released within a toyline, but I wouldn't want it to cause more confusion than less. Anyway thanks for taking the time to evaluate the idea. --Fritz (talk) 05:54, 22 January 2024 (EST)

Repurposings, continuity transplants, and using Template:Main/Template:See to improve navigability

I've gone back to the drawing board to come up with a way to signal to readers where closely-related pages exist, as I don't think disambiguation pages are enough and have found Template:OtherVersions to be unideal. Previously, I'd suggested merging a bunch of pages for so-called "continuity transplants", but other users convinced me this would be a poor solution. One alternative suggestion, from User:Broadside, was to use Template:Main to put key links to a character's appearances in other continuity families directly in the fiction section—reactions at the time were neutral-positive. You can see mockups for Cy-Kill and Bug Bite. This strikes me as the best of both worlds, because it keeps the consistent schema (which helps for page length and organisation) but also puts a link to the information in the place where your typical reader is expecting to find it (on the page for the highest-profile first incarnation of the character).

With the same philosophy in mind, I've also designed two new templates. The first, Template:Toyappeared, is intended for use in toy write-ups as a way of linking to fiction write-ups and character pages. It covers repurposings, "continuity transplants", notable instances of toy-accuracy, in-fiction powerups, "virtual" redecos, you name it. Toy write-ups are increasingly being duplicated across multiple character pages, which creates maintenance overhead, as both instances must be manually kept in sync. My suggestion is to use Template:See to link to the full information regarding a toy on the original page, with the repurposed instance giving only brief information of what the toy is and why it was repurposed or whatever. The second of my new templates has a much more specific intended use case: Template:Bwucharacter provides an easy way of explaining how/why a character was reinterpreted for their Uprising appearance, as Uprising accounts for most of the situations I view as being problematic.

I realise I'm proposing like five things at once here, so my sandbox has a full example demonstrating how it all works together, along with tons of individual examples of the templates' usage and a more thorough explanation of what I'm trying to address with them. Take a look, and let me know which aspects you like, which parts you don't like, or any ideas you have to add! —The Wadapan (talk) 06:24, 12 February 2024 (EST)

I can vouch for these templates! ShootingStar7X (talk) 15:38, 26 February 2024 (EST)

I'm seeing a lot of problems with the implementation of some of this, and a lot of future headaches. The ones rolled out put what look like stub headers in a fiction section with just a small normal missable note up top; and in Override's case in specific, multiple stubs with completely redundant information. What this is going to do is get new people thinking that these are missing information that needs to be filled, then we gotta revert it and tell them no all that goes elsewhere, which is utterly unintuitive and will just lead to arguments and headaches all around.

As for toys, in the instances of BWU-type stuff where it's a one-toy Mini-Con or whatever, I feel like NOT having the actual toy info for them on the BWU page, as with the Mini-Con Snow Cat toy currently, is not doing the reader any favors. Quite the opposite. Why are we making them jump to a different page for information that has no reason to not be right there? I don't like making readers jump through hoops needlessly, and that's all this feels like. And it's not like the toy sections of most of these are gonna see major changes, so lack of cross-updating is very, very, very unlikely to be an issue.

I really don't think these require new templates and a bunch of new-editor landmines. At most, there's a decent argument to be made for re-positioning the "you look familiar" template that already exists, maybe below the main character writeup (above feels like a bad layout choice, pushing all kinds of stuff down.) --M Sipher (talk) 02:11, 28 February 2024 (EST)

Listings and accessories

When I was making the description for cannonball based on the Walmart listing, there was mention of a Gatling gun and hammer not shown in the stock images,and left them out.

If I run into this type of situation again, what do I do?Poliwag06 (talk) 10:56, 7 March 2024 (EST)

A few suggestions

Gallery pages should only include images that aren't easily accessed by going to the main page, to avoid cluttering. I guess this is not an issue now since the current gallery pages are fairly short.

There should be more dedication in listing alt-modes of characters. Maybe there should be a header or something. For example, if the Dreamwave version of Sunstorm transforms into an F-16 jet, it should be listed in the beginning with a header for the sake of easy access to the said information.--Primestar3 (talk) 13:59, 17 March 2024 (EDT)

Will we get an article on The Masked Singer?

Will there be an article on TFWiki about The Masked Singer, specifically their recent "Transformers Night" episode (https://the-masked-singer.fandom.com/wiki/Transformers_Night)? --John Pannozzi (talk) 20:01, 12 April 2024 (EDT)

Assuming it's a licensed appearance (I can't check the credits myself :C ), I can't think why it wouldn't be AkibaSilver (talk) 21:15, 12 April 2024 (EDT)

It was indeed licensed. --John Pannozzi (talk) 22:30, 12 April 2024 (EDT)

Yes, as an official Hasbro-sanctioned piece of TF media, the episode does meet our requirements for inclusion. It just needs someone to write it up. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 23:22, 12 April 2024 (EDT)

Franchise articles

So I was looking at the franchise pages to try and get an idea of what the standard is supposed to be for how they are written. Should all of them be updated to be more like the Beast Wars: Transformers (franchise) article? What was making me wonder this was that on the Transformers: Energon (franchise) article it had a section for "Homages" and one for "New characters" which I don't think any other franchise article has. --1levichurch (|talk) 22:57, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

AI upscaled images

With fresh offsite talks about the matter, I put forth we add an official policy against posting AI upscaled images of any kind to the wiki, owing to their subpar performance in "enhancing" the quality of images. McBaggins (talk) 23:52, 1 May 2024 (EDT)

Agreed. It's literally faking information and presenting it as official. (Also often noticeably terrible.) Sometimes the best quality available of something sucks, but we simply have to deal. Saix (talk) 23:57, 1 May 2024 (EDT)

100 percent agreed. It's called "artificial" for a reason. Plenty of details would be lost out through the upscaling, and several times errors on the wiki somehow became official through Hastak using the wiki for references (the whole Circular reporting thing). If we start allowing AI upscaled images, then we're likely to have things lost to the annals of time. Potato quality is better than lost qualitySingularity (talk) 00:11, 2 May 2024 (EDT)

Sure. --M Sipher (talk) 00:43, 2 May 2024 (EDT)

Ending addition of high-end statues

This is something I doubt other people have noticed, but I'm putting down a tent-peg on it: After having built the entries for dozens of high-end collectable TF statues in the last 2-3 years, from firms like Diamond Select, Imaginarium, Azure Sea, XM Studios, etc., and then seeing most of them either officially cancelled or never spoken of again with no reported purchases, I am going to stop adding such items here. If someone else feels like cataloguing them, great.

It really may not be possible for us to keep up with toy-like non-transforming merchandise (figurines and statues) the way we used to. There are at least two released series of G1 core cast micro-figurines with micro-comics and magnifying glasses, which would have been the rage of the fandom in 2005, that nobody ever got around to adding, and it feels like too much of a chore for me to start. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 10:35, 3 May 2024 (EDT)

It's an unfortunate but very real thing that once you enter the world of licensed merch, we're gonna have big gaps. It's... a lot, on top of the "a lot" that is the regular TF toyline and fictional output today. I've said that the work involved in keeping up with all of TF's merch ought to be a full-time paying job, and I genuinely mean it. --M Sipher (talk) 16:39, 3 May 2024 (EDT)

Transformers Roleplaying Game releases on the front page and sidebar

The Transformers Roleplaying Game is getting pretty frequent releases of both sourcebooks and pre-written adventures, and it occurs to me that it might be a good idea to have it on the "current releases" section of the front page and/or the navigation sidebar. How would people feel about that? --Broadside (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2024 (EDT)

I think that makes a lot of sense, as long as we have people keeping up with the new releases to document them. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 15:51, 4 May 2024 (EDT)

How we handle weapons' toy/merch sections

Okay, so like... I'm not really convinced that what we've been doing is the best way to handle the weapon pages' toys/merch sections. Honestly, they end up looking... really shoddy. There's just tiny scraps of info, vast wads of whitespace, few to no links, the images are tons of different sizes.
I'm thinking that instead of all this... maybe this is a place where a gallery is in order, just a chronological procession. Have the captions just say what lines/toys the weapons came with and link to the toys directly on the character page. It's not like there's much to say about any of these, why not let the toy listing on the character page say it? Why make people scroll through screens of mostly-emptiness, which I feel they're increasingly unlikely to do? I may do a sandbox if I'm feeling up to it. --M Sipher (talk) 22:24, 6 May 2024 (EDT)

User:M Sipher/Sandbox:WeaponPageToysSection - So... this, basically. --M Sipher (talk) 22:39, 6 May 2024 (EDT)

I'd be on board with that. --Broadside (talk) 22:34, 6 May 2024 (EDT)

I like it. It would be far more compact than our current approach for, say, Fusion cannon#toys, while still getting the point across. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 11:13, 10 May 2024 (EDT)

Proposal for Unproduced or Unreleased Template

I don't think the Apocrypha template is particularly useful. It was created specifically for Alignment, but most of the things in it don't fit that criteria. Something like Unproduced or Unreleased Transformer media would be more self explanatory. WillR113 (talk) 07:05, 11 May 2024 (EDT)

Use of pictures from ebay, fan sites, etc

Is it appropriate to use pictures of toys from ebay, fan reviews, video review screenshots and the like? Under fair use and with source credit? Sometimes rarer items we don't have good pictures of on the wiki show up in these places. In particular I found a ebay seller with good images of EZ collection toys and and old Japanese review blog with images of Takara variants of HFTD/Autobot Alliance toys so that got me wondering. —BluJayWarrior (talk) 10:10, 12 May 2024 (EDT)

Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers “再構成版” エピソード視聴ガイド "Re-Configuration Version" aka "Re-Constructed Version" Episode Viewing Guide

We really need to document the "canon" Japanese viewing order for Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers & Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers 2010 originally included with the Pioneer Laserdisc booklets & later apparently revised by Hirofumi Ichikawa (市川裕文) for the DVD BOX SET 2 Instruction Booklet as it would help clean-up the chronology on many wiki pages here. From what I've been able to gather this particular viewing order differs from both the US/Japan production orders, the US-Airing order and the Japanese-Airing order. So what exactly is the order of the episodes of these two series according to these documents? Does anyone own them and able to list the specific order in which the episodes appear in those LD/DVD "Instruction Booklets" word-for-word? As it stands, we've only mentioned that a "narrative viewing order" exists but do not have it listed anywhere. For further clarification, it is not the order in which the episodes appear on the Japanese DVDs. Astrobotix (talk) 01:09, 15 May 2024 (EDT)