Forum:Conjectural Portrait Guidelines

A good portion of our group portrait galleries have portraits of unnamed members of that group, which are known as conjectural portraits. However, there have been more than a few disagreements on how many conjectural portraits are tolerable; among most users there is a desire not to spam the galleries with all the unnamed characters one can find, but there are no clearly defined guidelines about which unnamed characters warrant portraits and which don't. We haven't had any huge conflict over this issue so far, but I feel like it'd be productive to discuss and develop clear guidelines that might prevent future conflicts. Kaido King of the Beasts (talk) 22:42, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Discussion
To get things started, here's my idea for a guidelines draft:
 * Maximum ten conjectural portraits per gallery
 * For most cases, unnamed characters should only be added if:
 * They affect the plot individually or as part of a small group (like no more than 5) - i.e. they are more than just a background character, or part of a giant horde.
 * They have a discussion with a major character (not shouting from a group)
 * Exception: Small groups of a defined number (maybe 20 members or less) can have up to 10 conjectural portraits of confirmed members even when they do not fit the above guidelines (like the Numbers Gallery)

Let me know what you think of these, and what you might add or change There are a few intricacies that I'm not yet sure how to put into words, so if those come up later I'll try to help work on those. Kaido King of the Beasts (talk) 22:39, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I don't necessarily see the point in there being a limit to the number of unnamed characters listed. I can't imagine there ever being an issue where a gallery gets overfilled with non-notable characters as long as we aren't including literally ever character with a unique design. I personally think any character that appears in multiple chapters should probably just be included in galleries by default. Like for example, there's several members of the Mink Tribe that have appeared in like a dozen chapters but aren't currently included in the gallery. Since they're background characters, they're not important to the plot and many of them don't have speaking roles, but I still think they should be included because they're a consistent part of the group. I think the guidelines should be that a character has to have appeared several times in multiple chapters as a recognizable member of a group (even just in the background), or if they've only appeared in one chapter, they need to have had a significant speaking role or impact on the plot. DewClamChum (talk) 23:23, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I agree that there should be a limit and guidelines for notability. Ten, however, might be too much depending on the gallery, because according to the records on the Donquixote Pirates talk page, there used to be a lot more random henchman, and it was decided to shorten it simply because ten was way too much. Imagine looking at any gallery with two consecutive rows of only ????? ????? ????? ????? ?????... It looks bad, and at that point since they are unknown characters, there is no link to them, so no one even knows who they are. I think it should be more like, if a gallery has multiple sections like Wano's, one should be allowed to put 2-3 important unknowns (such as Geisha Master and Magistrate, since the One Piece website has entries for them) per section as long as they are decided to be important and not for the sake of filling it up, so that even if the total of them is ten or even over for the whole gallery, they aren't all smack against each other creating two to three rows of question marks. Also, I think that the priority for minor characters if they are not important at all, would be to place them in minor galleries. For example, the Galley-La Gallery and the Franky Family Gallery have some conjecturals that appear multiple times, but they should stay there and not take a place in the Water 7 Gallery. Also, exceptions should be made for groups like WCI31, as it is very specifically intended to be 31, as opposed to maybe a 20-man pirate crew, which only happened to be 20 people by chance and we shouldn't go around finding up to 20 pictures to fill it up, unless those 20 conjecturals appear multiple times and can be confirmed.Nightmare Pirates (talk) 05:40, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

I think the limit of how many conjectural portraits a gallery is allowed to have should be done in a case-by-case basis. Having an uniform limit probably wouldn't work since 10 could be too much for smaller groups and too little for really large groups, like the Beasts Pirates, which have tons of unnamed recurring Gifters. Plus, you'd get discussions about who should be included or not if a group has more than 10 potential conjectural portraits. The Beasts Pirates alone have like a dozen recurring unnamed Gifters that's likely to increase as the arc goes.

I do agree however, that plot relevance and role should be the top criteria for even considering their presence. The Magistrate, for example, is important to making Zoro a wanted criminal, and thus leads to the fight with Hawkins.

Plus, as stated above, groups like the WC31 should be allowed to have 30 conjectural portraits since the number of members is part of the group's identity.KingCannon (talk) 14:00, 31 October 2020 (UTC)