Forum:Deletion/Merge of Useless Character Pages

Hopefully a quick forum....

Basically, we have a lot of useless character articles that I'd to get deleted/merged. These characters haven't made an appearance anywhere, only their name has been mentioned. And for most of them, only in the anime. There is no reason to think that they'll ever be anything but filler names, so I see no point in having separate articles for them. The list goes:

Cactus Island, Sapoten Graveyard: Names on gravestones, nothing more. All of them besides Mr. Sacrifice only appear in the anime and are references to people who work on the series. They should be trivia. Mr. Sacrifice's name, though, appears in the manga and follows the BW agent naming, so I think he should be merged to the BW article.
 * Okohsim-Eda
 * Ekusonhok-Adu
 * Ihsakat EkiihsoY
 * Imuzak Akoijuf
 * Lyu-Manas
 * Mr. Sacrifice

Impel Down: As seen on a list of Level 5 prisoners. Should be merged into Impel Down
 * Roche Tomson
 * George Black

Corrida Colosseum: An anime only name on a list of participants. Should be merged into the Corrida Colosseum article.
 * Komaking

So yeah, discuss. 21:15, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

Discussion
Meh, I think they're kind of funny, we should keep them

As long as they're noted that they're anime only or name only.

What's the harm? 21:21, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

I'm in favor of this merger. We did something similar on Bleach Wiki with a bunch of characters who either only appeared in one chapter or who didn't get expanded on enough to be worthy of a full article for themselves, and grouping them together on one page sets a standard for what should and should not be a full-fledged article, so I'm all for it.--Xilinoc (talk) 21:43, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

Delete everything but Mr. Sacrifice which should be merged into the Baroque Works article and the others can be noted in trivia. Merge Roche Thompson and "George" Black into Impel down article and merge Komaking into Corrida Colosseum article. SeaTerror (talk) 21:56, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

I really hate it when this Wiki does that. No we should not merge them.

Joekido (talk) 22:34, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

If there is enough information for the articles, I'm in favour for keeping them. If there isn't, merging them into a singular page similar to Animal Species might be a good idea. Besty17 22:37, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

We should definitely keep these. 23:16, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

I'm against merging them too. It's not harming the wiki by having more pages. 23:21, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

Against merge. Who knows if either Impel Down guy will appear in Buggy's crew, plus I agree with what Calua said. 23:43, February 28, 2015 (UTC)

Against merge, but for a reason that someone may consider stupid: we are a wiki. The thing that makes the difference between us and a classic site is the presence of a page for each character. --Meganoide (talk) 00:34, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

But they aren't even characters. They're names. The graveyard ones are the worst: Six pages that are pretty much copies of each other. And five of them are just easter eggs referencing people who've worked on the series, which could work as a simple trivia point. If someone were to look them up on the wikia, wouldn't it be better for them all to be in the same place rather than scattered around? 00:45, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

I support this merge. These articles are a waster of space, as I severely doubt any person would look these characters up, and if they did, what information would they get? Someone is more likely to go to the Baroque Works/Impel Down/Corrida Colosseum pages, where they would learn about these characters. I didn't even know these characters existed until this forum pointed it out. And people, stop arguing that doing this makes us more like Wikipedia; there's a fine line between a detailed encyclopedia of a world and a hodgepodge of random, cluttered, ultimately unimportant information.

Delete the Baroque Works tombstone names except for Mr. Sacrifice who should be merged, and merge the others with the intended pages. 01:17, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

This wouldn't make us like Wikipedia. If we were like Wikipedia then every single page on here would be deleted. SeaTerror (talk) 01:21, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

I would accept the merge only if all easter eggs are deleted or merged somewhere. Stefan is a joke character that can be merged with the WB pirates; Chaton and Momousagi in the page of the Marines. Do we have a page for each joke Devil Fruit (Samu Samu no Mi, Ero Ero no Mi and another)? Then they should be merged with Paramecia. And probably others. Because, you know, all my examples are little pages with no effect on the series. --Meganoide (talk) 01:32, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

The difference is that we have a picture and information about those characters. 01:39, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

The very minimum that should be done is we delete those stupid tombstone characters other than Mr. Sacrifice. Those should be trivia at the most. SeaTerror (talk) 04:20, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

Alright, time for my REAL opinion. These articles have to go. I could settle for a merger, that's fine, but allowing them to have their own articles is insane. Why would simply having a name qualify a character to have an article? It's no more important than a nameless background character. At least those guys can be reoccuring. I say we should stick to the Kira rule: We need a name and a face. 14:22, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

So somebody answer the question, "what's the harm?" 15:54, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

The harm is people constantly wanting to delete or merge them. It's more an administrative problem than the content not being relevant.

16:00, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

So somebody answer the question, "How is presenting easter egg names that reference the anime staff as actual characters on five separate articles better than having a trivia point that would explain them all at once?" Not causing harm doesn't mean it's the best way to do things. 16:25, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

The harm is having useless articles for no reason. SeaTerror (talk) 18:29, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

Not everyone thinks they're useless. If they're already there then it's more work to delete the articles and merge them. And as people have said, since we're a wiki specialized on One Piece, we can get as detailed as possible, no matter how little the details affect the series. Nobody's having trouble because those pages exist, so it's not worth the effort to merge. Also if an avid reader just happens to search up one of these "useless characters" out of curiosity, it'd be cool if we had a page for all of them. Having more can never hurt. 18:47, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

I can 100% guarantee that there's a 0% chance of ANYBODY ever searching for those backwards names. SeaTerror (talk) 19:40, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

@JOP:
 * 1) Answer my question above.
 * 2) Having pages for these "characters" isn't detailed. It's redundant. Everything there is to say about them could just be merged to other articles/made into a trivia point as stated in my opening post. Currently the articles pretty much just speculate and state "nothing is known about...".
 * 3) "Not worth the effort"? Nobody's forcing you to make these changes. I could do them all by myself if it came down to that. So yeah, useless argument.
 * 4) If someone were to search them up, it would make no difference whether or not they have their own page or a section on another page. Or actually, it would: Having all the gravestone names in one place would be much better for someone who's trying to find info about them. Again, see my question.

19:53, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

I don't like the idea of merging a page about a character with a non-character page and the same goes for other type of pages. I think we should merge only pages of the same kind, like characters with characters, places with places, etc. This is also because you are mixing up different pages from different categories.

We can make a page for characters like Animal Species I think we have one for locations too. SeaTerror (talk) 21:12, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

And to the point of someone looking up their name, it's actually counterproductive. Instead of confirming that the names mean nothing, it suggests that it is, in fact, a character. And these people aren't characters. They're names. 22:52, March 1, 2015 (UTC)

If they're only names, then I support the idea of deleting them, or at the very least, add them as trivia, not as character articles, because as Ryu said, they're not characters; they're only names. However, if they did show up, regardless if it's in a SBS or whatever, like Stefan, I favor keeping them. 00:43, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

"How is presenting easter egg names that reference the anime staff as actual characters on five separate articles better than having a trivia point that would explain them all at once?"- My point was, neither is better than the other, therefore we should leave it as is. Just link the names to the Sapoten Graveyard page or wherever else links belong, and more information can be found on their individual page for less clutter. 01:13, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

That's incredibly bad logic. By your logic the wiki should have just stayed the same from the day it was crated since that's leaving it "as it is". Those backwards names should be merged into the Sapoten Graveyard article which is a stub as a trivia point and the redirects should be deleted. They never should have been made in the first place. SeaTerror (talk) 04:03, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

I'm against it. Let's keep them. Short doesn't equal bad. I'd rather have a bunch of short articles than one conjectural page that makes us look too lazy to make proper pages. 04:10, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

^ :D 04:28, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

DP I don't think you even read the forum if you think the first 5 linked articles are valid. SeaTerror (talk) 04:37, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

Gosh ST, why you gotta be so mean?? 04:42, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

If they are all merged, and the meaningful content is put onto appropriate pages, and redirects are made for all them, then I'm fine with this. And for the record "Not much is known about Mr. Sacrifice's personality" is not meaningful content.

Though I do take a problem with something Ryu mentioned, which is "We need a name and a face". The problem with these characters is not their lack of a face that makes them bad pages, it's that they are all just names that are seen in the background and are not addressed or mentioned by characters in dialogue. Characters like Cora and Dadan were mentioned by characters in the plot, and their articles were useful before the characters appeared.

Ultimately, I don't think we should have full articles for characters just because we happen to see their name written in English. Should we have a place that allows people to find information for these names that they see? Absolutely. Should it be over several articles where half of the sentences start with "Not much is known"? Absolutely not. 06:33, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

I think we should keep them, many small articles are better than one big article. 10:17, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that there is no real reason to be so reluctant to create small/trivia articles. We don't have to save pages, space or whatever. Our priority as a wiki should be organization and to fully cover the series. This is also why I think when we merge pages, the redirects should still be categorized normally since categories are lists: when I open a category, like Category:Islands, I want to see all islands. If we have merged an island with a kingdom, for example, the island redirect should still be categorized normally because otherwise you are "hiding" that island from the category and you are making it appears as if there were less islands then there actually are. Wikipedia also do this so is not something unorthodox to do. About merging the trivia characters in a page like animal species, I don't think that's really a similar case since for animals we are doing that to begin with, because if we make a similar page for characters it means that all characters should go there by default (and like animals, only with a few exception). I don't find doing that only for a few characters to be "well organized" and how do you think that would turn out? People will start to add every small character page to it and we will end up as a super mesh up of different characters that should have different categories. Merging places it's easier instead, you can easily cover the local places of an island on the island page itself.

Most people don't mind the actual articles of small characters but are against the completely useless backwards names since they're not even actually part of the series. They're not even characters. SeaTerror (talk) 18:12, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

In the very moment in which a name appears, a new character is created. They're easter eggs, but they're still characters. --Meganoide (talk) 18:52, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

No. Character = "A being involved in the action of a story." They're not characters. 19:02, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

So Stefan, Chaton and Momousagi are not characters even if they have an image, because they don't appear in the story. --Meganoide (talk) 19:05, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

Oda gave them a backstory, so they're characters. But the fact that they haven't appeared in the main story is why we consider them joke characters. 19:15, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

Knowing only the names is not really that much different from all those countless characters that appears in only one frame/panel and do anything else though... so I don't really understand why these pages must go while similar ones are fine for "reasons".

The first 5 aren't even names, Levi. SeaTerror (talk) 20:11, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

They're written on graveyards, and they may be references but they're still names that appear in the series. 20:16, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

Only Mr. Sacrifice's name appeared in the series. SeaTerror (talk) 20:46, March 3, 2015 (UTC)

They are good like this, no need to merge them. 00:47, March 5, 2015 (UTC)

Enrik did you even click the first 5 links? SeaTerror (talk) 04:00, March 5, 2015 (UTC)

I did, and still no need to merge, they don't make any harm. 06:37, March 5, 2015 (UTC)

"The harm is having useless articles for no reason." They are not characters. They are trivia pieces that never should have been created in the first place. SeaTerror (talk) 18:42, March 5, 2015 (UTC)

Several Shonen Jump characters appear in the game "Jump Ultimate Stars". We could add a "Don Patch" article. Actually, that game has a ton of locations, items, and fighting styles, all connected to One Piece through this game. I bet there are over 200 articles we could add from there. But we know that there is a such thing as "too minor" where they don't deserve their own article. That's why animal species are catalogued on one page instead of a bunch of tiny ones. That's why Heppoko, Peppoko, and Poppoko are merged, as well as all the other duos and trios. If we wanted to, we could make a separate page for ever Gomu Gomu attack that Luffy uses. But one article says it all much more effectively.

So don't say that more articles is always better. 20:19, March 5, 2015 (UTC)

Merge for the anime-only Tombstone names. Keep for everything else. Mr. Sacrifice may end up being relevant later on.--109.166.129.187 21:02, March 5, 2015 (UTC)

Merge to what?

Sapoten Graveyard trivia. SeaTerror (talk) 21:56, March 5, 2015 (UTC)

I just don't why we need to have so many pages whose content is mostly "Not much is known about ____, but..." I'm all for using our endless amounts of articles for things, but I don't see much of anything that is worth reading in those articles. I'm open to ideas, so someone please explain that to me.

If characters become relevant later, we can always unmerge, no harm, no foul. I don't see how that's a serious concern. Nobody would opposed to unmerging them...

And if we're worried about categories, maybe we can just make a section on these location pages for "mentioned residents" or something like that. Or if someone else has an idea, I'd appreciate that too. 03:03, March 6, 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, these articles of very, very trivial characters are useless, and should go, perhaps being merged in one article or named in the trivia section. I think JSD's idea on "mentioned residents" is nice, so I'm for it.

And if they become relevant to the plot, then we can just give them their own articles, but why should we give articles to characters that was only mentioned or named in a way that it's not relevant to the plot at all? 03:13, March 6, 2015 (UTC)

I think it's just a matter of method: as a wiki, we list and cover all the possible subjects from One Piece. For each character, we make a page and place it in the right categories to keep all organized. Sometimes we even cover two characters in the same page (something I'm not really fond of). In the case of places we have the option of merging minor places with the island page, but doing that for a character out of ordinary. If it's a character, we make a page for it, it's simple as that. Are those characters "useless"? Yes, so what? We don't really make "use" of any character anyway... the whole reason why removing them was suggested in the first place, "being useless", is to be honest not rational. It a subjective point of view and a personal judgment. If we make a page for each character, then we do it for all characters, it's simple as that. Otherwise I can think of tons of reason to why we should delete/merge any of these pages. Even among the characters, what about someone like Willie Gallon? He technically wasn't even mention in One Piece, since he was only mention by the narrator who can be considered to be outside the story itself. There are also side/joke characters from fillers or special episodes, what about them? My point is that we can't go around deciding who stays and who doesn't based on personal opinions that obviously cannot be shared by everyone, since they are indeed personal.

That's not the problem here, it's the fact that the pages are useless. As JSD and I have pointed out, their content is mostly just stating that we don't know much. 19:07, March 6, 2015 (UTC)

So then no difference with Willie Gallon, other minor characters or some pages in Category:Mentioned Only? You are not equally judging these kind of pages, which is why I said the argument "they are useless" is not objective, or rather, you cannot define which pages are useless and which aren't without relying on people opinions.

That article you keep linking is completely useless too. SeaTerror (talk) 03:55, March 7, 2015 (UTC)

The word "useless" is being thrown around a lot in here... (makes useless comment about it) 04:40, March 7, 2015 (UTC)

^also, Levi has a good point. 04:40, March 7, 2015 (UTC)

Yes, what I'm trying to say is saying "it's useless" it's not that much different from saying "I don't like it, delete it". We are a wiki, not a popularity contest for articles. If an article is "useless", then few people will read it, who cares.

It's clearly different. We've given plenty of arguments as to why having pages for these "characters" is redundant and why merging them into articles/trivia is a better way of doing things. 21:30, March 8, 2015 (UTC)

"We've given plenty of arguments" - I'm sorry, but you didn't. Reading again the discussion, the arguments are: Maybe I missed something, tell me, but ideas like merging them to the island pages and such are not arguments, they are alternatives. My arguments to not merge them are:
 * They are useless. - "Useless" means nothing, it not like a page is usable anyway and it's still a personal opinion that obviously is not always shared by everyone.
 * They are just names. - Same as Category:Mentioned Only.
 * They are trivia pages that won't have any place in the story. - Same as Category:Trivia Pages, many of short pages and filler pages.
 * They are a waste of space. - There is no space to waste to begin with.
 * People won't search for them. - There are plenty of pages people won't search. Also you can't search something that you don't know it exists to begin with. Have you ever find out something you didn't know reading the wiki? Is that bad? That's why pages are linked together and categorized, to make people find them.
 * The above arguments are very subjective. Obviously personal opinions cannot be eliminated and matters a lot in our decisions, but the more you can avoid them, the better. Especially if they are the only reasons behind a suggestion.
 * It's not consistent. If you consider any of the above points valid, then there are way more pages that should be merged (to what, however?). Where is the cut line? How do you decide if a page is useless or not? There is not defined criteria.
 * It will be a mess. All these pages should be merged somewhere. To start with, merging character pages to places makes little sense to me, but what you merge similar cases with? Like Willie Gallon, Mikio Itoo and such? Again, I don't see any criteria, therefore it's quite a random decision.

You seem to have picked up the idea that we feel these pages should be removed because we don't like the subject? I mean, I've got my personal strifes with George Black, but that's not what this is about. You're missing the point. When we say "useless", the actual intended meaning is "non-character". As in,

http://i1189.photobucket.com/albums/z439/RyuPointGame/WhoAreTheseGuys.png

who are these guys? I just pulled random people from the background. Are they One Piece characters? If we made an article for them, it would be "useless". Maybe that is subjective. As subjective as deciding whether to use an anime or a manga picture, with which we decided to go case-by-case. We draw the line wherever the community naturally draws the line, with the case-by-case decision. My vote for Whiskey Peak cactus graves is that they're not worthy of their own articles because they don't qualify as characters. Maybe Willie Gallon is a non-character, too. That's a discussion for another day.

I think the strongest argument on this side, which you have overlooked, is that things don't need their own individual articles to effectively present information. Hypothetically, we could take all the trivia from Luffy's page and make them separate links. People could be directed from one to the next and read all the trivia page-by-page. We know, though, that it's more effective to simply keep all the trivia together and present the information in small sentences. Having more articles is not always better. This is another thing that's inconsistent already, with Heppoko, Peppoko, and Poppoko as my previously given example.

One sentence is all it takes to list all the names on the graves in the anime on the cactus. One sentence that could go on a number of already existing pages. 05:35, March 9, 2015 (UTC)

I agree so much with Ryu about how the community chooses where we draw the line.

Personally, I draw the line with the ones at the top. Because literally the only thing about the characters is that their names were written in roman letters in the background of images. They were never mentioned by name in-story through dialogue, and at this moment in time have little connection to plot. Until they are mentioned in dialogue, like Willie Gallon was, I don't think they are important enough to exist as their own article. As a redirect to a merged page? Absolutely. As a freestanding article? There's just not enough to say. 06:10, March 9, 2015 (UTC)

I disagree with that redirect thing. They're not named characters, nor are they even characters at all. They're just backwards name of various Toei staff members. The only exception being Mr. Sacrifice, obviously. SeaTerror (talk) 06:18, March 9, 2015 (UTC)

I know this comment is late, but I also agree with the merge. I also agree that they should be redirected, except for Mr. Sacrifice.

12:03, March 9, 2015 (UTC)

Ok, Ryu almost has me with his Luffy trivia argument. I'm having trouble imagining how we would neatly merge the grave name articles into the Sapoten graveyard page though, can someone lay out an example? 14:28, March 9, 2015 (UTC)

^The names "Tizio, Caio and Sempronio" are amazing. Anyway, jokes aside.
 * "Hypothetically, we could take all the trivia from Luffy's page and make them separate links." - how can you make a page about a sentence exactly?
 * "things don't need their own individual articles to effectively present information." - I agree, that's why me make sometimes listing pages like Animal Species. However, when we decide to make such pages, we do it consistently. You said this was the strongest argument, but it's not an argument at all: it's an alternative way of doing things. You can't use the fact that we can list some characters in a page as argument in favor of listing some characters in a page.
 * About those "background characters" you posted, are you implying that if in the next SBS Oda says something like "Oh, those are Tizio, Caio and Sempronio, they are fun guys", then we shouldn't make their page? Because that's doesn't explain why we have pages such as Sam, Mikio Itoo, Pandaman, Tomato Gang, Teru, Minatomo, Domo-kun and Nnke-kun... maybe the graveyard names are different because we don't have a background story? But we have, since we know they were killed by the BW and other minor characters lacks it anyway. Maybe because we only know their names? Well as I said many times, that's the case for Category:Mentioned Only too. Maybe because they are staff Easter eggs? Well but so it is Mikio Itoo.
 * I found some statements said here, like why Mr. sacrifice is an exception or why being mentioned in a dialogue make the article "worthy", utterly arbitrary and that's why they make no sense.
 * I remember sometimes ago we had a page for each animal species. Then we decide to merge all of them together in Animal Species, while leaving the pages only of those which were really long (but still listing them in Animal Species). Obviously we cannot do the same things for all characters. We can merge "overlapping" characters together, but up until now, when we know the name of a character we make its article. It's as simple as that. It doesn't leave room for pointless debates and it's easy to do it. If we go case-by-case and start saying "this character is useless, we should merge/remove it", then we have to start countless discussions about all the minor/trivia characters there are. That's non sense.
 * Actually I'm more surprised that nobody proposed to merge Sapoten Graveyard to the island page, since we do merge places with other places.

I'm starting to not care what we end up doing anymore, because as Levi says, this whole argument seems to boil down to a matter of preference. Trivia or article, what damned difference does it make?! From what I can tell, this is still just a lot of the words "useless" and "not useless" being thrown around in here. Personally, I argued in favor of keeping things the way they are because those pages look absolutely fine to me and I figured merging was too much of a hassle for what it's not worth, but in the end, we still ended up in a heated debate over something as trivial as this. Heck, since we're not getting anywhere, might as well start a poll to get this over with. If anything, we should be more worried about fixing up that terribly empty Sapoten Graveyard article. 18:40, March 9, 2015 (UTC)