Category talk:Power-ups

Cleaning up this category

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I've noticed that several entries in this category and its subcategories seem be stretching the definition of "power-up". For example, there's the 1-Up Mushroom, which only gives the player an extra life and doesn't power up the user in any way; or the Megamorph Belt, which is only used by Bowser in his role as an antagonistic NPC in Mario Party DS and therefore isn't a power-up by definition as the player never uses it. To me, a lot of the misuse seems like poorly thought out choices from the early days of this wiki that go unnoticed as our standards change. Other misuse, however, is probably just Category:Flower power-ups and Category:Size-changing power-ups being subcategories of this when they'd make more sense as seperate categories named something like Category:Fire Flowers (even though most of them aren't fire-based—it's the best name I could think of) and Category:Size-changing items respectively.

In preparation for remedying this category's state with a proposal, I've put together a dissection of this category and its subcategories in my sandbox. I've divided the entries by how I want to handle the articles, with subgrouping for what kinds of articles the categories are being applied to. Before I start preparing the proposal, I'd like some feedback on how to handle certain items in "Could go either way" first—mainly the character caps from Super Mario 64 DS, the Wonder Flower, the boomerang, and meat. (I'll likely have the Mario Party items and non-video game items as voting options.) Perhaps some items I've labeled as uncertainties or removals could be contested as well. Deciding how to treat the subcategories can happen in a later proposal—that'd just overcomplicate the one I currently have planned. — SolemnStormcloud (talk) 19:34, February 4, 2025 (EST)