Talk:History of Bowser

Split

This talk page section contains an unresolved talk page proposal. Please try to help and resolve the issue by voting or leaving a comment.

Current time: Sunday, December 1, 2024, 20:34 GMT

This is one of the longest pages on this wiki (around twice the maximum recommended size given by MarioWiki:Article size!), so I'm surprised there hasn't already been a talk page proposal suggesting that it should be split. While much of the issue can and should be addressed by trimming some individual sections, I think a significant portion of the problem is inherent to the topic of Bowser's history itself. Bowser has appeared in a lot of media, and he usually has an active story-relevant and gameplay-relevant role. Trimming this article down to the size of History of Luigi or History of Princess Peach is theoretically possible, but "what does Bowser do in this game?" generally does have a slightly longer answer than the same question would for Luigi or Peach, even if the unnecessary plot summary details are removed.

Unfortunately, since this article is so much longer than all other "History of {character}" articles, there is no precedent for how to split a history article into multiple sub-articles. As such, I have multiple ideas for how to split the article.

1. Separate the longest subsections into their own articles, such as "History of Bowser in the Super Mario series". (More precisely, the top n longest subsections by byte count, for whatever smallest number n would result in the main article being under the recommended 150,000 byte limit.) This would be the easiest approach to implement. However, some of the longest sections really should be made shorter, and they wouldn't have enough in them to stand alone as separate articles if the unnecessary parts were removed. Therefore, this would need to wait until after this article is trimmed down. It could be the case that trimming those sections is itself really enough to bring the article's length below 150,000 bytes, in which case that number n would be zero, and no new articles would be necessary.
2. Divide the history by century, as in "History of Bowser (1985-2000)" and "History of Bowser (2001-present)". This is a very "natural" solution, but it's not exactly aligned with how this wiki typically organizes history articles and sections. (Not to mention the annoying controversy regarding where exactly a century boundary should be! I believe using the 1-indexed convention would be more practical for this wiki's purposes, because 2001 happens to be the release year of the GameCube and Game Boy Advance.) The two articles would still both be otherwise organized in the standard "group by series, sort series by the subject's first appearance in that series" order, with series where Bowser's appearances span both centuries having sections that link to each other. This would be a very "stable" way to split the article, without depending on the relative lengths of individual sections, which are subject to change over time. It is also easy to extend to other long history articles, should they need to be split in the future. It may pose a problem eventually due to how over time the imbalance between the amount of Super Mario media released in the 20th and 21st centuries will become more significant, but that's not something we have to worry about yet.
3. Divide the history by Bowser's role, as in "History of Bowser as a non-playable character", "History of Bowser as a playable character", and "History of Bowser in non-game media". This has similar advantages to dividing the history by century, and would be implemented in a similar way. This has the additional advantage of being more relevant to Bowser in particular and video games in general, but it has the additional disadvantage of requiring more cross-referenced sections for media where Bowser has multiple roles.

Proposer: JanMisali (talk)
Deadline: July 14, 2024, 23:59 GMT

Trim the article first, then split the longest subsections if it's still over 150,000 bytes

1. JanMisali (talk) Second preference, as proposer.
2. Super Mario RPG (talk) I'm sticking with this option.

Split into "History of Bowser (1985-2000)" and "History of Bowser (2001-present)"

1. JanMisali (talk) First preference, as proposer.

Split into "History of Bowser as a non-playable character", "History of Bowser as a playable character", and "History of Bowser in non-game media"

1. JanMisali (talk) Third preference, as proposer.

Do not split the article

1. Waluigi Time (talk) I'm not too keen on splitting history articles. The article size policy is a guideline meant for the convenience of readers by improving readability and load times, and further splits compartmentalize that information too much in my opinion. (FWIW, the article loads fine for me. Images affect loading a lot more than text.) I'm strongly against splitting by year or role in game, for readers who are unfamiliar with the subject that would make it a lot harder to find what they're looking for, and it breaks up information within a sub-series (sliced either way, Mario Party would be split across two pages, for example). See also Talk:History of Mario#Split again?.

Comments

I don't think "Split by century" will work out in the long run. Consider the fact that Bowser has existed for nearly 40 years at this point, and this article is already too long to cover 40 years apparently. Now, consider the fact that a century is 100 years, which is well over double of 40. The "Split by century" option has the year 2000 as its only cutoff date, so the "2000 - present" half will cover nearly 25 years of history, so we will run into this same problem again in 15 years. And yeah, I understand many things will change in 15 years already, and that I'm just unnecessarily futureproofing things too early, but still.
If we had to split this article by eras and amounts of years, splitting by decade seems a more ideal solution to me: like History of Bowser in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, etc. rend (talk) (edits) 12:06, June 30, 2024 (EDT)

Yes, that's what I was referring to with how option two could cause problems "eventually". Deciding a solution to that can wait until the 2040s when it becomes relevant, I think. Splitting into individual decades at this point would be overkill. jan Misali (talk · contributions) 12:11, June 30, 2024 (EDT)