MarioWiki talk:Minor NPCs

Why is "Minor NPCs" capitalized?

Shouldn't it be "minor NPCs"? Spectrogram (talk) 15:43, January 13, 2023 (EST)

The state of this

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Over the past year, I've noticed that the prominence of this guideline seems to be eroding, so to speak. An earlier attempt to be more strict about these articles failed due to being too broad, but we've since seen merges for Jerry and Kuribo. I didn't agree with these merges and still don't, but I can at least see the logic there - you don't really interact with either of them, they're just name dropped in cutscenes. But now there's an ongoing proposal where the leading option is to merge Chef Torte and his Apprentice, named bosses, with the base Torte species article. What's going on, and what's the point of having this guideline if we're going to arbitrarily choose when it applies?

Frankly, inconsistency on the wiki is a significant issue, even if most of us probably don't want to admit it. Decisions are often made piecemeal via proposals concerning one article at a time, and many times those decisions aren't carried over to comparable articles for various reasons. Maybe no one ever bothered to follow up or wasn't aware of those articles, or maybe someone did try a proposal but because different users saw it at a different time it ended with a result that was inconsistent with the earlier decision. Imagine a casual reader asks why Kuribo doesn't have a page but Gary does. How do you explain it to them? Is Gary supposed to be merged too but no one's bothered to suggest it? Or does Gary meet some higher standard of notability because you're able to press up on the Wiimote to talk to him (and if so, how did we come to that decision)? Or why does Chanterelle (no, not the Paper Mario one) still have a page but not those characters? Is this another situation where no one bothered to follow up or do we have inexplicably different standards for characters who are name dropped in games vs. other media? How are we coming to the standards we're using - and more importantly, why are we making these decisions at all when we already have this guideline that draws a clear line that's simple for anyone to follow along with?

As time goes on and we inevitably crop up more inconsistencies, the more I become convinced that we need more top-down policy to settle some of these broader issues (and, while we're at it, codifying some of our existing practices in policy - a newcomer shouldn't have to comb through three proposals over the course of six years to figure out if a musical theme gets a page or not, for example). It would be nice if, when a casual reader asks why we do something a certain way, we can point to a policy page that clearly explains it instead of a gaggle of disconnected talk page proposals or whatever the case may be. Minor NPCs is just a small part in the grand scheme of things at the moment, but it's a good example of a guideline concerning coverage of a specific topic, and one that we probably should be following - because if we're not going to, we might as well throw it out, and I doubt we'll be able to agree on other potential policies to make wiki-wide coverage more consistent and easy to understand. I get that some users don't like some of the articles that would be (re)created by a stricter following of this guideline, but personally, I'd rather be more consistent and accept the price of some articles/organizational decisions being around that I don't particularly like. -- Too Bad! Waluigi Time! 11:32, January 27, 2025 (EST)