Xeno Series Wiki talk:Spoiler policy

Proposed amendment to 'Infoboxing characters as what they first appear to be'
Current policy about characters whose 'true form' is different from their apparent form when they are first encountered is as follows: This policy can have undesirable consequences, which mostly revolve around page contents looking like misinformation. There are several characters (e.g. Jin) whose first apparent form (human) would be, under current policy, different from their actual nature ; however, their actual nature is both not particularly hidden (being revealed relatively early on in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and immediately in Torna ~ The Golden Country) and not strongly considered a spoiler among fans, resulting in their true nature being much more widely known. As a result, showcasing their first apparent nature — specifically in the infobox, for reasons below — may appear confusing to wiki users who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of the spoiler policy. At worst, it may appear as misinformation and damage the wiki's reputation as a result. There are also characters (like Jin) who have particularly important reason to be distinguished clearly from their first apparent form (Jin's relationship with, and opposition to, humans is based upon him not being one); current policy does not particularly allow for this.
 * Describing and infoboxing characters as what they first appear to be. If they have a "true form" or similar, its information will appear lower down the page, in its own section and second infobox underneath the description of the plot that reveals it.

The difficulty is that the character infobox itself makes no distinction between 'what they first appear to be' and 'what they actually are'. As it stands, having Jin's species be 'human' gives the impression that the infobox is actually calling Jin a human. Changing the infobox to instead say 'Apparent species' or similar would be confusing for characters' true forms; including both an 'apparent species' and a 'species' option would be a dead giveaway that they are not what they seem. On the other hand, this difficulty is not present with characters' 'Appearance and personality' sections, which have substantially more room for subtlety.

I propose an alternative to the policy which avoids the issue above. It avoids the issue via omission: Instead of erring on the side of too much information, this errs on the side of too little information. The benefit to this is that a lack of information is much less attention-grabbing than information the viewer believes to be incorrect — it avoids the misrepresentation issue in a way that is likely to go unnoticed (and un'corrected') by many wiki users. The disadvantage is that there is no easy way to include an explanatory MediaWiki comment directly inside the infobox (that does not mess with the formatting) when information is omitted as opposed to when it is included. A comment could be placed outside the infobox, but that would be easier for editors to miss. It is very possible that the occasional change by editors unfamiliar with the policy would have to be undone with this as the policy.
 * Describing characters as what they first appear to be. If they have a "true form" or similar, its information will appear lower down the page, in its own section and second infobox underneath the description of the plot that reveals it. Infoboxes other than those pertaining to a character's "true form" should omit sections which would contain information specific to apparent or actual forms (namely the 'species' section).

Another alternative to the policy could perhaps avoid it via limited misrepresentation. The idea behind limited misrepresentation is that it hides characters' true natures where it is a spoiler while correctly stating it where is not, perhaps making the distinction be along the lines of whether the forms have particularly distinct physical appearances. However, I can't think of a way to phrase the policy in a manner that reasonably covers every case (especially Alvis) and has no substantial decision-making that must be done for every applicable character. If someone comes up with a good wording that's reasonable to implement, feel free to suggest it.

In either case, only the policy as regards the infobox would be altered. As stated above, detailed descriptions of characters in an 'Appearance and personality' section would allow for subtler language that accurately describes their appearance and does not give away their true nature but also does not misrepresent it (e.g. "Jin is a man..."). This would be something to attempt to accomplish in all relevant 'Appearance and personality' sections.

Rtg142857 (talk) 08:08, 14 February 2022 (EST)