Talk:List of DIC cartoon episodes featuring Hip Koopa

Expand the scope of or nix the Hip Koopa filmography

This talk page proposal has already been settled. Please do not edit any of the sections in the proposal. If you wish to discuss the article, do so in a new header below the proposal.

convert to categories 2-2-4-3-1
So, this is an oddly specific Wiki article we came across on complete accident (as we are want to do.) To get everyone up to speed, This is a list article that only seeks to list every episode of the DiC Mario cartoons that Lemmy "Hip" Koopa appears in. There's no article for other characters. There's no article like this for other shows. It's just a filmography for Hip Koopa.

This is weird, right? This article was created in 2014 and since then, zero articles like it (as far as we've been able to find) have followed suit. We think everyone can agree this is a fairly dismal state for an article to be in. However... We think there's a few things we could do. Taking a page from--of all things--the Homestar Runner Wiki's filmography categories, as well as a filmography table they created for a series of shorts, we think we have a few tricks up our sleeves.

• Expand scope and convert to a table: Similarly to the aforementioned table, we'd change this article to cover all 3 of the DiC Mario cartoons and display every character that appears in each episode via a neatly created table. We'd likely handle the presence of one-off characters like, say, Indiana Joe by either not listing them at all (both in the table or in the article), or listing them in a bullet-pointed list like the Homestar Wiki does for miscellaneous characters, but as long as a main character appears more than once, they would likely get listed. (There would likely be edge cases to this we'd need to deal with in a future proposal!)
• Expand scope and create new articles: A more in-depth solution that's a bit akin to this article's current state, we would create articles like this for every main character that appears a substantial amount of times, and give brief plot summaries for every appearance.
• Create new categories and: This is a much more direct implementation of the Homestar Runner Wiki's methodology for their non-MAM shorts. Usually we don't have this information conveyed simply via categories, and in particularly cast-heavy episodes, they could get burdened with a lot of categories, so we're inclined to say this is sub-optimal.
• DELETED!: Self-explanatory, but this feels a little self-terminating. A list like this does have potential, in our eyes--it's just that, well, we'd kinda want more than one character for it.
• Do Nothing: Self-explanatory, but this feels very suboptimal to us. This article's already in a very janky state as-is.

Proposer: Camwoodstock (talk)
Deadline: Nov 8, 2023, 23:59 GMT Extended to Nov 15, 2023, 23:59 GMT Extended to Nov 22, 2023, 23:59 GMT

Expand, convert to a table

1. Camwoodstock (talk) We think we made it clear this is our preferred option. A table feels the most elegant for conveying the information in question, and while we definitely forsee the columns for Mario, Luigi, and Bowser being almost solid lines save for one odd episode where one isn't present in a good few of these tables, we feel like that's just kind of a natural byproduct of how the shows themselves are.
2. MegaBowser64 (talk) Sounds like the most organized option, per Camwoodstock.

Expand, create new similar articles

1. Koopa con Carne (talk) With tens of episodes and many recurring characters across the DIC cartoons, I'd venture a guess that a single shared page for all episode appearances of each character would get quite big. Like, upwards to 1 million bytes big. The idea behind this page is the best approach--though I won't comment on its execution.
2. Camwoodstock (talk) Thinking long and hard on it, we'd be fine with this, with the caveat that we, in the future, were to label these as "History of" articles and fully convert them to those, rather than clumsily keep the "List of" name. That would likely be a future proposal all on its own, however. While we still feel converting these to a table is best if we really want to call this a list, a full conversion to a proper history article doesn't hurt either.

#MegaBowser64 (talk) per

Convert to a category and create similar categories

1. Camwoodstock (talk) Failing that, we feel this is the second best option, unless people are just really adverse to some episodes having very large amounts of categories.
2. Hewer (talk) Second choice, I don't feel particularly strongly about whether or not to make categories but I don't really see any issues with this option. EDIT: To clarify, I still think the information from these pages should be merged to the characters' history sections rather than deleted outright.
3. FanOfYoshi (talk) Per all.
4. SolemnStormcloud (talk) Second choice, if only so this proposal can end with some beneficial outcome.

Delete the article

1. Hewer (talk) I honestly don't really get what the point is in having dedicated pages for these appearance lists instead of just covering all of a character's appearances on that character's page (i.e. a merge). Is that not what history sections on character pages are for?
2. TheUndescribableGhost (talk) I at first wasn't so sure about this, but Hip is like a recurring character, right? I feel it would be more useful to know what episode he's not in, rather than what episodes he is in because he is quite recurring if I'm correct. In my opinion, these filmographies should only be useful if it's a character who infrequently appears or is part of a show that has no main character like Happy Tree Friends. The latter example is personal to me because I'm working on a HTF wiki and that is actually one of my plans is to give most characters an article that covers all their episodes since the show has so many for some of them. Good examples go to Lumpy and Flippy.
3. SolemnStormcloud (talk) Per all.

Do nothing

1. Camwoodstock (talk) Honestly, at this point, we think we'd be fine with this, seeing as we'd prefer a simple rename for these "List of episodes" articles to "History of <name> in <cartoon>", putting them more in-line with their intended purpose--which, of course, was a conclusion we only reached in the comments, so it isn't an option. We're fairly certain at this point that adding a new option is... a little late on extension 2, so we'd rather just put a vote to abstain.

Comments

There are other lists of episode appearances on the wiki, not just the one for Hip Koopa:

• List of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 episodes featuring Mario
• List of Super Mario World episodes featuring Mario
• List of Donkey Kong Country episodes featuring Donkey Kong
• List of Donkey Kong Country episodes featuring Candy Kong

-- KOOPA CON CARNE 14:40, October 25, 2023 (EDT)

Good eye! We didn't actually catch that those already existed. In addition, we guess we might need to make a table for the DKC cartoon if the table option wins. (Fortunately, we've already got decent cast lists on the episode articles proper, so that won't be any more difficult than the rest of those tables would be. ;p) ~Camwoodstock (talk) 17:00, October 25, 2023 (EDT)

So I'm assuming whatever option passes will apply to these four articles as well as the Hip Koopa one, right? Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 14:18, October 26, 2023 (EDT)

Unless for some reason that's an issue, we'd say it'd apply to them all. ~Camwoodstock (talk) 16:17, October 26, 2023 (EDT)

@Hewer: Have you... seen how big those pages for Mario's cartoon appearances are? I don't think it's a good idea to merge them with an already gigantic page. -- KOOPA CON CARNE 16:55, October 26, 2023 (EDT)

It's worth noting in Candy Kong's case, she seems to have those episode synopses split off from her article because her article would literally be 25% larger than it currently is. In Mario's case, it's even worse--that's adding 61,799 bytes worth of data to a page currently only 175,561 bytes. That's an extra third of an article just for plot synopses. Discounting Super Show, which currently has no equivalent article. These are more than little excessive for what you're probably looking for in the first place--the episodes these characters appear in--hence we suggested a table and you can kinda tell that's our preferred option. The relevant information can be handled by the episode synopsis and not a collection of individual summaries of a character's whole story across a single episode, but all the relevant information for who appears in what episode is neatly organized and it helps someone find where a character appears in the first place, which is what a filmography should be first and foremost. ~Camwoodstock (talk) 17:54, October 26, 2023 (EDT)

"The relevant information can be handled by the episode synopsis and not a collection of individual summaries of a character's whole story across a single episode". I'm 67.5% certain I'm misinterpreting something here, but couldn't this rationale be used for literally any appearance of a character ever? "The information on Mario's appearance in Paper Mario can be handled by the game article, and not by an individual summary of Mario's whole story across the game."
Furthermore, seeing as how the example link in your proposal refuses to load for me, I'm still unclear on how the category approach would work. Categories on wikis are pages that index multiple content articles based on a given shared trait; they're not content articles per se, like something you'd put episode descriptions in. -- KOOPA CON CARNE 19:51, October 26, 2023 (EDT)

We should've been clearer--we're specifically using "filmography" in this context to effectively mean a list of appearances, not a descriptor of them. Considering usual list articles get only sentence-long summaries at best when they have to summarize things, this is meant to bring that closer to something like, say, the Lists of Recipes which don't specify the minutia of how the items work once you have them (especially in edge cases where said effects are oddly specific like the Electro Pop), just what the item's named, how it looks, and what items it takes to make it. (We hope this made sense? Basically: just look at just about every other "List" article, and then compare it to the state of this one, and you'll hopefully get what we're talking about.)
...Also, we're gonna be real here, we have no idea what you mean by "example link" for categories. The external link is for tables, and admittedly, the Homestar Runner Wiki servers are pretty dang slow, so you might need to give it a minute there. Aside from that, the only links are for two character pages. We're uh, gonna ask what you meant by that one in return, we guess. ;P ~Camwoodstock (talk) 23:33, October 26, 2023 (EDT)

There is no hardline stance on how much you're allowed to elaborate on a list. Technically, History of Mario is also a list of appearances for Mario across media, and the pages for his DIC episode appearances act as an extension to that. I admittedly still don't even know what the proposal is rallying behind--it feels like change for the sake of change--but, in any case, it can't be a good thing to set a precedent where list articles are not allowed to have in-depth information for each entry. If the cartoon episode lists get trimmed down to mere mentions of these episodes, or get deleted outright, then why wouldn't the same be done to the aforementioned History of Mario page, or List of beanholes in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, or what have you? What is the endgame here? Is it just conforming list pages to the more gauzy Paper Mario recipes lists? Because those are comparatively light on content for a specific reason: there is seldom anything you can elucidate on a certain recipe beyond "it requires this and this ingredient". -- KOOPA CON CARNE 12:12, November 4, 2023 (EDT

Ultimately, the goal here is to let these articles both be proper lists while also expanding the scope. Currently, only 5 characters have these lists (we think it's pretty obvious there's more shows and more characters in them than these 5!) and some of these currently don't actually explain much about the appearances. We don't really get the comparisons to the various History pages, list of things in RPGs such as bestiaries/hidden blocks/badges/beanholes/recipes/whatever collectibles we're forgetting here there's like 500 of those. The history pages are pretty fundamentally obviously different from the list articles as they rely on unique synopses on a game-by-game basis. We shouldn't need to explain the "list of" articles, as those are a pretty pre-established format of articles of being. We are not speaking for the other articles at the moment (we know the Candy Kong one falls squarely in the history side of things), but in the case of this article, at least, is currently in a weird state of being both a "List of" article in-name, but it's also trying to be a history article... While still not being formatted like a history article, and it ends up being this blend of both.
The "endgame" is not, in fact, to delete the History of Mario article over Hip Koopa--It's to expand this article into actually being both a functional list and cover more, rather than being this weird hybrid of a list article (what it's named for) and a History of article (what it's trying to be). Hence, either we make similar articles like this (hopefully more on the History side of things and cleaning this article up in particular to be up to the standards of them), we nix this weird hybrid entirely and just go for a pure list format--and a table seems like the best way to do the latter. ~Camwoodstock (talk) 13:42, November 4, 2023 (EDT)

I understand where you're coming from now, but I still think the proposal complicates things. The go-to course should have been to simply rename these pages to something that isn't, as eloquently put here by Glowsquid, dumb. If these episode appearance pages were titled accurately, like what Doc suggested below, this page wouldn't be seen as the hybrid it is purported to be and, thus, this discussion wouldn't take place. -- KOOPA CON CARNE 14:21, November 17, 2023 (EST)

@TheUndescribableGhost: The whole "it'd be more helpful to know where they're not in" thing is part of why we proposed a table in the first place, seeing as it would very plainly state what episodes they do and do not appear in. ~Camwoodstock (talk) 16:36, November 2, 2023 (EDT)

So, a bit of a silly question--we mentioned earlier that this could potentially affect other articles (see the list Koopa Con Carne posted above). Just so we're all on the same page, one: is that allowed in the first place, and two: are we all in agreement that this would indeed affect that? especially seeing as unless this turns out a no quorum or the voting shifts this could be deleting a few articles ~Camwoodstock (talk) 10:49, November 4, 2023 (EDT)

okay. BOWSER... (talk) 11:04, November 4, 2023 (EDT)

It definitely should affect all of them for consistency. As for whether it's allowed, I'm...actually not 100% sure whether this would count as a revision of the proposal, which wouldn't be allowed now since the six day window since creating the proposal is up, but the comment above where you said it'd apply to all of them was made within the six day window. But even if technically this proposal was only about Hip Koopa I think it could still serve as precedent to change the others too without a proposal? Basically this is a bit of an unusual case but I think it should be fine. Or, if what you mean is whether a talk page proposal affecting multiple related pages rather than just one is allowed, I'm pretty sure the answer to that is yes, it's certainly happened before. Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 11:22, November 4, 2023 (EDT)

I voted with the intent that this proposal would affect the other pages, and it'd be foolhardy to just take action for this page and have to make a second proposal for the others. Also, as Hewer mentioned, there's precedence for this happening before. SolemnStormcloud (talk) 10:50, November 5, 2023 (EST)

Honestly, it'd be better if the title format were "History of [character] in [show]" rather than "List of [show] episodes featuring [character]." That'd make it much easier to understand the point of its existence. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) 20:56, November 10, 2023 (EST)

If these were fully converted to History articles and expanded that way, we honestly don't think we'd mind that much. if for no other reason than that inherently means these won't be so wishy-washy as to if they're lists or not ~Camwoodstock (talk) 12:23, November 11, 2023 (EST)

So... The extended deadline has passed without 4 votes in any category. Isn't this technically a no quorum? ~Camwoodstock (talk) 19:11, November 16, 2023 (EST)

No quorum only happens after three extensions. Hewer (talk · contributions · edit count) 13:49, November 17, 2023 (EST)