User blog comment:Gideoncrawle/ADMIN BLOG POST: Revisiting Rules, and The Future of Featured Quote/@comment-1590625-20120626023540

Whew! This blog is a doozy to read, but raises many important points, so I'll try and address each one in order:

Minimum Character Page Content: I do agree with you that we need to expand on character page content, especially for "placeholders" or library characters, but the full-on audition tape and trivia may not be a good idea for characters who are still competing/have yet to compete in a given story. I think what we should do is maybe have an infobox, and then a paragraph backstory and why they chose to audition for Total Drama. I know this is what I do for my character pages, and it is also what many authors use, and it works. The trivia and audition tapes can come after the character has been eliminated, for example, if the author wants to expand on the character a bit post-elimination.

Relationships, Conflicts, etc: I know that I have always wanted to see how a dynamic between certain characters in stories I have read and enjoyed played out over time, and how they originated. I do think that it would be a good idea to have a page for those relationships and conflicts, but I disagree that they should be in one subpage for a story. Sometimes, casts get so large, and interact so often and in so many ways (Total Drama Reality and Total Drama: The Production are prime examples of this) that if they had each just one page to detail all of the relationships and conflicts throughout the story, they would be incredibly long and difficult to read. Instead, I would propose that each CHARACTER gets a subpage for relationships and conflicts, treated as another character page, trivia and all. This would make pages less cumbersome, and authors could more freely include trivia on how the ideas progressed about each dynamic during the writing process (a huge bonus for me!).

Multiple Pages for a Character: I am inclined to agree with Gideon on this one, and say that information for one character should stay on one page, and the information for a new story with that character should be added to the existing page. This has worked well for Sprink and Owe, who both have had repeated All-Star stories using recycled characters from their previous works. I know this seems hypocritical, seeing my stance on relationship pages, but the issues are different, because in that case, the information will be not exclusive to just one character in multiple stories. The writing process is different when writing individual characters versus writing interactions between them (trust me. I am skilled at the former, but awful at the latter, which is why I don't write stories), and their pages should reflect that.

Standalone Characters and Placeholders: This is something I do not have as strong an opinion on, so I will defer to the other admins on it. I trust their judgment.

Multilingual Stories: I like the idea of having some stories in different languages, seeing as we do have some users whose native language is not English, and that leads their stories to be poorly written, by our standards, and thus judged unfairly. We also have a large number of multilingual users and admins, myself included, that can oversee non-English works. I think we should go with the second rule, that stories need not be in English, but can only be posted in one article (so no separate pages for separate languages- all translations on one page).

Categories: Also something I have little opinion on, frankly because I do not find them useful for much of anything. Candidates for deletion, and other such clerical uses are fine, but categories such as "male characters" or "Killer Bass" just don't seem too useful, or widely used to me, but I will defer on this one, as well.

Account Blocking Procedures; I agree with the proposed rules one hundred percent. If we implement those rules (which it seems we admins mostly go by, anyway), we should be fine.

I don't feel qualified to speak on the Featured Quote issue, specifically, but I did vote in the polls, so I will just let them decide FQ's fate.

Wow, that post was long, but necessary! I guess that's really all I have to say on these matters.