Forum:Underrepresented characters

Forums: Index → Proposals → Underrepresented characters

This is a closed discussion about a failed proposed change on SmashWiki. It remains for archival purposes. The closing administrator adds: "Lack of consensus Serpent  King 01:21, April 6, 2021 (EDT)"

Seeing as we have another proposal related to bias...

As someone who has been quick to notice that certain characters are languishing from a lack of (categorised) professionals, I'd like to propose a page (similar to Wikipedia's Systemic Bias page, or rather, its counter-page) that aims to help with this. I also think that the Wanted Pages/Pages to Improve template should prioritise Smashers who main these characters.

The page would list a target number of Smashers to be in a character's category; once a character's target is reached, they can be taken off the page - and yes, characters can also be added to the page.

Support

1. RickTommy 18:33, March 30, 2021 (EDT)

Oppose

1. Oppose. If a character is seldom used in the metagame, then they're gonna have less players and therefore less players in their respective categories. Adding a threshold would just lead to a bunch of no-effort or low-effort pages and sharply increase the pages in "Articles in need of tournament results" maintenance category, which is already somewhat of a problem right now. In addition, we already have a problem with characters in infoboxes, and I don't want to deal with people arguing that their Corrin they used for a few Wi-Fi tournaments is sufficient enough to have the "Corrin professional" category just so they could help reach the character threshold. CookiesCreme 18:49, March 30, 2021 (EDT)
2. Oppose: This is frankly a terrible idea, characters are naturally played to vastly varying degrees and it's not the wiki's responsibility to try putting up a facade that we have just as many Isabelle players as we do Joker players. Cookies is additionally right that trying to force a minimum in each character category will just lead to people adding the category to players that just touched the character a few times (which is already a problem we're in the process of fixing) and to creating articles of marginal players that aren't noteworthy. If there aren't a whole lot of people noteworthy for playing those "underrepresented characters", then that's just the cold hard facts and we have to report it as it is. Omega Tyrant 19:43, March 30, 2021 (EDT)
3. Oppose. The last thing we want to do is to start enforcing quotas. Alex the Weeb 19:46, March 30, 2021 (EDT)
4. Oppose. It's normal for Ganondorf to have less players than Meta Knight (Just an example). Worse characters won't have the same player base as good characters and trying too hard to pad out their notable players section will just make that section lose any semblance of credibility it has. Hitbox Enthusiast Zeck (talk) 20:23, March 30, 2021 (EDT)
5. Oppose. It's not our fault that a fighter is lacking in higher-up tourney representation (RIP Mii Gunner). If we're writing about a fighter's professional perception, we'd be giving a fighter much more attention than it deserves to purposely seek out players and try to fill out some sort of threshold. Sincerely, Samuel the NEW AMIIBO TRAINER!!! 20:27, March 30, 2021 (EDT)
6. Oppose. If a character (objectively) sucks, people aren't gonna use them. I mean, they might, but more likely than not it's not in a serious setting. Aidan, the Rurouni 20:29, March 30, 2021 (EDT)

Comments

I can't speak to anything but ultimate, but I don't think characters lack attention due to bias. Characters like Jigglypuff or Simon just have fewer players placing well with them. Wiifitkid (talk) 19:46, March 30, 2021 (EDT)

This is how it is for all games; worse characters (or perceived obsoleted characters like Ultimate Marth) will naturally have a lot less players, and because of being less viable their players will naturally have worse results on average, leading to even less of their players being notable enough for an article here. It's not any "systematic bias" that leads to less coverage of those characters' players, they simply just don't have as many notable players, and trying to force a quota on them is just misrepresenting the reality of the matter. Omega Tyrant 19:56, March 30, 2021 (EDT)

There's really only one Pokémon Trainer player (maybe two) in Brawl, for instance, and insinuating otherwise would not be a wise move, because then it would basically just be like desperately trying to increase the word count on a college essay. Aidan, the Rurouni 20:24, March 30, 2021 (EDT)

PT has a couple more players than that, though barely notable the non-Reflex PTs are (the category currently has four players, and I think there was a Japanese PT that was decent), but yeah you'll have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel for characters like Brawl PT to fulfill a wiki-wide quota for their categories, which isn't really helping anyone looking for more information about players of that character and just makes the wiki look silly by insinuating that these bottom-of-the-barrel players used to artificially fill up the category are remotely noteworthy. Omega Tyrant 00:24, March 31, 2021 (EDT)