Talk:List of Homestuck characters

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--Copied over from my personal talk page ~Maplestrip

Thank you for finally replying. I'm actually reading through the point where they're introduced, and am planning to give them all at least cursory descriptions, but haven't gotten to them yet. Furthermore, when [troll names] are searched, most redirect not to the Characters page, but to the general page for Homestuck. If I take reasonable measures to update the whole list, will you allow me to keep my partial updates? (I actually think reverting piecemeal updates is a bad policy, which will discourage casual editors from improving things. But I probably don't have the clout to change it.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 45.56.1.106 (talk) 23:21, 29 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I was reverting the change from the list items (;) to small headers specifically, because I personally think that the former are better in this situation. Other than that, feel free to expand the article. I kept the troll descriptions mostly empty because there aren't really any sources that go into depth about any specific characters, but a short paragraph on each one sounds fine to me. I hope the people who reverted you earlier can join the discussion as well - @CyanoTex: @Yoshi24517:? ~Mable (chat) 10:37, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

| I'm not sure what to say other than the IP's edit didn't seem constructive in my perspective. Though, I suppose I understood what they were trying to do._ CyanoTex (talk) 17:08, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have to agree with CyanoTex in this one. It didn't seem constructive in this case, so I reverted it. See my talk page for more info. Yoshi24517^Chat _Online 17:52, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, if the reason for the format change is to allow linking to the sections, I'd be fine to create some anchors. Those would do the job fine :) As for the adding of unsourced content, that's indeed an issue. As I said, I kept most of the entries empty because I couldn't find any sources discussing the trolls themselves in any depth. Seeing as how complex some of these characters are, I don't think deciding ourselves how to describe them is a good idea... ~Mable (chat) 18:45, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There we go: now all the trolls can be linked like normal without having to worry about creating twelve subsections to the article. ~Mable (chat) 18:51, 30 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, fine. If you don't want them in the (Table of) Contents like other large character lists, I won't stop you. But Homestuck Act 5 is actually a pretty good place to find the Trolls' descriptions. -Horatio Von Becker45.56.1.106 (talk) 14:43, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I tried to exclusively use independent sources. I don't believe it's proper to link to the webcomic directly. I've actually written a piece about that once, WP:WANGAS. ~Mable (chat) 18:36, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Buh. Why the heck are comic issues an acceptable source, but webcomic links, which can be easily vetted to see if they actually support the given conclusions, aren't? -Horatio Von Becker45.56.1.106 (talk) 22:46, 20 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I personally don't think comic issues are particularly acceptable either. I'm not particularly active in comics compared to webcomics, so I don't know how prevalent the issue is there, but I know that linking directly to webcomics has been abused a lot on Wikipedia. Much of this is covered in WP:PRIMARY, Quote: "primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts ...". Note that webcomics aren't "reputably published" like comic books are, though I'm personally more worried about the "interpretation" aspect. I am fine with using a primary source to support a fact, but if the fact is irrelevant to anything reliable secondary sources have written about, then there isn't much of a point to it. That's how I usually go about in my editing process. ~Mable (chat) 09:32, 21 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, my later citations are all pointing to the first citation's link. (Cite note 9, at the moment.) I'm not sure how to fix it. Help? -Horatio Von Becker45.56.1.106 (talk) 18:04, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I believe you'll find that this problem is solved by removing the word "name" from the ref tag. Writing "name=foo" or whatever can be useful when you use the same citation multiple times, but that's not what you're trying to do here. ~Mable (chat) 18:35, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In many other lists of fictional characters, a "cast table" is used to denote which character appears in which parts of the fiction. The addition of such a table on this article would help with in-page navigation, summarize info and keep track of which characters to add if the list is incomplete. Because this list is incomplete. John's dad, one of the first characters to show up, gets no mention let alone a section. PartTimeJanitor (talk) 19:58, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid such a table wouldn't be appropriate for Wikipedia, as we do not have reliable secondary sources to use for it. This is an ideal idea for the Homestuck fanwiki, however. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 12:39, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I see a lot of issues with the way this is written; character descriptions are cursory and toe the line between omitting key information and being extremely spoilery, key characters (Alpha Trolls, Cherubs, Guardians) are reduced to footnotes and the page generally feels disorganised and effortless. It's been long enough since this was modified, and with a work of fiction as undeniably influential as Homestuck I feel this page could be a lot more than it currently is. AGooseWithAPhone (talk) 11:19, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is what a character article looks like when you try to commit to reliable sourcing when setting it up. If you can find any reliable sources talking about alpha trolls, cherubs, and guardians, you're free to include it. These characters are certainly not quite as major as the eight kids and twelve trolls, however, and currently the "Alpha Kids" section is already 100% original research so I doubt there's much to work with. Spoilers don't matter, as per WP:Spoiler, it is not an argument for removal. Key information that's missing is because I couldn't find any sources mentioning it at the time. There's lots of original research in the article already, so personally I would just be trimming a lot of stuff out. (I'm saddened to see this page described as "effortless"...) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 12:30, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]