Help talk:Writing an article about a person
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Proposal: Document naming convention
There is no documentation on this page of any naming conventions for people. For instance, should the article name include or omit any titles, nicknames, or honorifics? How do we disambiguate articles for people with the same name?
== Naming the article ==
When naming an article about a person, use the person's full name when known and avoid including any titles, nicknames, or honorifics.
If an article already exists at that name, descriptively disambiguate it in parentheses after the name (such as {{xt|Jane Doe (Chelish Navy)}}. If there are several articles for the same name, consider creating a disambiguation page. For details, see the [[PathfinderWiki:Disambiguation|Disambiguation policy]].
-Oznogon (talk) 00:13, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
- Looks good to me and a good spot. I don't think we need a formal proposal to update the help pages to explain wiki policy, so I'd just update the page. --Fleanetha (talk) 23:29, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
Proposal paragraph: iconics' companions
Is everyone okay with the fact that Seoni's little-known familiar named Dragon and Harsk's "Schrodinger's animal companion" are relegated to little "== headings ==" at the bottoms of their articles? If that policy is fine, I could use the Help page to document why they're down there instead of at the tops of the articles:
Most iconics' companions like Droogami and Whirp are significant characters seen wherever the master goes, so it's important that those companions get top billing in the first paragraph of the article. However, some companions/familiars are minor characters. It's okay for Harsk's little-known badger companion to be relegated to an "== Animal companion ==" heading quickly jotted down near the bottom of his article.
-—This unsigned post was made by Descriptivist at 12:17, 15 August 2024. Please sign all posts with ~~~~.
- I don't see any problem with minor companion creatures/beings being relegated to the ends of articles.
- I don't understand the confusion about the existing text about billing companion creatures and so would defer to others who do. -Oznogon (talk) 04:47, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Categorization Question 2
I just noticed that we are inconsistent in our instructions for categorizing people. On this main help page, Oz added a subsection that I missed last April about adding 2E trait categories to a person's page:
Some people have Pathfinder Second Edition game mechanics as a unique creature, and in turn have corresponding traits and a creature level. Use the traits parameter in the infobox to list those traits as {{2eTrait}} templates, add corresponding creature trait categories (such as Category:Medium creatures or Category:Aberration creatures, per their listed traits), and include a "Category:Level X inhabitants" category, where X is their stated level.
However, the article spawner Template:ArticleSpawner/Person does not list these categories as suggestions to add.
From memory, and I cannot find any discussion now to back this up, I thought we were not going to add creature trait categories to Person template pages (hence their omission from the spawner) but just add the trait boxes in the ib. That way, the Creatures category tree and the People category tree would still be separate. Currently, I don't think we have too many inhabitants on the Creatures side yet, so can we discuss please?
This split was kept pure in 1E, so it is a change to merge them in 2E. Q: what is the advantage of merging over not? If we carry on with the newish instruction, the Creatures category tree will also have many individuals as well as creatures. First thoughts, I think that would be confusing / less useful, so that's one disadvantage for me. I am torn, however, as if someone has a set of traits assigned that screams out to be categorized rather than just ignored, but we had (until Oz's guidance) no way to do that. One all. Would it be better or clunkier to add a trait subtree to People to keep the distinction? Something like Category:Giant trait inhabitants?
Apologies too if I missed / forgot a debate somewhere here or on the Discord. A pointer would be appreciated please if so.
Anyway, we need an agreed way forward and then make the help tools consistent with that. --Fleanetha (talk) 19:28, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- Clarified the text to make it clearer to the intent: that it be narrowly applied to edge cases where a person is also, or at some point becomes, a creature with a creature statblock and creature traits, like Ileosa Arabasti does in Shadows at Sundown. (Edit: I think Barzillai Thrune's seemingly endless appearances and forms were even more relevant to that specific timeframe of that addition.) If there are specific examples outside of cases like that which need reversion, please list some here or revert them.
- This is in a help page, not a policy, so it is guidance, not policy. It does not require strict or mandatory enforcement, and individual subjects that don't conform more likely warrant their own discussions rather than an all-encompassing one. Sometimes in Pathfinder a person is also a creature, and vice versa, and we should ideally accommodate those case-by-case without adding still more redundant categorization trees. -Oznogon (talk) 22:51, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- Ah, there's the one I was looking for: Zellara Esmeranda is probably the iconic (and actually implemented!) example for this topic. -Oznogon (talk) 23:11, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- That's a lot clearer thanks, Oz, and I think I may have got the wrong end of the stick taking it as a blanket guidance for all individuals. Bear with me though. The one that flagged this was from the shapeshifting conversation earlier: Avinash Jurrg, who I think is a normal NPC individual but has creature traits manually categorized. I can't see the rationale there. --Fleanetha (talk) 23:40, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
Truly unique creatures vs. Unique trait creatures
Due to Pathfinder Second Edition trait autocategorization, Category:Unique creatures contains a bunch of articles about creatures with
that don't align with the guidance in the "Truly unique creatures" section.
Either the trait autocategorization should be modified to put trait-havers in an edition-specific category like Category:Unique trait creatures, or we need a different category name for unique beings. -Oznogon (talk) 23:08, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- Yuk, yes. That's my doing in 2020 then reusing the category. Five years on, it's not quite working. Category:Unique trait creatures would work but then I think we should make the other three rarity traits follow suit for consistency? That's not trivial but maybe something a bot could handle? --Fleanetha (talk) 23:50, 14 March 2025 (UTC)