Portal talk:Inhabitants

"Inhabitants" word choice

I know this has been what we used for all characters or groups of sapient individuals on the wiki since its founding, but that was inherited from Forgotten Realms wiki when we ported their organization and templates and stuff into our otherwise blank project. I've never loved it. It always makes me ask, "inhabitants of what?" when another word might better serve our needs.

My initial thought is just to use "characters" when talking about individuals, and potentially even groups, as that's what we're really talking about. When we say "goblin inhabitants," we really mean "characters that are goblins." The only time I think "inhabitants" actually applies is when we're also describing what they're inhabiting. So, we'd keep inhabitants for places (ie. "Absalom inhabitants") but switch other groupings to characters (ie. "goblin characters").

This has farther reaching implications than just this portal, including categories and templates, so this may not be the best place for it, but as the central hub for lists of characters, it seemed most logical to me.

If this change is adopted, this would change the name of this portal from Inhabitants to Characters.— Yoda8myhead (talk) 20:39, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't think portals need to mirror categories. This portal could be revised to be more about characters/individuals/cultures independently of any effort to categorize them differently. -Oznogon (talk) 22:52, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Spun off a discussion about categorization on Category talk:Inhabitants. -Oznogon (talk) 23:11, 10 January 2024 (UTC)