LG and I were talking about reworking the guest cast and minor character articles because most of our roughly 1,400 articles are either stubs, or repetitions of what's already included in other articles. The problem with stubs is that once they're set up, they soon end up lonely and forgotten, and given that we're very much behind even with main character articles, who would ever expand those stubs. In terms of quality versus quantity, I'd rather have informative lists and tabs than dozens of unfinished or repeating articles. Here are some suggestions:
Guest Actors
If you take a look at pages about guest actors you'll see that other than "X played Y in episode Z", a rather unproportionally big image (if any), and an IMDB link, there's nothing else on that page - and probably there won't ever be more because let's face it, who would be the one to do it for 300+ pages. Let alone that having 300+ articles about guest actors who only appeared in one episode, and very likely won't ever return isn't really necessary. Even if somebody would in fact copy and paste actor biographies to those pages, what's the point. That's what Wikipedia or IMDB is for.
In short, how about we do what we were originally thinking to do, namely add relevant actor info (name, role, IMDB link) on the Cast & Crew page, where they belong.
It doesn't really change anything for our readers whether they need to click on an actor link in the cast & crew list just to get to a stub article that doesn't include any additional info, just to then click on another link to land on IMDB - or click on the actor link in the c&c page and get to IMDB right away.
It also wouldn't change anything for people looking for a specific actor since the wiki search function displays all pages that include that actor's name, regardless of whether there's a separate article.
And if it's only about having a pretty list of actors that have appeared on the show, well, that could really just be a list, and wouldn't require 300 ten word articles that nobody remembers.
Note that -of course- this only applies to one-time guest actors, not main or recurring actors.
One-time Characters
It's hard to decide who's important to the story (and thus deserves their own article), and who's not. But, for the sake of having meaningful content without repetition, we have to draw a line somewhere.
Also, there is no real point in having a separate article about a really minor one-time character if most of the content (if not all of it) already exists in the episode summary. Here's an example: Karen Mills
Do you remember Karen Mills? She had a one minute scene in “Nothing to Hide” and never appeared again in the episode. Her article's content is pretty much just parts of the episode summary rephrased.
Same goes for characters like Neal Jenkins, Sharon, Detective Hill, Lisa, Rene Lapointe, Murray Langston, and unnamed characters like Medical Examiner or Admin.
All those short articles could be consolidated into a single page per episode, similar to Wikipedia's lists of TV series characters. We could redesign one of our tables to accommodate necessary information (and the character picture of course) and move it to another tab, just like Cast & Crew.
It's not about that we don't need information about those small supporting characters, on the contrary, with a "Supporting Characters" list we could even write a line or two about really minor characters that appear in an episode whose part is so small that they didn't get their own article. This could all fit together very nicely and provide a good overview about the supporting characters in each episode, like we already have with the POI tab.
Your feedback would be much appreciated.
LATEST UPDATE (I'm going to put this on the forum as well)
I've put a finished page in my sandbox: here. Go take a look and let me know what you think.
Notes:
- The list includes recurring characters
- Characters are grouped by storyline/relationship. Billing should be ignored here.
- One-time characters get a description of their actions in the episode, along with an appropriate image. This will replace a separate article for those characters
- The list will be placed on the Cast (final name TBD) tab. below the main character boxes (these stay as is)
- All crew info will be moved to the brand new Crew tab
- Recurring actors will be linked to as usual, one-time guests only get their IMDB link. No separate actor article.
- All characters in the list work as ordinary links in this format: [[Panopticon/Cast#Novak]]> produces a link to Novak's entry
- If no further comments, or objections, I will start reorganizing the Cast tab for all S4 episodes so far. The other three seasons will follow later. Fee free to help out.