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Sonic the Hedgehog

From Sonic Retro

Too much plot elaboration, not enough character elaboration

For example Sonic's 'personality and traits' describes Sonic's powers and in-universe history more than it does his personality, and I feel the sections regarding the different in-universes such as cartoons or comics should contain mainly information about Sonic's personality/portrayal within those media. I propose this article should change majorly in order to describe less plot and more of Sonic personality and role.


I (Mysterics) have started adding more personality description, I hope this will inspire others to have a go.

Duplication

So it's on record somewhere - these character pages are very wordy and are duplicating info listed elsewhere on the wiki. I think, as this comment above (from 2013!) ^ suggests, this article isn't describing "Sonic the Hedgehog" as much as it is "what Sonic the Hedgehog did in games/TV/whatever". I can see why it's been done - Wikipedia writes character pages this way, but we don't need to.

That is to say, we don't need every origin story explained in great detail, we don't need the details on how Naoto Oshima invented him (Sonic the Hedgehog (16-bit)/Development will do that better) and we don't need walls of texts describing his entire life story in the Archie continuity. I'm probably going to reduce some of it, but someone might have to check this information is covered in the right places.

What we do need are references for things like age and height and official descriptions of personality if they exist. They exist in manuals but it takes effort to look them up -Black Squirrel (talk) 12:41, 21 May 2019 (EDT)

This task needs someone more dedicated to the cause than I.
This is a half-reminder to myself, because I don't want to be making these sorts of decisions on a Friday evening - I think every single character page might need to be marked for rewriting. In addition to superfluous garbage that is covered better elsewhere on the wiki (the Eggman page is really bad at this), there's assumptions and conjecture and all sorts of questionable material that's never been moderated properly.
I think a clear and consistent structure is needed that perhaps looks something like this:
  1. Development/design
  2. Character personality and abilities
  3. Brief fictional history
    1. in games
    2. in other things
  4. Impact in popular culture(?)
  5. Theme songs
  6. Voice actors
  7. Anything else of interest
Some characters have lists of appearances, however I think I'd prefer to automate that if and when the time comes. Sonic appears in virtually everything on this wiki, and it would be really tedious to update a dozen pages every time a new game came along. -Black Squirrel (talk) 15:11, 24 May 2019 (EDT)
So if character pages should be laid out this way, what about character pages which list boss fights on them?
For instance, I've been thinking on whether or not the pages that cover each member of the Deadly Six should have the boss fights be split off to their own pages and have the character pages themselves just describe the characters themselves and their brief history in each of their game appearances, especially since Zavok keeps getting more game appearances than he has any right to have. It was the same thing that has been done with Infinite despite only having one game appearance besides Zavok or Zazz. What's your say on that? --BSonirachi (talk) 15:51, 24 May 2019 (EDT)
The boss battles should be split off, yeah. Otherwise we'd have to apply the same rules to Eggman and that would make for some unpleasant reading -Black Squirrel (talk) 15:56, 24 May 2019 (EDT)
Is it still the plan to give each enemy its own page per game? This came up a while ago on Beeton's page. Orbinaut is a bit of a mess, since the name has been used for enemies that are considered separate in Japan (Unidus, Uni-uni and Pola), then American SA1 called Unidus "Spiky Spinner" and American SA2 just went with "Unidus". --Pecky (talk) 17:26, 25 May 2019 (EDT)
Yes it is - that's something that can be done -Black Squirrel (talk) 07:42, 26 May 2019 (EDT)