Xeno Series Wiki talk:Spoiler policy

Proposed amendment to 'Infoboxing characters as what they first appear to be'

Current policy about characters whose 'true form' is different from their apparent form when they are first encountered is as follows:

• Describing and infoboxing characters as what they first appear to be. If they have a "true form" or similar, its information will appear lower down the page, in its own section and second infobox underneath the description of the plot that reveals it.

This policy can have undesirable consequences, which mostly revolve around page contents looking like misinformation. There are several characters (e.g. Jin) whose first apparent form (human) would be, under current policy, different from their actual nature (Blade); however, their actual nature is both not particularly hidden (being revealed relatively early on in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and immediately in Torna ~ The Golden Country) and not strongly considered a spoiler among fans, resulting in their true nature being much more widely known. As a result, showcasing their first apparent nature — specifically in the infobox, for reasons below — may appear confusing to wiki users who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of the spoiler policy. At worst, it may appear as misinformation and damage the wiki's reputation as a result. There are also characters (like Jin) who have particularly important reason to be distinguished clearly from their first apparent form (Jin's relationship with, and opposition to, humans is based upon him not being one); current policy does not particularly allow for this.

The difficulty is that the character infobox itself makes no distinction between 'what they first appear to be' and 'what they actually are'. As it stands, having Jin's species be 'human' gives the impression that the infobox is actually calling Jin a human. Changing the infobox to instead say 'Apparent species' or similar would be confusing for characters' true forms; including both an 'apparent species' and a 'species' option would be a dead giveaway that they are not what they seem.
On the other hand, this difficulty is not present with characters' 'Appearance and personality' sections, which have substantially more room for subtlety.

I propose an alternative to the policy which avoids the issue above. It avoids the issue via omission:

• Describing characters as what they first appear to be. If they have a "true form" or similar, its information will appear lower down the page, in its own section and second infobox underneath the description of the plot that reveals it. Infoboxes other than those pertaining to a character's "true form" should omit sections which would contain information specific to apparent or actual forms (namely the 'species' section).

Instead of erring on the side of too much information, this errs on the side of too little information. The benefit to this is that a lack of information is much less attention-grabbing than information the viewer believes to be incorrect — it avoids the misrepresentation issue in a way that is likely to go unnoticed (and un'corrected') by many wiki users. The disadvantage is that there is no easy way to include an explanatory MediaWiki comment directly inside the infobox (that does not mess with the formatting) when information is omitted as opposed to when it is included. A comment could be placed outside the infobox, but that would be easier for editors to miss. It is very possible that the occasional change by editors unfamiliar with the policy would have to be undone with this as the policy.

Another alternative to the policy could perhaps avoid it via limited misrepresentation. The idea behind limited misrepresentation is that it hides characters' true natures where it is a spoiler while correctly stating it where is not, perhaps making the distinction be along the lines of whether the forms have particularly distinct physical appearances. However, I can't think of a way to phrase the policy in a manner that reasonably covers every case (especially Alvis) and has no substantial decision-making that must be done for every applicable character. If someone comes up with a good wording that's reasonable to implement, feel free to suggest it.

In either case, only the policy as regards the infobox would be altered. As stated above, detailed descriptions of characters in an 'Appearance and personality' section would allow for subtler language that accurately describes their appearance and does not give away their true nature but also does not misrepresent it (e.g. "Jin is a man..."). This would be something to attempt to accomplish in all relevant 'Appearance and personality' sections.

Rtg142857 (talk) 08:08, 14 February 2022 (EST)

Maybe I just have more faith in the readers than other people do, but if an infobox is missing "species" on a wiki known to try hiding spoilers, that is immediately very suspicious. I personally think this bit of "misinformation" is acceptable in the grand scheme of things - we're probably going to be correcting good-faith editors "fixing" the info in any event, and it's not our place to decide "how much" of a spoiler something is.

I would much prefer if the decision to omit were based on the appearance being distinctly different (as alternatively suggested), but agree that it's hard to figure out the necessary wording for this to be unambiguous. STM (t) 08:19, 15 February 2022 (EST)

It is possible that a keen-eyed user could notice the omission and be suspicious. But omission, by its nature, is far less eye-catching than inclusion. To notice something that's not there, a wiki user would either need to be actively aware of the information the infobox usually contains, which will seldom be the case except for editors (and even that is mitigated by the fact that many characters' infoboxes don't contain all seven of the standard entries below the image anyway), or they would have to be deliberately trying to find the species in the infobox - and if they are actively looking up what a character's species is, chances are that they don't care about spoilers anyway (at least not enough that they'd want to be misinformed over being spoilt).

On the other hand, there are plentiful situations in which the current policy may result in undesirable outcomes. Unlike omission, one cannot assume that a reader may not notice an active inclusion, and whereas someone may brush off an omission as just a page being minorly incomplete, an inclusion does not have this excuse. Someone new to the wiki but in-the-know could visit the page, notice the blatantly false information in the infobox, and conclude the wiki is poorly edited, thus putting them off using it. Or, someone could notice both the first infobox and the true infobox and be confused as to why the two seem to contradict each other. Or, someone not in-the-know could be trying to look up a character's actual species, see the fake species in the first box, and leave the page satisfied with the information they've received without noticing the true species in a lower box (whereas with omission, they'd need to search more and be much more likely to find the lower box).

I would be very happy with a sufficiently-well-worded alternative to the omission policy with a less coarse effect. However, I strongly believe that the current policy needs to be changed temporarily at the very least, especially considering current circumstances with XC3 in which we may receive substantial numbers of users familiar with the series but unfamiliar with the wiki itself - exactly the kind of people likely to recognise a mistake but not an omission. Rtg142857 (talk) 14:53, 15 February 2022 (EST)

I'd like to adjust the proposal a bit to provide more opportunity for future additions:

• Describing characters as what they first appear to be. If they have a "true form" or similar, its information will appear lower down the page, in its own section and second infobox underneath the description of the plot that reveals it.
  • Infoboxes other than those pertaining to a character's "true form" should by default omit sections which would contain information specific to apparent or actual forms (namely the 'species' section). Exceptions may be added in the future if they can be made clear and unambiguous in how they should be handled, however with a new game's release on the horizon at the time this policy is being set, erring on the side of providing less information is currently preferred to avoid the potential for spreading misinformation.

This I think helps a lot by setting a general approach for how to handle this type of situation that always can be used as a fallback if later exceptions have unforeseen ambiguity (if exceptions get added later this can be further clarified to say that in an ambiguous situation the information should be left out, and a discussion started on the relevant Talk Page and/or this Talk Page), explaining why this is the standard, and leaving the door open for future changes. Hobusu (talk) 13:38, 25 February 2022 (EST)

Seeing what people are leaning towards, here's my proposal for the new wording:

• Describing subjects as what they first appear to be, leaving any information on their secret motivations or true form to a dedicated section underneath the description of the plot that reveals it.
  • The main infobox for such subjects will omit spoilery information rather than reveal it or lie about it, unless it's agreed by editors that one of these other solutions is better for this specific case, such as the character specifically stating something in dialogue.

Everyone seems to want "omit" to be the default action, so this does that, while specifying that we're allowed to do different things based on consensus for each specific case. STM (t) 14:11, 26 February 2022 (EST)

I Support, I think the safe play is to omit the species names --Dragon146 (talk) 15:13, 26 February 2022 (EST)

Agreed, having it default to omitting and then exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis seems like the best solution. Hobusu (talk) 15:32, 26 February 2022 (EST)

I also support, I don't expect that the number of exceptions which are more necessary to handle should be too great. Rtg142857 (talk) 17:35, 26 February 2022 (EST)

There seems to be agreement, so I'm making this change. STM (t) 13:12, 6 March 2022 (EST)