User blog comment:Emitewiki2/Combining enemy pages/@comment-3060206-20150828093955

meh

Before I give this some more thought, I will say that yeah it's not really the best to have an article that's mostly describing what a thing looks like and dedicating like two sentences to what it actually does. That's not really enough substance to hold an article, but we manage to squeeze by with it.

Honestly lists may be helpful for games who don't officially name their enemies. Every visitor's interpretation and description of an enemy may differ. With a list, we can order these enemies, or hazards etc. by the order in which they appear (like Emite said) and, along with images, that can help a user find and read about the enemy they're looking for all while staying on the same page.

That being said, I don't like the way the lists are constructed. To treat each list item like an individual article makes no sense. They're not individual articles; they're list items. Treat them like list items. The whole point is that a list is more compact because there's not enough information to fill an entire Appearance/Game information section. So I don't think these need to be there in the first place - for lists. That being said, they could and should still follow the same structure (ie. Appearance before Game info). We could do away with the large chunky infoboxes. If you're on a page called Enemies (Droplets), I wouldn't expect an enemy from some other obscure game to be on there, so I don't think it's necessary to have that page infobox.

Ehh and also we seem to get this strange idea that we can only have lists or individual articles. Why not both? Enemies that have exceptional detail can still get their own page and be part of a list. In a list, a link to the enemy's main article can be linked right after a section, like

Enemy
[article text]

And not every Enemy section would be like that! But no, there's been this notion that either all enemies get separate pages or they all go on a list. Some people think that if they churn so much information into a list section, then they can split the entire list apart. Which is fine, in some cases, but other times, we grasp so desperately at straws to increase our article count that we get the really short, filler information that makes up an entire article. Again, you can expand one section into a full article and leave the other list items as lists. That's fine.

Eh tbh even if we continue to make enemies separate pages I wouldn't mind as much. Though again, I'm just rambling on a whim. We've also got to consider that enemies are also mentioned in the game articles themselves (They have an "Enemies" section.). In some (er most?) cases, an enemy is so basic that this description alone pretty much covers what the enemy can do. The article itself becomes a drawn out description - which again, I'm still kinda on the line.

tl;dr