User blog comment:Frostyflytrap/Miscellaneous Category/@comment-4652747-20151204214102

I think most of the blurred lines you're referencing in this situation are due to being more captious than is really practical or necessary. I always viewed it as that some characteristics of enemies were that they're not passive, they impede the player's progress, act independently and tend to react to the player's actions to a great degree, and can be hurt by the player. Hazards are passive, also impede the player's progress, act as part of a universal system or pattern (i.e. Metal wheels rotating at a constant rate), and are unable to be hurt. Of course, some enemies or hazards won't have some of these and in those situations you have to make more of a judgement call. For example, I would say detection proton cannons are hazards because although they can be destroyed, they only attack if the player approaches them, they aren't mobile and are connected to the walls, and follow a predictable pattern. The majority of your examples which don't do any physical damage to the player I would group with hazards but that really depends on what we're aiming to include in the hazards category. I would also like to point out that having a miscellaneous category is completely meaningless. The point of having a category is to find other elements similar to the one you are looking at, right? Or that share a common characteristic? Having a category containing items that are only there because they don't fit in anywhere else is pointless. They share nothing in common except that they don't share anything in common with most other things. It would be preferable to include articles people are unsure about in an enemy or hazard category even though it may be ambiguous whether it belongs there because at least if players wanted to know where to find it they would have some idea where it might be. Or make it a requirement that hazards have to damage the player and create a special category for things that indirectly hurt the player, as there are a ton of those types of items. Regardless, you're never going to be able to completely avoid making judgement calls on these things and even if you create a category that's basically just there so you can compromise easily on these types of debates and say "Well why don't we just place it in miscellaneous?" it's just avoiding making a decision on the problem at all. It's just dodging the issue of how we should categorize these things because we aren't actually categorizing them.

I don't understand why you're writing this if you're not interested in having a discussion. I can understand the frustration with coming to a consensus on things like this sometimes and the need to make decisions without constantly consulting others, but proclaiming that that's what you're doing expecting to face backlash is the wrong way to do that. I don't really agree with the points you've made and I'd prefer to be able to discuss it, but it's not really a big deal for me if you decide to do it independently. I just don't think it's a good idea to make a post that is half presenting an argument that you don't want people to actually engage with and half making subtle jabs at the way things have been going on the wiki without addressing those issues. It's best to either go the whole way on both of those topics or don't address them at all.