ESB:Proposals/Merging transcripts and galleries with episode articles/voting

Open Proposal The following is an ongoing proposal. Please feel free to voice your opinion, but be sure to follow the rules. How proposals work Concerns stage Someone brings up a topic for a proposal. The community discusses that topic. Voting stage The proposal is brought to a vote, taking into account any changes discussed by the community. The community votes. You can use any of the following prior to your comments to show your opinion. {{Support}} • {{Neutral}} • {{Oppose}} • {{Change}} • {{Comment}} • {{Reply}} • {{Question}} Neutral votes do not count in determining the outcome percentage.

Instructions

This page is the voting stage of this discussion: "Merging transcripts and galleries with episode articles."

With all concerns from the concern stage of this discussion having been resolved and taken into account, the proposal located in the "Proposal" section above has been created and moved to voting. To join the voting, you simply use buttons located in the "Voting" section of this page and fill the resulting page.

Have a happy voting!

Proposal

Hi all,

So what I'm proposing here is quite different but please hear me out. :)

I'm proposing we merge transcript and gallery articles with their respective episode articles. An example of this can be seen here.

In that example, you'll see the New galleries feature which shows a few images first, then a "Show more" button press later, you see more images in the gallery. Using this feature means 100+ images aren't flooding main episode articles.

Furthermore, in my example, I propose using a scroll box for episode transcripts for easy reading without flooding the article.

So, I'm going to do something unorthodox and do a bit of a FAQ section to explain things further.

FAQ

Why??

Good question. The rationale behind doing this is to make life easier for our mobile readers that make up 50-60% (depending on the measurement service) of our viewership on the wiki. Our popular articles on this wiki are the main character and episode ones, not gallery and transcript articles. Why put so much effort into those articles if the bulk of our viewership aren't on those pages? Moving them to the main episode article gives them attention.

Merging the transcript with the episode page will also make the main episode article appear higher up Google search rankings as Google will understand the two are the same entity.

With that, this change just makes the wiki more efficient. Why have these extra gallery and transcript pages when we can combine them into the main character article? This means, for all users (desktop and mobile), viewing the wiki is easier. Each article is its own 'package'. It contains everything. When a reader wants to view "Help Wanted", they can scroll down to see the characters, plot, production notes, trivia and, oh!, a gallery of images and a transcript to back-up the plot synopsis written up earlier in the article. It makes sense as a reader to have it that way.

What about editors?

See, I think this makes life nice for editors too. Instead of having to navigate to a specific transcript or gallery article, they can just go the main episode page and, boom, it's there. Nice and easy to edit. Plus, you can edit by section of course which means users can edit galleries as before, with the gallery section alone.

Aren't new episode pages protected?

Yep and that would change. I'm very proud of the wiki moderation team we have here and I think we'll be able to handle false information or vandalism. We have done so far.

Won't all the images on the article make the article massive and affect load times?

Not really. Regarding load times, New galleries don't load all the images immediately anyway, that's what the "Show more" button is for. This will help with load times. Regarding massive articles, the Luke Skywalker article on Wookieepedia is 180,000+ bytes. My example Help Wanted article is around 30,000 bytes. Given that Wookieepedia is a flagship wiki with millions of viewers, I doubt the large articles are a concern. If anything, large, rich articles help with SEO.

We’ll have to press the Show more button loads, won’t we?

This is easily avoided if we’re more efficient with our galleries. Help Wanted, for example, has 197 images for 8 minutes of footage. Is that ‘’really’’ needed? Are users going to want to see all those images? We’re mentioning the scrolling needed with putting galleries on episode articles, if users want to find an image from near the end of an episode, do they want to scroll past a period of 5 images where SpongeBob changes his facial expression? We have a screenshot every few seconds at the moment. Folks may as well watch the episode. Per my example (linked above), I was able to reduce it to 50 odd and the story was told just as well. We don’t need three screenshots per frame showing different facial expressions, we’d perhaps set a gallery limit of 50 images per 11 minutes of footage for example.

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To conclude, I think this will be great for the wiki. Switching to Portable Infoboxes improved our viewing figures. As a measure of portability, this is likely to very well do the same.

From a practical and aesthetic standpoint, it would be great to bring in the 20th anniversary of SpongeBob with a new wiki design that caters for the majority of our wiki's viewership and makes the wiki more efficient.

Thanks all! :)

EDIT: In the Concerns phase, I addressed a lot of concerns with in-depth responses and some new statistics. They're available there as needed. Thanks! --Spongebob456 ^talk 21:35, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

Voting

Choose your input: Support • Neutral • Oppose • Comment

• Vehement Death Oppose - We've been thru this. It won't help us as our mobile viewership by that much and is a terribly involved process that inhibits SEO and is only for ad revenue. Tan Ham Man 21:36,2/18/2019 

• Support - Neutral - Giving this one more thought, I would rather remain neutral on this. Although it would be convenient to have transcripts and galleries all in one page, it would be too much of a hassle to move everything.  Anthony2306 ^{(W•C•L•E)}  21:37, February 18, 2019 (UTC) 

• Oppose - It may be stupid, but it's also dumb.  FireMatch ^(W•C•E) 

• Oppose - per tan  SpongeBot678 ^(M•C•E)  21:43, February 18, 2019 (UTC) 

• Oppose - Per Tan’s, Golf’s, 120d’s, and Cheese’s concerns.  Figmeister ^(W•C•E)  21:43, February 18, 2019 (UTC) 

• Extremely Strong Oppose - — AMK152 (Wall • Contrib) 21:47, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Neutral - Per Anthony. Chickenkrispies^{W C E}   21:48, February 18, 2019 (UTC) 

• Extremely Strong Oppose - As I and numerous others have brought up, this is unhelpful to all users and unnecessary. There are a lot better ways to increase the viewership of transcripts and galleries than to remove the subpages.  120d  Talk  Contribs  21:49, February 18, 2019 (UTC) 

• Support - --Spongebob456 ^talk 21:50, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose - (Contact • Contrib) 21:50, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Strong Support - If this proposal passes, it would help to organize the wiki further and provide a more sensible policy for episode pages. We don't need large amounts of excessive gallery and transcripts pages when we can place all of our information, galleries, and transcripts onto one page to make things easier for our users and readers. TheKorraFanatic ^{(Talk Page) (Contributions) (Guestbook)} 21:51, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Support, but Mainly for the Gallery Limit - A few weeks ago, some anonymous new user uploaded a heckin' ton of near-identical (and concerning) screengrabs of Sandy's shower scenes to Someone's in the Kitchen with Sandy/gallery. By our current "let's keep every single frame of a different facial expression" rule, the gallery had to be kept like that. A gallery limit would put an end to this cringe. --Demigod brendan (talk) 21:52, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Extremely Strong Oppose - While I get what you are trying to say, and the points you bring up sound good on paper, they really do. But in execution I think they wouldn't work well at all. And the other "opposers" bring up good points as well. -- 22:02, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - Opinion subject to change, but from what I've seen so far the proposal would only complicate editing, discourage people from uploading pictures of new episodes, cause lag on large pages, clutter pages, and just make life harder for people. In addition, I would like to add that it is important for us not to let the people arguing for the opposition (or people arguing in support) to influence how we view the opinion itself. The most expensive boss, Alex.sapre (talk) 22:08, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Neutral - :— 1033Forest ^[talk] 22:22, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

• Extremely Strong Oppose - Change can be good, but this change is not good. Scrooge200 (talk) 22:25, February 18, 2019 (UTC)
• Neutral -  —Lewis2567 ^{(Wall•Contribs)} 23:10, February 18, 2019 (UTC)