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

	Proposal Archive The following proposal has been discussed and is now marked as resolved. The page has been protected and now serves as an archive. Do not edit this page. Date Resolved: February 25, 2019 Result: Not passed.

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.

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)
- Comment -If the thing that’s currently there is what this guy did, I actually really like this. It’d be nice if the gallery pages had about every second in, as that would be really nice for whenever someone would want to get a picture of a specific moment. -Wintermelon43
- Reply - You do know that SpongeBob Captures (a place where you can get practically every frame of an episode) exists, right? --CheeseCrocker (talk) 20:34, February 19, 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)

Oppose - At first I thought this was to add one of those things that change what the page looks like at the top, that could allow you to switch from the main page to the transcript to the gallery, which I thought would be cool, but then I looked at the test page and.... that looks pretty bad. I espicially don’t like the gallery, having to press a button multiple times to find the exact picture would be annoying. -Wintermelon43

Oppose - They’re fine the way they already are. •кσσℓкιттү <мεssαgε ωαℓℓ> (=^ ◡ ^=)• 23:28, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

Neutral - Support moving galleries, not transcripts, for reasons given in my concern. ~JCM 23:54, February 18, 2019 (UTC)

Neutral - While I don't think it's a bad idea, I do think that there is more important stuff to do at the moment. Also, I think that there are too many complications with the proposal. Expert at

Vehemently Strong Oppose - Per everyone's concerns --CheeseCrocker (talk) 00:46, February 19, 2019 (UTC)

Strong Oppose - Sorry 456 but I rather not support something that'll hurt the wiki in a big way by taking away a bunch of pages. Plus, I'd rather not read a whole transcript on the same page as the episode itself especially if said episode is a special or even a movie. ZeoSpark Talk Contribs Edits 01:19,2/19/2019

Oppose - which do you think is more convienient - scrolling through an entire page of crap to find what you want, or clicking a single damn button? Chuck123456 ^(M•C•E) 19:19, February 19, 2019 (UTC)

Oppose - ThomasGaming64 ^{Wall Contribs}

Very Strong Oppose - At first, this didn't seem like too terrible an idea. After all, what harm can be done in making the pages better? Of course, the design of the pages would have been terrible, and that would have meant that I would give it an oppose anyway. However what really gets me is the fact that, as part of this, you intend to reduce the size of the gallery. Personally, I think that on dedicated wikis, any information about the relevant subject matter should be on there somewhere. Information should never be deleted from the site entirely, only reorganised if necessary. You wishing to delete all these images from these galleries goes against this completely. Why should a gallery be limited to 50 images per 11 minutes? It's not in violation of copyright laws, so there's no legal reason that it should have to go. In fact, this seems awfully fishy. Considering a major justification is to increase views while deleting pages that aren't paying for themselves, I would not be at all surprised to find out that this proposal was endorsed by FANDOM staff. User:Spongebob456, if you are just here to try and get a job with FANDOM, then know that while you may look like a good user to this profit-making company, you are not being helpful to the wiki to which you are a bureaucrat if you are just trying to use it for your own personal gain. We have has terrible administrators like this in the past, the only difference being that the Katy Perry quotes have been replaced with periodic smiley face emoticons. - The gamer 987654321 (M.W. B. C.) 21:45, February 19, 2019 (UTC)
- Reply - Worth bearing in mind that this is a wiki, not an image repository. The images should support the text, not the other way around. This proposal is supported by Fandom staff. No, I'm not trying to get a job at Fandom by doing this. :) --Spongebob456 ^talk 09:01, February 20, 2019 (UTC)
- Reply - Don't the images we currently have already support the text? I'm not sure how reducing them would support them any more than they currently do. In fact, it would probably make them worse. Of course we don't need 500 images in an episode gallery, because that would be A) Too much work and B) Would contain many images of the same expressions. But there wouldn't be a reason to remove them if 500 images were already added to a singular episode gallery, cause then you're removing a lot of work. It's like if someone worked 10 hours and got 500 dollars, but then the person who gave the money took back 400 of the 500 dollars a day later for their own needs. That makes no sense, as then most of their hard earned money was taken away for no good reason. I think an image amount recommendation would be fine, like maybe 100-150 images would be a good amount of images to recommend, but we shouldn't be forced around that amount. 50 is pretty small if you think about it. You'd get around 3-5 images for every minute of an episode, which honestly isn't that much IMO. Really, the only images we should be removing on this wiki are A) low-quality images. B) Images that don't follow the naming scheme (this could be an exception cause assistants and higher can always rename images) and C) images that have something that breaks our policy in it. --CheeseCrocker (talk) 20:30, February 20, 2019 (UTC)
  - Reply - With respect, not removing images due to it being too much isn't a very good reason. Likewise, while I understand we're removing hard work of users, if it benefits the wiki then I think it should be done. In all honesty, I was able to get Help Wanted down to 50 images and you can still tell the story no problem. For example, when you see SpongeBob and Patrick talking like this:

Only one of those images is needed. All that is necessary for the text is that Patrick motivates SpongeBob. We see in one of those images that happening. We don't need the others. Let's look at another example, from Tea at the Treedome this time:

I've been able to cut 5 images from that one scene. SpongeBob walks in, realises there's no water and his eyes and body react to that. That's all the images need to show.

If you go down the argument of having the extensive galleries so folks don't have to watch the episode, then we're going against what a wiki is. A wiki complements the episode, it doesn't act as a substitute for watching the episode. Equally, images complement the text, not the other way round. --Spongebob456 ^talk 12:06, February 21, 2019 (UTC)

- Reply - But the idea of the wiki is to act as a complement to the episodes, not a substitute. One could argue that having any information other than a brief synopsis would also be unnecessary, as a person could just watch the episode. Additional resources for people to check out doesn't hurt anyone. Removing those resources does hurt at least someone. Granted, most motion doesn't happen in 1/5 of a second, so you wouldn't need 5 images per second. The amount we have for each respective gallery is enough to convey the motion and action that is happening within the episode. Tan Ham Man 15:18,2/21/2019
  - Reply - With detailed episode synopses, readers go and read those if there are details from an episode they don't understand. A wiki is an information encyclopedia with text to clarify and bring together SpongeBob lore. You use images to complement the text which is what users come for. A wiki is not designed to be an image repository. --Spongebob456 ^talk 15:34, February 21, 2019 (UTC)
  - In terms of additional arguments against having too many images, they negatively affect SEO (yes, I know you disagree but there's the fact anyway). Also worth pointing out that with YouTube and other companies getting more stringent with copyright, I worry that with us having full transcripts and full galleries we effectively have the entire episodes and we'll get caught out eventually. --Spongebob456 ^talk 19:31, February 21, 2019 (UTC)
Oppose - Didn’t want to oppose this, but I can’t look past some of these negatives. Sorry. DanzxvFan8275 (M•C•U•E) 22:13, February 19, 2019 (UTC)

Comment - While I also strongly disagree with this proposal, it's worth pointing out that this originally wasn't thought of by Wikia Staff. It was Sb456, and although he could have done a better job at clarifying it (I can see where the misunderstanding came from, considering he did ask staff to come and talk about it, immediately after people were upset about staff), staff have only helped him word out his arguments. They did not come to tell us to make this change, but support it anyway. The most expensive boss, Alex.sapre (talk) 00:12, February 20, 2019 (UTC)

Oppose - Per everyone's concerns from above.--DragonSpore18 (talk) 20:40, February 20, 2019 (UTC)

Neutral --While I might agree about galleries, I believe merging transcripts would really clutter up the pages. Come to think of it, episode galleries are very convenient, as they don't take up preexisting pages too much, but I still think they could work, so that is why I am neutral. Chase McFly ^{(Message Wall)} ^{(Contributions)}

Strong Oppose - As I've said in the concerns stage, this change will not help the wiki much. - Jensonk

Oppose - it is fine the way it is now, making it more complicated won’t help the wiki. basically per everyone who opposed. LuigiTheMurderer ^(M•C•E) 05:08, February 22, 2019 (UTC)

Oppose - I think I agree about the gallery picture limit idea and I'd've put a "Support" that if it was on its own. Spongebob456 makes good points about it with the pictures above but everything else seems kind of over-complicated and (probably) harmful to the wiki. Squidbobfever (talk) 17:42, February 22, 2019 (UTC)