UESPWiki:Archive/CP Is a page on every NPC in the game necessary?

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Is a page on every NPC in the game necessary?

As a relative newcomer to editing the wiki, and focusing on filling out missing NPC pages, I have a couple of thoughts on the subject.

Is it really necessary to create a separate page for every NPC in the game?

There are a number of NPCs who are not integral to any particular quest, do not provide a particular service, etc. (basically they are filler to populate the cities and towns, and make the game more realistic). If a NPC does not provide a useful service, is not a player in a quest in the game, and exists solely as a filler, is it necessary to create a separate page for them? For example, I have filled out a couple of pages that state "Doppleganger is a female Breton commoner living in Chorrol." That is really all that can be said about Doppleganger -- they are not integral to anything, and just happen like Chorrol and chose to live there." The chances are very minimal that anyone in the game will come to UESP and search for Doppleganger.

My recommendation is that we create a page or pages that has a listing of all non-essential NPCs in the game; maybe make a separate page by town, or by race, or however we choose to categorize them, but group them all on one page and give the basic stats about them (race, sex, class, location, and maybe a misc comment if there is incidental information that someone might like to know (say, Branwen is Owyn's daughter). This way we don't clutter the sight with alot of seldom used pages that have to be maintained, but the info is compiled in case anyone should want it. In addition, if we find that someone has been included on the non-essential NPC page that actually has a role, then they can be removed and a page created for them. If they are non-essential and not part of any quest or activity, then the chances are slim that someone will insert information on a page that needs to be linked to them.

Any additional thought? Just my two cents from someone who is weary of creating one line NPC pages just for the sake of having one solely because they have a presence in the game somewhere. I'll be happy to take ownership of this if we should come up with an alternative to separate pages for each NPC in the game.--Hoggwild5 00:53, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

My first reaction is that this makes sense, but perhaps with a couple modifications. First, I think we may still want to have a page for each NPC for the sake of the category listings of all NPCs; for those who have minimal information, make the page actually be a redirect instead of deleting it. Second, I'd lean towards using, for example, the existing Oblivion:Beggars page as the redirect location for all beggars. That already has a table of all the beggars; adding sex/race/comment would be fairly straightforward. So in other words see if it's somehow possible to group the one-sentence NPCs by function, especially when existing pages already exist. I'm not completely sure what types of functions there will be other than beggars (Oblivion:Mythic Dawn Agents is one other that comes to mind), but maybe that can be a starting point. --Nephele 03:24, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

Update -- I've compiled preliminary data on the 235 NPCs that are left, and it looks like 50 to 60 of them don't do anything but hang out. Thoughts? --Hoggwild5 18:52, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

I've been thinking about this for a while, and haven't had much of an idea of how to fix it. I took a "What Would Wikipedia Do?" approach to the situation, and found that these types of articles are called "permastubs". Permastubs are stubs that cannot be expanded. Wikipedia merges permastubs into broader subjects-- perhaps we should do the same? We could have a section listing all the people in a city that are notable somewhere like at [[Oblivion:People in Chorrol]], then we could have a section listing all the non-notable people. --Aristeo | Talk 22:30, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

Well, I went ahead and added pages for these NPCs for Oblivion; however I'd like to explore a different way to do NPC pages for Morrowind (which hasn't been done and is probably needed more than for Oblivion for reasons I'll explain later). There are alot more incidental NPCs in Morrowind than there are in Oblivion. --Hoggwild5 07:23, 20 October 2006 (EDT)