Board Thread:Policies/@comment-20551-20190224085917/@comment-3361105-20190225035517

Koavf wrote: I can't understand this. No biggie. I get a dopamine rush about saying something clever whether you understand it or not.

Koavf wrote: It's actually much easier to know the first time someone appeared rather than the only time someone did. Either way, you are claiming to know a first appearance. only claims to know about every subsequent comic as well.

This doesn't refute my argument, it just restates your position. 1st claims to know that there will be at least one other appearance of a character, without necessarily having any evidence thereto.

In that regard, both templates, are best used on issues that are many years old. In most cases, I would recommend that a 1st be used on new issues of a book, only after the character has had a second appearance - and for the majority of minor characters, I would suggest they should be left without any such tag (and no redlink) until it is clear that they are going to become a major character.

With older books, it is much easier to determine these things because the rest of the series (or at least, a large portion of it) is already out there. In the majority of golden age comics, an Only is going to be most accurate. Not at all the case in our more serialized comics of today.

In both cases, to really do the job well, we need someone keeping up with, and maintaining a given series' pages in the long term. Usually, we can rely on a fan or two to do that. Sometimes we can't.

Anyone who assumes an only without reading ahead is not doing their due diligence, Anyone who assumes a second appearance without reading ahead is also not doing their due diligence. Sometimes we can't rely on editors to do that. That's unfortunate. And any user who happens to know better - such that they are willing to take the issue to the forums for a policy debate - could be of more help by simply correcting the other user's error.