User:MrBlonde267/Criticisms

Making new pages for The New 52
My biggest problem is accessibility. From a purely data-driven standpoint, it makes sense to have separate pages. But we're not just a database, we're a website designed to help people. I spend the majority of my time making sure that we maintain a balance between appealing to die-hard fans and people who are completely new to comics. It's important to understand that most people unfamiliar with comics are not aware of The New 52. There are certainly new readers jumping on board, but the majority of new readers are getting into comics the same way they always have... not by the newest thing on the stands, but by bookstores and things their friends lent them. By seeing movies and wanting to know more about those characters. They are the silent majority of people who view our site and I don't want to alienate them because of the vocal minority's opinions.

This means setting up a site that acknowledges continuity but allows readers to operate without an understanding of it. Our biggest pages such as Batman and Superman reflect that very simply. If you're making pages with a distinction between "current Batman" and "Batman from anything you've read more than a year ago" then that's something that needs to be made clear on every page. Casual readers don't know what Flashpoint or The New 52 are, so you need to find a way to explain that very simply across the site so people aren't confused on all of our pages. I've heard hypotheticals thrown around, but these need to be seen in place and working before we can even think about a move. I've spent the entire past year trying to make these disambigs accessible to new readers, I've written almost all of them myself, and I'd really hate to see all that work wasted on them becoming illegible.

My other biggest problem is coherence. I get that some characters are starting over fresh, but many of them have histories intact. I doubt we'll ever see a complete rundown of what is in continuity and what isn't, but these character pages will all be blind. Most of them won't have rewritten origins, especially not the obscure ones. Even big sagas like Batman Incorporated and Geoff Johns' work on the Green Lantern Corps will be cut completely in two so neither part will make sense individually. The alternative is something like having a Black Lightning page that doesn't list any history for him other than being a member of the Outsiders five years into the modern age of heroes. We are literally severing these characters from their history. It's really confusing and shitty to have our longest-running characters like Superman claim that their first appearance was in 2011 and not 1938. I think it makes far more sense to use Post-Flashpoint and explain these changes in-universe than make people visit separate pages to read about the same character.

What merits a move? Obviously not every single obscure Post-Crisis character is getting an appearance for quite some time... what do we do with characters like Batman mentors Chu Chin Li and Tsunetomo. They had a handful of late-eighties appearances each and have been mentioned in Born to Kill, but we probably won't see them again for quite some time. Do we create new mentioned only character pages for them?

Finally, the naming convention. Are we really going to have pages named (New Earth) to designate the old convention with Prime Earth as the new one? That's gonna be balls confusing for any new readers, and our site layout is already confusing enough. I think a big sign of that is how few editors we have comparatively despite being one of the top 10 biggest wikis. This is also ignoring the fact that we completely didn't address New Earth being changed to Earth-0 after Infinite Crisis, and it seems even more confusing to be hard-line about this change and completely ignoring that one.

I need to see satisfying solutions to all of these problems before I would vote in favor of making new pages. I can make a bulleted list if that would be more helpful than essay format.