I don't think it would be too much of a loss. The History/Description section should be enough to point to where the item was predominantly used. And the Notes section can be used to cover notable other continuity uses.

I've just seen cases of alternate continuities being added and removed without rhyme or reason.

I usually only add the main universes, and the same for Locations. I mean, Batsuit and Gotham City have appeared in at least 70% of these.

True. And that's why I can understand having, using the Bat-Examples, New Earth, Prime Earth, Earth-One, and Earth-Two. But it can also be argued that the DCAU, Burtonverse, Nolanverse, and a few others are "main universes". And those are the ones fluctuating in and out.

Just a follow up on this...

I do like the idea of paring down, for both items and locations, the 'box to a few. I also like limiting the categories to those as well and adding notes as to other uses.

But maybe we can break the categories out in the way characters are broken out, resulting in Universe Items and Universe Locations categories.

Is that workable?

?

Please tell me you don't mean "Batsuit (Nolanverse)"...

Oh hell no.

I mean that, for example, "Batsuit" would wind up in categories called "New Eart Items", "Earth-One Items", "Nolanverse Items", and "DCAU Items". Similar to how characters like Carter Nichols (Earth-One) is categorized in "Earth-One Characters" and "Earth-Two Characters".

That's just a load of pointless categories.

You know 80% of the categories we create around here are never used except for the sake of being made, yes?

Yes and no.

Personally, yes, I can see that swaths of categories that are pointless. From housing single items to collecting minutia like hair color. I can see how they can be viewed as pointless.

However, I can also see that the basic community this wiki caters to does tend to be the ones, in varying degrees, looking for things to be put into sets, for those sets to be complete, and for category application to be complete. There are those that want to have a list of all the red-heads, or members of a specific team, or from a particular setting, or whatever.

In this case, I'm looking at it as splitting a larger grouping - stuff featured in stories from a specific continuity - in to smaller, easier to visually search chunks - character (already there), items, and locations. To me this seems reasonable under the categorization schema in place in that it allows a user to look up similar things. That said, if from the level of running the site there is no problem with the items and locations being categorized in the top continuity categories, OK, no big problem. If, at that level, it's determined that the "Universe" parameter in the non-character templates is more trouble than its worth and these things need not be categorized by continuity, then also OK, no problem.

As I said up thread, I see little that is lost if the parameter and categorization of these things by continuity goes away. It's just the current method is the one I'm least comfortable with.

The basic community of 13-17 people who make more than 100 edits per month, and about 180 people who make more than 5 edits a month are a minute percentage of the 200,000 plus unique visitors to the wiki per day.

I mention that, because those 180 people (the 100+ editors are included in that stat) are probably the majority of those who use categories at all.

That said, I think we should have categories for red-headed characters, etc. That's useful.

Breaking items down by universe is just going to see something like "Batsuit" appear in 10 universe categories - and for the most part, we don't have any item pages for things that appear outside of mainstream continuity (that don't also appear in mainstream continuity).

And, as previously mentioned, I don't think half the items we have pages for should ever be tagged for appearances (not that that's entirely relevant to the subject, apart from the fact that their appearance tags help us know which universe they've appeared on).

... suffice it to say that I still don't think we should have a universe field on item pages anyway. Locations are a bit trickier, since some locations are unique to a universe.

I take your point. And if the remedy is to have the parameter removed, OK.