Forum:Character bios

Now that Season 1 is over, I think we need to reexamine how we're handling character biographies. I was following the True Blood Wiki format of updating each character's bio by episode, but I think this is proving unworkable due to GoT's much vaster cast size. At the moment we're providing a plot summary for each episode, then going back and basically doing another mini plot summary for every single character, faction and location that crops up in the episode. It's an enormous amount of work and simply means we end up with a ton of redundant information. It's also pretty much impossible for us to stay up-to-date whilst the season was in progress (for example, we did a good job of keeping Eddard's article up to date, but at one point Sansa's was about six episodes out of date). Also, whilst it's fine for dead characters, the characters who survive for many seasons to come are going to end up with articles colossal in size. I propose that we demolish the detailed character episode updates and in the 'In the series' section have a more concise summary of what has happened. We source each character page, using our own episode summaries as sources. So for Robb Stark we have a paragraph or two covering all of Season 1 (rather than ten short paragraphs, one for each episode, separately listed) covering only the salient points and then source-link the events to the episode summaries, where more detailed information can be found.

This is a substantial change to how we're handling the characters at the moment, but I think in the long run it will be easier to keep the pages updated and will keep them concise and prevent us from having to write out the same events ten times over. Keeping everying updated under the existing system for Season 1 was chaotic, half-hearted and didn't really work, so I think we definitely need an alternate system. What do people think?--Werthead 20:46, July 4, 2011 (UTC)