User talk:A Man In Black/Pokeinfobox

Three changes you should make to this pokeinfobox, to make it better: Just my 2 cents. Almafeta 23:14, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Take out the pronunciation box. There's really no information added.
 * 2) Add the stats in, below the biologcal section. They're relevant, and I'm sure Pidgeot can update his tool to provide them and percentile ranks in the appropriate format.
 * 3) Take out the Wikibooks link. Although Wikipedia is a good thing, Wikimedia's other projects (Wikitionary, Wikibooks, etc.) are really sorry pieces of work, as well as prone to vandalism; we are not well-served by linking to them.

First off, let me point out that this has been replaced by Template:pokeinfobox, which is actually being used out in the article space (in Pikachu, Kyogre, and Jynx (Pokémon)). It's still a proposed infobox, though, so feel free to speak up. As for your suggestions...
 * 1) Done and done. I'm not sure why I kept it in the first place.
 * 2) Er. I'm absolutely against bringing over info that is totally incomprehensible to lay readers; I firmly believe that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Moreover...
 * 3) While many of the Wikibooks are pretty sad, Pokémon is not, and it stands up with any of the other databases of Pokémon stats and info. Plus, by linking that in every Pokémon article, anyone who is actually interested in the stats, training info, movelists, and so forth can head over to Wikibooks and get that info.
 * 4) 2 and #3 are differences of opinion on policy. I'm tempted to make a discussion subpage (or maybe even a non-acrimonious RfC) to discuss this topic at length, but for the time being other things (like improving the articles) are more important, and the debate can carry on at WP:PAC's talk page. - A Man In Black (Talk | Contribs) 23:31, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I'm ambivalent on the Wikibooks link, now that you put it that way. However, I'm still adamant about the stats.  Even though Pokémon has expanded to the silver screen, the small screen, comic books, et al, Pokémon is still centered on one thing:  battles, either to capture new species or trainer battles.  And these battles are still structured very similarly to the video games.  A fast poké in the video game is going to be fast in the manga.  A tough poké in the video game is going to be tough in the movies.  A weak poké in the video game is still going to be a joke no matter what media it's in.
 * Additionally, putting them in percentile ranks helps 'lay persons' understand the stats in context. "Eighth percentile in attack?  Not too good...  but being seventy-fifth in defense and sixty-second in hit points has to say something..."  This is not adding information indiscriminately; it gives insight to how it fights (and how well it fights), which is a very important part of understanding the species in a multimedia series as fighting-centric as Pokémon.
 * By the way, you made a comment in PAC's talk page, "... the anime doesn't reference these stats, to my knowledge the manga doesn't reference these stats ..."  The anime references the stats once (at least, in the seasons I watched), and some of the manga (not every series) references the stats.
 * I do think biological information should go above the video game stats, however. Almafeta 10:49, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

The stats are regularly ignored in the manga, anime, card game, and games other than the trainer Game Boy games and stadium console games, for the sake of a story or other interests. Readers who aren't already well-established fans of the Pokémon games aren't going to be interested in whether, say, Bulbasaur is faster than Squirtle, as this is nearly never a plot point in any story. When "Is X foo-er than Y" outside of the trainer/battling games, the answer is always "Whatever serves the story." Note that raw stats would be misleading to the importance and tendencies of, say, Pikachu, or Jigglypuff, or Bulbasaur/Squirtle/Bayleef, as protagonists or recurring characters tend to have whatever powers or ability they need to serve the story at that moment. Lay readers aren't going to be interested even with the percentile ranks, and I daresay if you were to put 100 Wikipedians in a room, you would be hard-pressed to find two of them who know what the stats mean or care enough to click a single link to read an explanation. I daresay if you put a Pokémon article with the stat info still in the infobox on WP:PR or WP:FAC, one of the main pieces of advice would be to remove the stats as unencyclopedic, with a link to What Wikipedia is not. The original WikiProject Pokédex didn't include stats in the infobox because it was a WP:CVG subproject, and WP:CVG understands that gobs of raw data (as opposed to prose that conveys information) aren't encyclopedic, and moreover they make otherwise legitimate articles look less encyclopedic. Our project has a bad enough reputation for fancruftery as it is, and there's no sense muddying well-written articles. You've expressed concern about precision. Precision with regard to stats is absolutely, completely unimportant in an encyclopedia. The only time precision is ever an issue for anyone is when carefully tweaking a Pokémon team to play against another player. In other games, a general description of the Pokémon's general tendencies suffices, giving the reader all of the understanding needed to understand a Pokémon's place among its peers, or, just as likely, give the reader enough context to understand what's going on in a later episode of the anime or a later issue of the manga. In the unlikely event that precise stats do matter, well, the Wikibook link is right there in the infobox, one click away. - A Man In Black (Talk | Contribs) 11:18, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Note that Terra Branford, Cloud Strife, and List of Final Fantasy Tactics characters (the last being a game composed entirely of battles and cutscenes) don't have stats, and by and large err on the side of describing the characters as characters rather than as game constructs. - A Man In Black (Talk | Contribs) 11:20, 14 August 2005 (UTC)