Forum:Random questions about sidebars

Forum: The Situation Room > Random questions about sidebars

I've taken a mini-break from my work on Season 5 articles recently, mostly due to excess of work IRL, which prevents me from dedicating more constant time to it. However, I've been grabbing random articles here and there, just filling up information, and making general cleanups. One of the things I've been working is on filling up information on sidebars, but I've stumbled upon a few questions.

Date and place of birth

Sure, I know that for the few characters that have an actual birth date, we link it to the corresponding year. But what about cast and crew? I've seen some articles about them where their birth dates are linked to the corresponding year article. I, myself, have done it a few times. But I'm wondering if it should be that way since we would be linking the article of an oou cast/crew member to an iu article about a date. Not sure if we are okay with that. The same can be said about the birthplace.

You're on to something there: it is a bad idea to link the IU year articles in a real person's sidebar. That stuff goes onto the On This Day date templates and the 24 birthdays page. Nothing needs to be linked on the actor pages themselves. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 02:46, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Nationalities

It seems to me a lot of characters have what seems to be their "assumed" nationality, and not the actual one. Again, I'm guilty of this as well... but a lot of times it seems we put the "American" tag to any American-looking character, when in reality we have no evidence about it (see Mark or Greer). Shouldn't we just avoid the field? And what about Erica Vasquez, Jamey Farrell's mother? Or sometimes we see a character that for some reason is connected to a certain country, and we label him as such, even though we have no evidence about his actual nationality (can't think of an example right now, but I've stumbled upon a few).

I really don't like the field, because as you mentioned, it's not often clear if it means country of birth or country of current citizenship. I suppose it is safe to utilize when someone is verifiably born in one country and has the same allegiance during their season(s). Otherwise it's best to avoid. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 02:46, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Affiliations

I've seen this field mostly used for organizations, terrorist or extremist groups, government agencies, etc. But what about regular workplaces? Should we put those on the "Profession" field, along with the actual position? For example, Benjamin, which I edited earlier today; or Gary Klausner? Meredith Reed? Joseph Fayed? Gus, Phil, and Todd?

EDIT: Forgot something, is it okay to link characters like Tariq, Nicole, Mitch Anderson, and so on, to the respective antagonists page (in those cases, Day 4 antagonists) even if the "group" didn't have a specific name given in the show? I mean, Nina Myers has an "Unidentified German group" affiliation, even when no name - or anything, actually - was ever given about such group.

Although it is a tad odd, I don't see any actual problems with putting a regular workplace inside the Affiliation data field. If we were to cram the business/group name and the occupation position all inside the Profession field, it would be too crowded anyway. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 02:46, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Spouses

In cases where the character is divorced, widowed, or anything else, we should add that note to the side of the spouse name, if given, right? But if they are together, we should still label him/her as either "Wife" or "Husband"? (see Karen Hayes or Stephen).

I like that idea. Before you mentioned this, I disliked it whenever I saw "(husband/wife)" because I kept thinking, "well what else would a person in this field be?" But it could be a divorced partner or widow(er) situation too. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 02:46, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Deaths in Redemption

We usually label the deathdate with the "Day X: 9:99pm" label, linking to the specific season and episode. But what about the deaths in Redemption? We have the time, but not a specific day. Should we put the time only, use any other label, or simply omit the field?

My opinion: just insert the time. The only other thing we could do is duplicate a link to Redemption, but that would be repetitive right? Blue Rook  talk  contribs 02:46, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

I think that's pretty much it. Maybe some of them are silly questions, but I would appreciate any input so we can have uniformity within all articles. Thief12 17:57, September 18, 2011 (UTC)

My thoughts on the different things:

1. Date and Place of Birth: I don't think there's anything wrong with links between iu and oou pages. We often link to Day 1, unnamed civilians, On-screen kills by Jack Bauer or episode pages within the text of iu articles, so I see nothing wrong with doing the opposite for birthplaces. However, we shouldn't do this for dates because it would be much more appropriate to link to, say, 2002 productions instead of 2002, and for early dates we should link to Early production history, which has actor births on. I think 24 birthdays might be a redundant page in addition to early production history.
2. Nationalities: This has always been a bit of an odd one, and we probably shouldn't put it unless specifically stated. As for people working for an american agency like ctu or fbi, I guess you'd maybe need some form of american nationality to do that, but I dunno if it's necessary on the sidebar. Not sure.
3. Affiliations: I think extra field for "employer" or "place of work" would work better than affiliation in many cases. I also had a similar thing where I wanted to include a link to Latham group building on the sidebar of Bob Jorgensen, but "residence" didn't seem right so I used "location". Pyramidhead reverted it without much explanation of what was so bad about that.
4. Spouses: I think having "wife" and "husband" is redundant, as it's pretty obvious what they are from the name (or gender of the character you're on - no 24 gay marriages yet). I think (widowed) or (divorced) would be better. We seem to have (ex-husband) for divorces at the minute, but nothing for widows, other than the italicised names whose meaning isn't obvious to the casual reader.
5. Deaths in redemption: I'd vote to leave that field out of redemption deaths, as just having the time looks odd, to me.

Those are my initial thoughts - sorry if that hasn't helped and just confused the matter!--Acer4666 15:20, September 19, 2011 (UTC)

I went and answered all Thief's questions right under his posts, not knowing that Acer already replied at the bottom. I'm too tired to cut and paste and reformat everything at the bottom underneath Acer's, so I'll leave it there with this note. Acer and I differ on some minor stuff. I'll be happy to work out the specifics. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 02:46, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Re:Birth date links, I just remembered that each year article has the following disambiguation note at the top:

"For information dealing with this year in the real world, see Early production history."

...or something like that, which furthermore leads us to not link the birth dates of cast/crew to these years. Like you two said, they should link to the "Production" articles or something else. Thief12 18:28, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

I don't understand; what do you mean? Blue Rook  talk  contribs 03:09, September 21, 2011 (UTC)