Talk: List of characters

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Alphabetical order by surname

This page needs to be completely re-ordered in the way that it says on the top. --Potsk (talk) 18:30, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi. I'm pretty sure I'm the one who put what it says at the top (at least in its current form) a few months back and I've kept the list updated ever since. I made a mistake by writting "surname" instead of "first name", it is now fixed. If you want to re-organise the list by surname, that's fine by me but it seems unnecessary now. --Thomaerys Velaryon (talk) 19:19, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

Restructuring

Perhaps it would be more useful to place them in order of first appearance/mention by book and chapter, like how we arrange GoT/HotD characters by episode. Potsk (talk) 12:20, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

I would propose that we restructure this list the way you said and also create a category "Characters by alphabet" or similar, which sorts all characters by their first name. -Alyx Rivers (talk) 12:42, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
That's a lot of work but if you're up to it I don't see why not. Potsk, when you are saying you want to arrange the characters according to their first appeance/mention in the books, you mean like what I did years ago with my spreadsheet of all ASOIAF characters ? And Alyx Rivers, the French wiki "La Garde de Nuit" already has a similar system for their characters page (see here). Is that what you have in mind ? --Thomaerys Velaryon (talk) 15:02, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
I can absolutely do the category, it would just take some time. The system the French wiki has, is actually what inspired my idea. :) I'm only unsure what to call the category specifically, because "Characters by alphabet" sounds very clunky.. Also, should I just create the overall category or also the individual letters like on La Garde de Nuit? I'm not sure it's necessary if we include a TOC, but if you think it would be better, I can do that as well. (I've had a look at your spreadsheet, too. Very impressive!) -Alyx Rivers (talk) 15:23, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Thomaerys Velaryon, yes that's pretty much what I have in mind. Really good work on that spreadsheet by the way, I'll be using it as a reference while editing. If we're all in agreement on the restructuring I can begin right now. Potsk (talk) 16:39, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Potsk, if you want to use my spreadsheet that's alright but I've to warn you first that when I worked on that project I was rather flexible on what constitute a character first mention. For example, if a character refer to his/her "brothers" at some point in the text, I've considered that as a mention for all the brothers this particular character has even if none of them have been named or been singled out yet. --Thomaerys Velaryon (talk) 17:17, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Eh, it's not the end of the world if some characters get misplaced. They can always be corrected later. Potsk (talk) 17:30, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Do we count characters only appearing in dreams/visions as actually appearing? Potsk (talk) 17:44, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
I'd say they don't count. Maybe we could say, the book at this point takes place in 298 AC and the character in the dream does not actually exist as such at this point in time, therefore the characters does not appear. -Alyx Rivers (talk) 17:56, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
You do you. Rhaenys Targaryen started to classify the mentions and appearances of the characters a few years ago but did not finish. I would define a "character appearance" as someone talking to the POV character or someone being physically in the vicinity of the POV character (i.e. in the same room, being seen walking around by the POV character, etc.). So to me someone being seen in a vision would be a "character mention" rather than a "character appearance". It all depends on what is the goal of your project exactly. Creating a complete index chapter by chapter of the first time a character is mentioned or appears in the books ? Or going even farther and noting every mention/appearance chapter by chapter of all characters throughout the series ? --Thomaerys Velaryon (talk) 18:03, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Instead of manually adding the category to each page, we could have that be done automatically via the Infobox character template. It would save quite a lot of work. Would that be helpful? Abjiklam (talk) 18:56, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Yes, good idea Potsk (talk) 19:09, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
There's a problem. Most of the character pages on the wiki use {{Character}} instead of {{Infobox character}}, and moving the template to the former doesn't seem to do anything but create even more problems that I can't even identify. Potsk (talk) 19:30, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
While theoretically that would be a good idea and save a lot of work, it would, I think, also mean that all characters are sorted under the first letter of their character page. In cases like Fearless Ithoke or Sour Alyn that's not really what we, or I at least, want. A similar problem are the kings. Aegon I Targaryen wouldn't be with the other Aegon Targaryens, but with whichever Aegons had a last name starting with an "I". Maybe I just have to keep at it with the categorizing.. -Alyx Rivers (talk) 20:30, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Further problems I've found are characters with a Defaultsort, which now turn up under their last name. And unnamed characters, like "Lord Ashford" or "Archon's daughter", which I had figured would be best left in Unnamed characters only, and are now right in between the all the first names. -Alyx Rivers (talk) 21:35, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Since no one seems to have any further opionions on this, does that mean that you want to leave things like they are now? With the category majorly coming from the infobox? This does currently mean that it's always the first category listed on a character's page. Potsk, I'm not sure what problem you encountered with pages using {{Character}}. They're are all currently starting to show up in the category. They're just taking their time with it, as sometimes happens when a template is changed. (Also, the introductionary paragraph on character pages is now one line down compared to before, which looks a bit off in cases where there's a Hatnote. Was that on purpose?) -Alyx Rivers (talk) 00:59, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
I edited the template so that it categorizes pages in another hidden category. This way it won't interfere with the categorization you started. What I had in mind was implementing a module/template that can parse the character_name and the page title to output an alphabetical order. I think some operations would be relatively simple to implement, like "Aegon IV Targaryen" -> "Aegon4 Targaryen" or "Lord Ashford" -> "* Ashford". Such a template could deal with many cases you mentioned above. For the cases that cannot be dealt with, we could have an explicit alphabetical order as extra parameter in the infobox template. Abjiklam (talk) 10:15, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
Sorry for my impatience yesterday. I think, I was a bit overwhelmed by all the characters suddenly appearing in the category when I wasn't expecting them and at first couldn't figure out where they were coming from. I think, the moving and deleting Potsk did, kept the changes on the template from showing up in the Recent Changes.
Your idea for the template sounds pretty good, if you could implement that. The only problem I can see right now, is that people with nicknames, like Fearless Ithoke, often have the whole nickname as the character_name. I'd personally put just their first name, or full name, in character_name and the nickname in alias, but Potsk has been changing those, like with the Anvil Ryn page. (Possibly because they never turn up with just their first name?) Or would this be a completely new template? -Alyx Rivers (talk) 15:59, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
I've thought about the characters category some more and now I'm wondering if it wouldn't make more sense to put all characters into Category:Characters instead of the category I created, Category:Characters in alphabetical order. For one, this category is supposed to hold all characters for whom we have a page and not just some of them, as pretty much all other character categories do. So it would make sense to me to use the most generic category we have. Also, the point of this category should be that it's all characters; that they are in alphabetical order seems secondary and something that categories do automatically anyway, for the most part. What do you think? -Alyx Rivers (talk) 13:48, 9 September 2022 (UTC)