User blog:WoeisWingbat/Let's talk about some other things

As a wiki, I think many of us can agree that we don't have our priorities straight when it comes to having set rules/guidelines for the wiki. Everything is either secretly passed around to half of the community, or "made up" as we go.

So of course, we want this to change in the upcoming weeks. But before that does, we have to discuss some of these as a community, so that nothing is too sudden, and everybody is informed.


 * So for starters, you may have noticed that one of our admins, AniShalev has been doing amazing coding work to prepare for FandomDesktop. He has made the dark mode on the wiki usable, and has adjusted the episode list template, and other things. I bring this up because among these changes, he has done some tests on the date templates so that we can prepare to remove year/date pages. They haven't been very useful as of late and nobody has been updating them. Overall, they take up a lot of space. The date templates will still work the same way as before, but as of right now they just link to Wikipedia pages about the dates.
 * I also bring this up because I wanted to warn that the episode list format has changed again, slightly. The colors of the template have been implemented to the system to better accommodate for the FandomDesktop change.
 * Stage names are okay. Some people have shortened names in order to refer to themselves. Please stop linking to their full names. Of course you can still mention the full names on the actor pages, but stuff like "Tom Kenny", "Flavor Flav", and "Julia" is okay. It's fine. It's natural.
 * The "-" template is really helpful. But people have been overusing it to the point where viewing a regular page looks ugly because the cast is way below the infobox. We understand that for some users, especially those using the old Fandom skin, it looks awful when you remove it. However it would be better to stop using it like that, especially when if you're using FandomDesktop, where you can "Expand" the page and it looks majorly better like that.
 * This is a minor one, but also we don't need to use the "Netflix" template, as we don't need separate pages for "different versions" of Netflix; it doesn't necessarily have any feeds and feels useless. Same goes for most other streaming services too, but exceptions might be made.
 * This one is the big one. We need to discuss the massive overuse of flags. I'll keep this one simple and propose that we don't need them in the cast lists; it looks nicer and more practical to list the actors without flags attached to them.

What do you think about these changes? Any objections? Let us know in the replies below!