Forum:Outsider's Perspective - a few suggestions

I'll be upfront: I've been using this encyclopedia for a long while, and have occasionally added a few things to it over the years. So I've created an account to, primarily, make a few suggestions or add some ideas, particularly from the POV of someone who comes on the site to research information and the like. First of all, the header templates, particularly the spoiler warning templates, the non-canon templates and the theory warning templates. They are pretty much an eyesore - they're big and blocky with bold text. The spoiler box isn't so bad in itself, although I did poking around other wikis and they either had boxes that were less obnoxious. Some wikis forgo using spoiler warnings entirely (presumably operating under the assumption that spoilers are to be expected). At least on has the spoiler template hide the section if you want. The biggest eyesore comes from the non-canon and theory boxes: they are big, ugly blocks of text that visually detracts and distracts from the information on the page. I can't really describe why, and it might just be me, but there you go. Two things I also notice about these boxes is 1: they often but up to each other on the page, making the problem worse, and 2: the non-canon boxes are slapped at the very top of any "non-canon" page, like Hyrule Warriors or the Tingle game, and every page related to those games has it at the very top. It's unwieldy.

The second, probably more controversial idea has to do with the theory sections themselves. Some of the "theories" (not what that word means anyway) are pretty much contradicted by what the games (or Hyrule Historia) say themselves or correlate things that are similar in the smallest of ways and have no real evidence to back it up. One page puts forth a theory... and then immediately debunks it. Kind of redundant, I don't know. I know the Legend of Zelda games are rife with epileptic trees, but could they perhaps be removed from where the actual, canon information is? Like to a forum or a special page or subpages or something?

The last one (I think) is the possibility of splitting character pages. Specifically, a number of characters appear several times throughout the series that share the same name (or share the same design but have no name, such as the Postman) but are not the character, and share hundreds of years between them. For example, Tingle appears in Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker and The Minish Cap. According to Hyrule Historia, MC takes place a few hundred years before OoT, MM takes place a few years after OoT (in the child timeline) and WW takes place hundreds of years after OoT (in the adult timeline). The same with Sahasrahla; he appears in ALttP and ALBW, but in the second he is a descendant of the Sahasrahla in the first; therefore, two separate characters. Another is Impa, who not only appears in multiple games, has several very diverse designs and actually dies at the end of one game. And yes, this would apply to Link and Zelda. And Ganon/dorf, but not as extensively.

Okay, that's all I got. I'd be willing to elaborate if asked questions. Whitebird109 (talk) 04:18, January 7, 2015 (UTC)