Tippity Topps
Hello folks. I would like to formally raise the discussion of how we determine which cards (both physical and SWCT) should be listed in the Sources. I will do my best to raise both sides of the argument and then explain why I believe a non-all-inclusive approach is best.
The Layout Guide states "For in-universe articles, list all officially licensed Star Wars reference material, typically presented from a non-narrative, "out-of-universe" perspective." This, of course, is intended to list sources from which lore/images/info about the subject can be pulled – reference books, magazine articles, etc.That intent behind the sources section is why we have what is essentially an exception to the idea that we list all possible sources (though the exception is not, importantly, what we would define as reference material): WP:N#Merchandise notes that "Wookieepedia does not maintain articles for general merchandise, which is defined as any officially-licensed Lucasfilm Star Wars product that has no canonical value with respect to the franchise's in-universe continuities." This is to say that items "that have no canonical value" are beyond the scope of Wookieepedia – promotional cheese, for example.
It's worth noting that reference works that are certainly within WP:LG's "reference material" also sometimes have no new canonical info – take many Golden Books or often OOU magazine articles, for example. In those cases, however, if we were to look at the source in a vacuum, all of the lore therein would be relevant. If the ANH Golden Book was the only SW source ever released, it would prompt new articles and additions to Wookieepedia. Even though it doesn't really add anything in a world with the film and numerous other works surrounding ANH, because it has what I'll call "lore potential", it is certainly within our scope.
We then arrive at the issue of trading cards (as Imperators noted on the Discord, ideally we should treat physical cards the same as SWCT). The tricky thing here is that the general category of "trading cards" does not fall neatly into "reference material with canonical value" or "general merchandise with no canonical value." (Note that I am, however, intentionally defining the cards as merchandise – they're meant to be traded, treated like a toy, unlike other games e.g. most video games, which intentionally add to the lore.) There are sets like Galactic Files, which are chock-full of lore via text and stats; sets like Star Wars 206, which are really nothing more than an image and a name; and also sets that complicatedly have relevant information for some topics but not others: a card like this is enormous for Caitken, whose actor we otherwise wouldn't know, but fairly useless for an article like Jyn Erso.
One argument that arose in the Discord for listing all cards, regardless of canonical value, is consistency: since we're certainly going to list cards with lore, it would be inconsistent to only list some cards. "Consistency is good" is certainly a legitimate argument around these parts, so it's understandable.
On the other hand, there's potential for more nuance that it's "all or nothing, and it's certainly not 'nothing' so it must therefore be 'all'". Another possible approach is to decide set by set whether to list the cards. For each set, I think the all-or-nothing argument has more muscly legs to stand on: it would be much easier to codify sets to list/not list than each and every individual card among the thousands released over the years. This way, the policy would make it clear what cards to list and be within the "canonical value" intent of our notability policy (I know what I'm arguing for isn't related to notability, I'm just pulling the codified principle from there.)
I also have external reasons for my position, which I don't think are necessary for the argument to stand but are worth noting. If we require every single card – regardless of if it's just a picture of Admiral Raddus (that they lifted from Wookieepedia) with a little description that says "Admiral Raddus" – it will discourage people from writing article about film subjects as the cards will take as long as writing the article itself. Obviously all subjects are valuable, but there is something I find particularly important about having good coverage on subjects readers watch on-screen. Even for articles that in the "all" option would "only" have like 10 cards, listing, linking, and archiving all of them will take a real chunk of time that the editor could have been using to do what the main goal of Wookieepedia is – documenting Star Wars as in-universe historians/encyclopedians – all because we decided it was more "consistent."
If you read all of this, I commend you. If you didn't, you're in luck! Here's the TLDR:
TLDR
trust Macaroni because he is a pasta JediMasterMacaroni(Talk) 09:09, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Discussion
- As I said on the Discord, I'd oppose excluding any of the physical Topps sets from the sources since I think that if some trading cards fall within our scope then all of them do. While some sets are certainly fairly minimal in information they often contain exclusive images of characters and so it's important to document them so readers can truly tract down all sources of information on an article's subject including where images have come from that they might wish to use. Even where an image is repeated elsewhere, the level of quality might only be avaliable on a Topps card they wouldn't know to look for with out the listing. We could exclude any sets that don't include a single new image, but I'd argue that the work required to verify this for each new set would be substantially more than the work required to add cards to an article's sources list. Having done the latter many times, it generally just requires some fairly simple googling to find any relevant cards for the subject which is a lot easier then tracking down most non-digital information for many articles. Where things get tricky is Star Wars: Card Trader, where I do generally support the principle of only listing cards with new info or images purely because of the scale of the app, which adds new cards on almost a daily basis and has incredibly high numbers of cards for major characters. A solution to this might be just to always add Card Trader as a source and only require individual card cites for referencing, which would insure any unique info was preserved. If people then wish to list every card individually they could do so on the Index page. Ayrehead02 (talk) 09:28, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- In that particular case, the scale of the Card Trader app is a good point, and I like the idea of listing the Card Trader cards on an article's respective Index page while listing the app itself under Sources. Just my two cents. SorcererSupreme21 (talk) 10:54, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- I think Ayre's argument here has merit; Dani also demonstrated on the Discord a concrete example of where a name-and-illustration-only card turned out to be the 1stID for a subject. Cases like this would take a significant effort to spot if we were determining the notability of sets on a case-by-case basis. Imperators II(Talk) 09:56, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- Concur with Ayre and Imp, plus Dani’s thoughts on Discord. Frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me to exclude any of these. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 16:28, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- I like Ayre's solution. It still shows readers the relevant sources without requiring editors to do a significant amount of extra work. CometSmudge (talk) 17:52, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- Per others; mainly to echo some thoughts from Discord; physical card releases are licensed physical releases, so there's really no reason to disclude them (we already include tons of arguably useless {{Po}} sources of other varieties). And, google almost always has all of them in tcdb.—spookywillowwtalk 18:00, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- Imp and Ayre's points are well taken, and even though it doesn't convince me personally it seems I'm in the minority. However, in regard to "no reason to disclude them"... I feel like I explained why, even if some may disagree, there certainly is what to say as to why we should exclude them. JediMasterMacaroni(Talk) 18:15, 14 September 2024 (UTC)
- I mean, conversely, my opinion (only my own) is that we never really have clause to avoid adding a licensed item from sources or apps, irregardless of its relevance. It doesn't mean others can't believe otherwise and that there are reasons to disclude them, as explained are some above, but I do stand by my statement that I personally believe there is no reason to ever disclude licensed sources because it introduces arbitrary selection bias to canonicity, especially given how many other similarly limited relevance sources we list solely because they're also licensed.—spookywillowwtalk 18:38, 14 September 2024 (UTC)
- Imp and Ayre's points are well taken, and even though it doesn't convince me personally it seems I'm in the minority. However, in regard to "no reason to disclude them"... I feel like I explained why, even if some may disagree, there certainly is what to say as to why we should exclude them. JediMasterMacaroni(Talk) 18:15, 14 September 2024 (UTC)
- After reflection, I agree with Macaroni here. We don't need to list cards if they don't have any text on them. I don't think we even need to list them if they just have a unique promotional image, they would be similar to official physical art without canonical info. For things like 1stID, we can list them, but sort of like how we handle Getty, only list it if it provides a 1stID and not list every card that only has an image. ThrawnChiss7
Assembly Cupola 14:20, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
