This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. C4-DE Bot (talk) 22:39, 6 December 2025 (UTC)
Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:OOU people notability
Last night, we had a discussion on the Discord server regarding the notability of OOU people credited in Star Wars media. Some people argue that we should have articles for everyone listed in credits anywhere; some people think we are going too far in terms of hyperinclusionism; most are probably somewhere inbetween.
The Problem
In my opinion, there are several problems (in my opinion) caused by the hyperinclusionism.
- There are a ton of them: yes, Wookieepedia isn't running out of space anytime soon but the hyperinclusionist approach involves creating an enormous amount of single-line articles on real-life people. A single movie or video game can have several thousand people involved and credited. Given the amount of SW media out there, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is on the magnitude of a hundred thousand articles. The vast majority of readers come here to read about (IU) Star Wars, not about people who were employed by the game studio at the time a Star Wars game was made. I honestly don't like the idea of a sizeable share of our articles being single-line stubs on OOU people. Hitting Random Page shouldn't land you on these pages one third of the time.
- Some of these people were definitely not involved in the creative process: I don't think anyone is arguing that we shouldn't be covering people actually involved in the creative process. The credits roll of Battlefront 2 and lists thousands of people, with the vast majority obviously not involved in creating Star Wars. Senior SEO strategists, account managers, brand managers, legal, 100+ people involved in language localization (100+ people for each language!).
- We don't know if these people actually want their moment of fame: the lion's share of these articles are (correctly) tagged as being stubs and lacking images, but I'm unsure if these people actually want Wookieepedians to go hunting them down and adding images from social media etc.
- Creating single-line articles is not, in my opinion, a greater sign of appreciation for the person than just listing them in the Credits section: particularly if we are to (semi-)automate the creation of these by using bots.
The Solution?
- Limit article creation to people who were actually involved in the creative process: the hard part is determining where to draw the line. I don't really have a proposed rule for this at this time.
- Limit article creation to people who participated in multiple works: one of the problems here is that if we don't redlink people in Credits section, it's pretty hard to tell which people actually participated in multiple works since What links here won't be useful. Another thing that makes this tricky is that different people can share the same name. John Smith who was involved in BF2 might not be the same John Smith who worked on TLJ. Additionally, I believe that being Senior SEO strategist on two different SW projects still doesn't make you notable.
Looking forward to your thoughts. Xd1358 (Talk) 10:07, 26 October 2025 (UTC)
Discuss
- I generally agree with the points above, I just think the very last point might be tricky to enforce since there's as you mention, there's often not many reliable sources that confirm that a John Doe that worked on project X is the same John Doe that worked on project Y. Stake black msg 10:42, 26 October 2025 (UTC)
- While I understand why some would be against the idea of everyone credited getting an article, I think I'd personally be opposed to any of the solutions I saw suggested including those here because all of them end up with us very arbitrarily drawing lines that exclude real people as not mattering while elevating others. The "creative process" is an incredibly vague idea that I don't see how we'd meaningfully define. Firstly, although there are obvious outliers at either end like a concept artist vs a caterer, I'd imagine the majority of credited individuals on any project fall into a grey area in-between where we likely don't know enough about their role to judge whether they shaped the story or not. Secondly, there are many instances of individuals in roles we'd probably not think of as creative who end up shaping the final product, finance people who block ideas due to cost, Fox executives making suggestions, unit nurses who lead to their kid getting a cameo, even Leland Chee started out as a game tester and presumably shaped the game based on the fact they kept him around for his knowledge of the lore. The multi-project solution runs into the same issue, as we'd have to make exceptions for some individuals like Ron Howard who only worked on a single project but are important enough to get an article anyway, leading us back to the same issue of drawing a line around who's important. Instead, I think it's worth looking at more focused policy to lessen some of the issues you mention. There was discussion of new policies around where we source personal information like birthdates or images that make sure no one is digging into people's personal lives which would ensure that people aren't getting coverage on the site that they're uncomfortable with. One issue with their being lots of OOU articles people brought up is it affecting what the results of the random page button are, so perhaps it's worth looking into if we can have an IU only random page button, or even continuity exclusive ones. Specifically defined policy, like Nano's suggestion of all international language credits not being covered here but on their respective language wiki also seem more tenable. Ayrehead02 (talk) 10:45, 26 October 2025 (UTC)
- I agree that the best fix would be to exclude these type of pages from the random page button rather than the entire wiki itself. Also yes we shouldn't look for images of every single person as that would be an invasion of privacy.-Darth Soda
(Talk) 14:55, 26 October 2025 (UTC) - Do agree with the point that people who worked on and are credited in a project in another language could be covered in that language's wiki. Rsand 30 (talk) 00:06, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
- Ayre and others summed up my thoughts on the matter very well. If the random button is really worrying, we could try reworking the button perhaps. Also per Mtrac on giving Visions an exception. Bonzane10
04:40, 27 October 2025 (UTC) - I believe Ayre has effectively summarised my point. While I understand some may feel averse to creating numerous OOU pages, it would be more realistic to assess individual cases for excessive page creation rather than arbitrarily restricting page creation based on creativity or the number of times one has contributed to Star Wars works. あざした (talk) 06:59, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
- Mostly per Ayrehead here. Though, I personally am in favor of documenting people involved in international credits. So people like Felicita Victoria Prokešová. NBDani
(they/them)Yeager's Repairs 18:06, 5 November 2025 (UTC)
- I agree that the best fix would be to exclude these type of pages from the random page button rather than the entire wiki itself. Also yes we shouldn't look for images of every single person as that would be an invasion of privacy.-Darth Soda
- I'm probably one of the "somewhere in the middle" guys. But definitely against hyperinclusion here. We do not need to be listing who catered on set for such-and-such film. Are we also going to be creating articles for the Tunisia bureau of land management and the secretary who took George Lucas's call when he requested permission to film there? OK, is this a real credited role? I have no idea. But that type of listing is in many film credits. And it would be asinine to try, IMO. - JMAS
Hey, it's me! 13:39, 27 October 2025 (UTC) - Truthfully don’t have a problem with credited people having articles. Mind you, for licensed projects obviously; never pages for random fan SW projects. Agreed on the interlanguage issue (sans Visions or other language originating projects). Also agreed on not stalking people for personal info if not well known public figures. We had incidents of people poring through the social media of folk and even their family members for birthdays, in one case citing something ancient with a deadname present all in the pursuit of adding a birthday. Too far at some point, in my opinion completeness shouldn’t take such a toll especially since a few creators have complained or lodged copyright complaints after we freaked them out.—spookywillowwtalk 22:09, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
- Do want to temper this briefly with a comment that some care should be taken for nuance of course. Some exceptions might include SW creators with minimal roles who have reached out to Wookieepedia’s social media directly and, of their own will, asked for their page to be updated and provided their preferred photo. Or, corporate images of individuals that were provided by licensees to Wookieepedia for the purpose of using them (both scenarios have happened recently). And that, while this SH was spurred by VG credits, any policy verbiage should not exclude where authors and such fall into this. Simply think there is a fine balance between respecting privacy and not diving too deeply as to be creepy; some folk do announce things like their birthday every year and openly, so much so it appears with a quick google search, which is different than deep diving. Did have a stray thought that if we end up with an overly restrictive policy with no leeway for edge cases, that too would be not beneficial.—spookywillowwtalk 06:03, 2 November 2025 (UTC)
- I work in games and from my experience everyone's work matters. Part of the reason game credits are so long now is a push back to hard working people not being included in credits in the past. That said, I'd definitely support updating our image policy to something along the lines of "Images of OOU people should be restricted to public facing people, such as actors, voice actors and executive level crew." Basically just public facing people. I could also applying the same restricts to other fields like birth day and nationality. ThePedantry (talk) 21:09, 1 November 2025 (UTC)
