Forum:"Design" vs "Appearances" on Character pages

Its been a good while since I last been legitimately on the wiki and I wanna bring up the topic of "Design" vs "Appearances" on Character pages and why this raises quite some problem;


 * This was never official discuss anywhere on the wiki on any forum or between any staff member with this changes. As far as I can tell, it was done by random users who changed them.


 * "Design", on the wiki, has always been used to describe stuff like Weapons or Creatures; Heartless, Dream Eaters, etc. While "Appearances" were used on Characters.


 * "Design", right now, is only used game-original and FF-related characters, while nearly all Disney-related character still used "Appearances". This arbitrary makes no sense in any way.


 * This causes a major inconsistency issues on the wiki. As half of pages used them while other still has Appearances.

18:48, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm fairly certain this was discussed on the staff Messenger chat. I'm no longer staff, but my preference is for "Design", as it allows us to incorporate pertinent information on why characters look the way they do. 19:07, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

I asked on the discord with KSM, TSH, and Ninja, and only Ninja was the one that was aware of such changes being a thing. I'm still more on "Appearances", as thats what the wiki has always been using for pages. 20:14, 18 December 2018 (UTC)


 * I can't remember discussing this on the messenger chat, or anywhere else. I don't really have a preference for either of the terms. I would say Design because we're using that for item and enemy pages already, but Appearance sounds better for characters. 21:49, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
 * To clarify, I was never part of the discussion since I did not have access to Messenger. I simply heard about it, I think from KrytenKoro. I'm rather neutral about the subject, same as THS. I'll admit I do prefer "Appearance" because the sections that dedicated to describing the characters' physical appearances, but I'm okay with using "Design", because as Kryten said, it allow us to incorporate pertinent information on why characters look they way they do and other bits of information.-- 23:26, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

I was just editing Sora's article a while ago and Koro said to change it to Design, since that's where the etymology and ages are too. So Design makes more sense than Appearance if we're going to list these two aspects in the section, although I would prefer if we added an "Age" parameter to the character infobox, and started making Etymology sections, like a lot of wikis do. Soroxas (talk) 00:27, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Etymology is already covered as part of Design. As far as ages, we have precious few confirmed ages. 14:21, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

My personal problem with using "Appearance" is that that word sort of has a double meaning. On one hand we have "Appearance" sections used to describe how someone looks, and then there are some pages that have an "Other Appearances" section which do not describe how a person looks, but rather other places someone or something unofficially appears in. You see what I'm saying? It's a bit weird, and could be somewhat confusing to some. In my opinion, design makes more sense because it brings to mind character design, which if you ask me is how an information site should view a fictional character's looks. Blackchaos27 (talk) 08:14, 20 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Design would be more appropriate if we're adding things like age and etymology to the section. An idea I had was to make it more of a development section, but I think Aqua's page does this best. We can merge the development sections there are for characters (like on Sora's page) with design, and that overall would improve those sections. I'm thinking of this because in reality, describing the physical appearance of a character feels awful redundant with the picture in the infobox and associated galleries. But if we were to retool it as a general character design section, with details about how they were designed that way (if we know), than that would enhance those sections. As far as ages go, we could always make such a parameter optional for infoboxes if we wanted to, but yeah, we only know the exact or approximate age of seven characters out of the whole series. 16:53, 20 December 2018 (UTC)