User:Salmancer/Upkeep Policy draft

This article is a proposed policy for Bulbapedia. Please discuss the proposed policy and suggest possible changes on the article's talk page.

Bulbapedia is a big site, covering a franchise with more releases than any one hive of busy bees can theoretically purchase, read/watch/play, then document. As such, it's important to be efficient about how information is organized, such that not every write up has to be returned to constantly just because an event reran and that an edit to something on one page does not need to be followed by a cascade of copy-pastes onto other pages that have the same information.

• If a list of things on a page contains the same things as a list of things on a different page, and the first list does not sufficiently differentiate itself from the second list, then it is preferable to instead have one page link to the other than to maintain two or more identical lists.
  • Examples of things that would differentiate list of the same things are
    • Different descriptions for each item, or having more details about the item.
    • An order which communicates something about how the item functions. Perhaps grouping by when the are obtained, or when they are used.
      • Alphabetical order comes up just short of this ideal.
    • Different formatting so that the way both lists are used is different.
      • For instance, a TCG set list and a TCG location list look different. If every single card in a set were tied to the same location, the set list would not be able to replace the location list.
• If a game has events that take place on specific dates, then specifying those dates outside of the dedicated event page and the game's page is heavily restricted. Sometimes the exact date really is important to the ongoing Pokémon narrative, but often using phrases like "a recurring event" gets the message across and saves editors time in the future because the page doesn't have to be updated every time the even recurs. (If a reader needs to know the exact dates, they can use the link to the event.)
• If an article is very long, and needs regular updates (usually, it is because that article has multiple lists on it), then it should be split so as to reduce load times for editors.