Thread: Regarding the matter of the John-117 page size and possible improvement

My preferred solution would be to preserve all the information recorded on the page in some way. An overall way to do this would be outside of the John-117 page. Essentially using it as a hub to other pages that will cover him in more detail. Two solutions I would support are:

1. Move all of the current information in the biography section (at least) to a single page with a title like "Biography of John-117". On the main page could be a reduced, shortened version that hits all the same beats that the longer one currently hits.

• 1a. Use bits and pieces of Halo Nation's old John-117 biography to act as the shortened biography.

2. Move sections of his biography to separate pages based on in-universe era or stage of John-117's life similar to the Julius Caesar wikipedia page. A shortened biography should be left in the place of the moved information.

• 2a. Use bits and pieces of Halo Nation's old John-117 biography to act as the shortened biography.

I don't really see any problems in the introduction. For the face of the franchise I find it reasonable, if not a bit of excessive, but it depends on you people to cut it or not. Switching to HN's introduction is something I'd strictly oppose, since running over the character in a sentence or two doesn't look professional at all, nor is it helping for people who want a quick recap.

While I like the "Biography of John-117" idea, might I suggest to make it into a subpage such as "John-117/Complete Biography" or similar: something akin to Marvel Database's wiki page about Earth-616 version of Iron Man. And using HN's old biography on the page as a shortened version seems like a good idea but with some tweaks: a few sections are kinda barebones while others are full of exposition.

I think the only problem is that the page isn't nearly to the level of quality I'd like to eventually get it to and kind of wish everyone would focus on improving it and other pages instead of chopping them up. :) Just me, though. I won't fight with anyone.

Okay so seeing as I was the one who once again spurred this topic coming up in the Discord server, I figured I'd weigh in my thoughts properly.

First of all, I think Eld has done a really fantastic job of his articles so far - the meticulous level of detail is really to be commended for the sheer time put in, and I definitely do not support deleting them as it would be a sheer waste of time and effort, and I do think the info deserves to be recorded somewhere. However, the J117 page as it stands right now I feel deserves chopping up (to put it as others have) for several reasons;

A) On slow connections and less powerful PCs, the sheer weight of the page can be pretty intensive. It has a lot of images and text. B) A few weeks ago I copied the page in its entirety into a google doc to check the wordcount and other stats, and it's currently sitting around at 184 pages and roughly 109,000 words. This is nearing the level of a full-length book. C) While I praised the level of detail in the page before, I also believe this makes it incredibly intimidating to begin reading. For those fans who often cite Halopedia as a good resource to use instead of reading the novels to justify increased lore in the games, I can assure you that no one will be sitting down to read this entire thing. With projects such as the PC release of MCC and Infinite around the corner, there's gonna be a lot of new people who don't need or want to know the exact time he ate a biscuit on a particular day or whatever. Just a simple outline of who he is, where he came from and how he became what he is now in a few paragraphs should suffice. The page should be able to stand alone without needing to read the EU, but at the rate it's going it's probably about the same amount of time investment to do just that.

To put this another way, if I were getting into Halo and wanted to find out about who 117 is, I would immediately nope off this page and find something more easily digestible (and I know many of my IRL friends find this issue with this page and ones like it). To this extent, I find similar issues with the Skywalker and Spock pages linked above in the OP and if I were an editor on those wikis I would absolutely be making the same argument there. If people aren't reading your page, it's not doing it's job.

So, solutions? My preferred solution is the method by which Wikipedia does extensive biographies; split them up. In the case of Master Chief, I find that Early Life, Covenant War and Post-War should be relatively clean picks for three good-sized pages in a "series". These pages would respectively cover everything in John's pre-SPARTAN life and his training up until he gets MJOLNIR armor, his actions during the war up to Halo 3 and then everything from Halo 4 and beyond. This divides the information up a little bit more to help make it more easy to pick up and put down (reading three shorter articles is better than one mammoth one), and also lessens bandwidth/ processing power load for weaker internet and PC connections. The information would be there almost unaltered from what we have now, just in a much more easily-digestible format. Using the Halo Nation biography would then act as a good summary of his actions for the main article, with a short prelude text explaining that the full biography is available for those that want more than the condensed version.

If you're going to replace anything with a much more condense version, then actually go about doing the job of condensing what is already here. Don't copy anything over from Halo Nation. That material is badly written, woefully incomplete, and often wrong.

At least this guy had fun: https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/bch4ae/awesome_light_reading_on_halopedia/ :)

Copying over from Halo Nation was just piggybacking on the idea presented above and with keeping the merger in mind. Incorrect and false info would of course be corrected as necessary. Personally, I have no attachment to either writing the main article from scratch, adapting the current HN text or massively condensing what we have now, as long as it achieves the same end goal.

Yeah, as Bacon mentioned above, it was mostly keeping the merger in mind. Given that a biography reorganization would require a rework of the J117, I figured that we could kill two birds with one stone.

But anyways, about the reworking itself. Bacon's three page idea would work quite well with what we have and could be really easily implemented. In general though, I will agree to any idea that will simplify the page so long as the information is retained somewhere.

The level of detail on 117's wiki page is phenomenal, honestly. If I'm looking for something specific on there I'll Ctrl+F it, but often I find myself trailing off and reading far more than intended.

Using the Anakin Skywalker page as an example, because it was the first one I came across what I was looking for. It has sections - in this instance for battles that require more detailed info than just Anakin's contributions to it - marked like this:

Battle on Orto Plutonia

Main article: Battle of Orto Plutonia

Which is followed by a paragraph giving an overview of what happened there. It's possible that we could keep the intro section, mark the other parts similar to this Main Article: The early life of John-117 etc. with a limited description that's a few paragraphs long, while the bulk of the information is placed on the early life/other page(s). Someone who knows how to deal with it better than I can might be able to also have the gallery split so that while some of them remain on the hub page, some could be placed on the 'era' pages, a separate, similarly linked 'main' gallery so that it doesn't bog down those who have slow internet connections or older/lower end hardware when they visit the biography itself.