UESPWiki:Archive/CP Gender on NPC Pages

Gender on NPC pages

This is something that's bothered me for a while, not the least because I started the trend way back in the dark days before the NPC Summary template.  I've been thinking that it's a bit odd to always start off every NPC's page with a sentence that looks like:
:So-and-so is a male Imperial, who such-and-such etc.
It sounds so much more natural just to leave out the gender and say:
:So-and-so is an Imperial who such-and-such etc.
First of all, the gender is usually readily apparent by the name, not to mention the frequent use of gender-specific pronouns in the text.  Second, most if not all NPC pages now have pictures which make it pretty obvious, and finally, if you were still confused, the NPC Summary clearly states "Male" or "Female" right there in the box, 2 inches away from the text.  Referring to somebody as "a male" whatever is dehumanizing, making them seem like the subject of a laboratory experiment or something.  (It's even worse when the race is given first: "So-and-so is a Khajiit female...")  These pages are supposed to be sort of brief biographies.  You'd never see an article where the first sentence is: "Abraham Lincoln was a male politician from Illinois who was elected the sixteenth president of the United States in 1860."  It's simply not necessary to mention his gender, as there are many other clues that would make it readily obvious.  (Even if I hadn't picked a name that almost everybody recognizes.)  Originally, we were including the gender in the text because the text was all there was.  With some of those Khajiit, Argonian, Bosmer, and Altmer names, it wasn't necessarily obvious, and there wasn't a picture or Summary box on the page to clear up any possible confusion.  But now with all the other clues we're giving all over the page, it doesn't seem like it's still necessary to explicitly state this in the text on every page.  I'd like to propose that we begin changing these pages to have a more natural sounding text to them.  Obviously, it's a pretty big job considering how many of these pages there are, so I'm not saying we should go crazy and fix all of them right away.  Just if you're changing something else on an NPC page, you might as well fix that as well, and we'll gradually phase out this laboratory-style writing from the pages. --TheRealLurlock   15:47, 12 May 2008 (EDT)

:I have no problems with that, but then at some point, someone's going to ask why we have "Imperial" and "such-and-such" there, as they're also mentioned in the NPC summary.  Though I'll be the first to agree that it does sound better to say "...is an Imperial thief" (or whatever) than "is a male Imperial thief". --Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 21:51, 12 May 2008 (EDT)

::Ditto. I mean, we could go on eliminating all details until all we have on an NPC page is the summary box and quests and notes, but I think that the gender is superfluous. Somercy 11:06, 20 May 2008 (EDT)
:::I've left the gender out on the couple of NPC pages I created recently. I think having the race there is helpful, although I'm not sure about the class, and I'm definitely not convinced they need linking. Given that everything is there in the infobox (with links) it seems overkill to duplicate everything. –Rpeh  13:14, 20 May 2008 (EDT)
::::When I de-stubbed 100+ NPCs, I just followed the formula at the time, it was incredible boring to do that task ;) There isn't much to say about many NPCs, other than what the info-box provides. I agree that male or female is often superfluous, but given that's how it is written in 95% of the cases... just seems like a waste of effort to go through all these pages again. The links are duplicated as well, maybe we could reach an agreement not to add more? Also, I thought the statement of not part of any quest and has no unique dialog was banned, or is that for Oblivion NPCs only? --Benould  13:44, 20 May 2008 (EDT)
(outdent) Okay, so I've just written another module for RoBoT that will go through and make a few changes to NPC pages. For pages containing "is a (fe)male (Linked Race) (Linked Class)" it will:
Remove the word male or female,
Adjust the indefinite article to "an" where required,
Unlink the race
Unlink the class and change it to lower case. If there is no linked class, do nothing for this step.
As a couple of examples:
Aenar is a male Nord Barbarian -> Aenar is a Nord barbarian
Gaea Artoria is a female Imperial Guard -> Gaea Artoria is an Imperial guard
Gamin Girith is a male Dunmer -> Gamin Girith is a Dunmer
I can leave out any or all of those steps, so what do people think? The consensus is definitely against gender being in the description, but what about the other steps?
For the technically-minded, the regular expression I'm using is     so it won't match unless the gender and race are as expected. If that doesn't get a match, it tries again without the bit after the race. –Rpeh  08:15, 21 May 2008 (EDT)
:Cheers to RoBotT! The example "Gaea Artoria is a female Imperial Guard -> Gaea Artoria is an Imperial guard." looks good to me. The definition what the characteristics of a given NPC are is given in a clean sentence. If a user wants to check out race and class details, the links are still available in the info-box. Good work! --Benould  09:21, 21 May 2008 (EDT)
:: Well all the examples are based on the same code - I just wanted to show a couple of different results. I'll leave the debate open until Saturday morning (London time) and run it then so the server will be relatively quiet and I can check the results more easily. –Rpeh  10:21, 21 May 2008 (EDT)
:::While we're at it, should we match MW NPCs to :UESPWiki:Oblivion_NPC_Redesign_Project#Quest_Involvement? I think the statement "is not involved in any quests" is unnecessary, but we need to have a consensus, or else we get a lot of theses edits. Quests will be linked on the page, no need for the sentence.--Benould  13:11, 21 May 2008 (EDT)

::: I'm of two minds about the unlinking, but I'll go with the consensus.  Just to double-check, in your regular expression, I see a space before the word "imperial".  I'm assuming that's just a line-wrapping issue and that the original is correct (or that spaces are ignored and it's irrelevant). --Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 13:13, 21 May 2008 (EDT)

:::: Yes, the space was there to allow a line-break. There might need to be more to this because some of the pages don't quite conform to that pattern, especially now some pages have had the gender removed. Linking to the race may serve some purpose, but linking to the class seems unnecessary to me. It isn't going to be relevant for 95% of players and is linked in the infobox. I'll obviously follow a consensus though. I'd also agree that the "is not involved..." line should go. It's redundant after all. That's a job for a different module - I don't want to try to do too much at once. –Rpeh  13:21, 21 May 2008 (EDT)

:::::I haven't chimed in to this discussion so far.  In part, because I feel like it's something that is more appropriate to discuss in the context of, for example, the Oblivion NPC Redesign Project.  I'd rather have any tinkering with the text done as part of a larger effort to improve the pages, instead of having editors go through each of the hundreds (thousands?) of NPC pages just to tweak a couple words.  In addition, though, I'm not sure that my feedback is really going to help resolve anything, because it doesn't really agree with most of what's already been said.  Anyway, here goes....

:::::In short, I'm against having a fixed "formula" prescribing exactly what the introductory sentence should say.  I don't like the existing unofficial formula, "[Person] is a [gender] [race (link)] [class (link)]."  But I also don't particularly like substituting another formula, such as "[Person] is a [race] [class]."   The NPC summary is there to provide the formulaic description.  I think the introductory sentence should provide a concise, recognizable description of the NPC, focussing on how players are likely to get to know the character -- independent of whether that information happens to correspond to easy labels such as gender/race/class.
:::::In some cases, a "good" description may be similar to the existing formula.  The statement, "Ardaline is an Altmer Alchemist at the Bravil Mages Guild," provides a pretty accurate summary of the facts a player will care about: what she does, why you're likely to interact with her, where to find her, etc.  From that information, I'm able to recognize the NPC.  But in other cases, the formula fails miserably.  For example, "Helvius Cecia is an Imperial Rogue and a member of the Thieves Guild in Bruma" leaves me pretty clueless.  The "rogue" class tells me nothing about what he does in the game.  His membership in the Thieves Guild isn't particularly relevant: it doesn't tell me where to find him, for example; it doesn't affect other aspects of gameplay, such as whether or not he provides training; the most significant aspect of his membership isn't even hinted at, namely that the Gray Fox uses his house as a meeting spot.  In my opinion, it would be far more useful to ignore his class and affiliation and instead start out with the reason why he matters: he's the master trainer in hand to hand.  Just as a quickly-written example, I'd say this sentence would be more useful than the existing one: "Helvius Cecia is an expert in Hand to Hand combat who lives in Bruma's lower class neighborhood."  That tells me where to find him, hints at his appearance (e.g., lower class clothes), as well as telling me why he's relevant to the game.  Subsequent sentences can go on to detail his connection to the Thieves guild, or other interesting information. 
:::::As for the topic of interest here, namely gender, I'm similarly unconvinced that a universal formula will always work.  In many cases, the gender probably is unnecessary and should be left out.  But in other cases, it's possible that the gender is unclear or that the gender is an important aspect of the character.  For example, with Argonians and Khajiiti the gender may need to be mentioned more frequently than with other races because it's not obvious from the picture.  Or there are some NPCs whose gender defines their role in the game: the sirens in Anvil, for example.  If the information can be made obvious in some other way (e.g., describing the person using a gender-specific noun such as seductress, or husband, or whatever), then that's sufficient.  But if an explicit male/female adjective is helpful for clarity, I don't think it should be left out just because there's a rule saying that it's not part of the formula.
:::::The extent to which a formula will work or fail probably varies widely, depending upon the situation.  In Morrowind, it's likely that the class will be used more frequently in the descriptions, because as a player you are more aware of NPC classes: each player provides a "my trade" blurb summarizing their class; trainers' skills are dictated by their class, etc.  It's also likely that any newly created pages will be more formulaic: if you're just trying to flesh out a few dozen stubs, you don't necessarily want to take the time to analyze each NPC.  But as the pages evolve, I'd rather see them change from more formulaic to less, rather than the opposite way around.  Currently, it seems that adherence to a formula is encouraging editors to make the NPC descriptions more generic, by replacing customized parts of the description with less-meaningful class identifications.   Using a bot to update the pages, unfortunately, only exacerbates the problem of generic content.  Well-written descriptions and sentences can't be written by bots.
:::::Finally, I think that links should be used whenever there is a linkable word.  So if the race and/or class are mentioned, I don't see how it hurts the wiki to make those words be links.  I don't think we should insist on using the precise class name just so that a link to the class can be squeezed in.  But if the natural wording of the sentence introduces standard game terms, I think the term should be a link.
:::::Hopefully my input isn't completely disruptive :| --Nephele  19:00, 21 May 2008 (EDT)
::::::I completely agree with you about the formula. I'd also prefer to see it done as part of the ONPCRP but that's not going to be complete for a long time and doesn't apply to Morrowind NPCs in any case. The reason I suggested changing the pages en masse is that at the moment there is the appearance of an "official" formula, and it's not surprising that a couple of editors have decided to make every page conform to it. If that's going to happen I'd rather have a formula that's less bad even if we can't have one that's good - at least until we can redo the pages by hand. On the other hand, your point about the non-human races is a fair one and deserves consideration. I certainly can't tell the gender of "Beewos" just from the name, but I think I could guess with "Hides-His-Heart" or "Only-He-Stands-There".
::::::With the links, I can definitely see the use of the race link but, for Oblivion at least, the class link seems a link too far. If I see the word "Alchemist" linked, I'd rather it went to a description of what an alchemist is and does than a page listing all the NPC classes. Similarly, "Guard" would be better going to . If there's a class that doesn't have an obvious page to link to then I wouldn't bother. The link to the class stats is still in the infobox and I don't think it's important enough to have it in the main text. I'd also agree that some classes are unnecessary on the pages. It's definitely worthwhile describing Melisande as a Witch, but Anedhel? At least that hasn't happened to Goblin Jim yet. Other classes such as "Pauper" or "Enforcer" aren't going to help anybody.
::::::So pace your comments about bots (I'll enroll RoBoT in a creative writing class :) ) I still think it's a good idea to have one go through and take out the gender - leaving anybody that's a Khajiit or Argonian alone, and also leaving alone the links on the other parts. It's not a perfect solution but it's the best available for now. –Rpeh  04:29, 22 May 2008 (EDT)

Unfortunately, I'll have to take the majority of the blame for the way things currently are.  I did a ridiculous amount of putting the NPC template on the Oblivion NPCs pages over a year ago, and as I was doing that, I was adding the "(Name) is a (gender) (race) (class)" blurb, because, frankly, it was the easiest thing to do (hey, that was a lot of work!), and it had been done on the other NPC pages.  A lot of these pages had nothing, so I thought that was at least an improvement.  I also added the "not involved" blurb because, at the time, I needed something to signal to me that I hadn't missed anything; that it wasn't an oversight.  If no one's opposed, I'd love to go through them all myself and "personalize" them.  I agree with Nephele; it's practical when the pages are still being developed, but as they're being "polished," they should sound less generic.  This is a task made for me, so unless anyone really wanted a bot to do it, I'm game.  --GuildKnight  23:35, 22 May 2008 (EDT)