Talk:Beastfolk

On redlinks
w/r/t some of the recent edits here/reversion of Sahuagin and Centaur: I completely respect including these. I think it would help to have more guidance, however, as the wiki does not, at least to my experience, have a clear redlinking policy (to give an example: I created the sorrowsworn article today, which is listed on the wiki's main page as a desired article, but Sorrowsworn were not linked on multiple pages on which they were mentioned - which is I think the result of this lack of guidance).

There are a number of redlinks I've run into that are, at least in my opinion, wholly unnecessary (eg: 'iron', referring to the material).

I can bring this to the community blog/main page later, but in the meantime I've drafted a very rough notability guideline on my user page and would love feedback/thoughts. In the meantime I will focus on different edits, thanks!

Untropicalisland (talk) 17:24, 15 August 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree it would be helpful to have guidance on this available for users. I link to anything where I can find enough material for a decent article (at least a few mentions in the sourcebooks, transcripts, and other canon sources) or it seems plausible that there could be enough material soon (a character mentioned in an episode who may appear soon, or a creature that appears in an episode, etc.), and I remove links to things that are too vague or too light on material to justify an article in the foreseeable future.  Virtually all of the wiki links to extremely common real-world nouns like "currency" and "leather" were added by one prolific user valiantly trying to catalogue every little thing. I've spent a bunch of time removing those wiki links while condensing articles, and I haven't gotten to nearly all of them; please feel free to remove those where you see them.


 * I did start linking to classes like "paladin" because we have a page already dedicated to druids, and I figured there could be enough material at this point to show how each class is distinct in Critical Role compared to other settings (Open Sea paladins, Blood clerics and Pike switching domains, warlock switching patrons or having a sister for a patron, etc.). But I understand this is an arguable point. – Durandal&#39;s Fate (talk) 18:12, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

With redlinks, there's two competing interests: 1) Google hates them. Per Wiki Performance, redlinks "are damaging to web vitals and search crawling" and "drive search engine crawlers to non-existent areas, effectively counting them as errors when a page can not be found. The total error count encountered on a website, wiki or not, lowers its perceived credibility and reliability. Reducing your overall number of redlinks quickly will help page performance and ranking." 2) They're useful to see what needs to be worked on and are what populates Special:WantedPages. So there's a tension. I think 99% of editors pretty much agree on what deserves a page and what doesn't, and there's room for disagreement on the borderline cases.

I'd like to see redlinks removed from Navboxes because they appear on multiple pages, artificially driving up the numbers on Wanted Pages and making it hard to sort through and see what's actually being linked to and what's just a Navbox. I've tried removing them in the past and people keep putting them back, so we'd need broad agreement that would be a Good Thing. - LynnE216 (talk) 20:54, 15 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Ah, this is all good to know. With that information, I definitely agree about removing redlinks from navboxes, and I'll be doing that going forward; they really skew the numbers on the Wanted Pages list. As for in-article redlinks, I don't know if CR-specific topics on the wiki are suffering in search ranking, but I know they've been helpful for seeing which articles are most conspicuously missing. – Durandal&#39;s Fate (talk) 21:41, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
 * In that case, I could agree about navboxes, but maintaining them on articles themselves does remain useful for figuring out what's missing. (Never realized there wasn't an Arms of the Betrayers article until I saw it as a redlink couple months ago.) If redlinks are kept to sensible topics, which seems to be the advice, as opposed to like generalized "water" or "ash" like in the past, there should be a sensible number without weighing too negatively on anything; in general, I think the advice about the error count is largely avoided if we avoid that sort of redlinking. I think the general thing should be redlinks theoretically should be thinks that won't be redlinks for long, so keep to stuff we could create a proper article on like in a hypothetical hour? That feels like a decent balance, in theory. FreckledMcCree (talk) 22:44, 15 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks all for weighing in and sharing the history and considerations! I agree here that having redlinks in articles makes it much easier to understand what needs to be created. I absolutely understand that it's rough for wiki performance but I think the tradeoff for judicious redlinking (ie, to things with enough canon for an article) is worth it. I'll keep them out of navboxes though - that does make a lot of sense. I have been planning to get through a bunch of the navbox (item & place) redlinks anyway.
 * As for the many links to topics that don't need pages, I do agree they seem to primarily come from one or two people, and my recommendation of a policy is more so that if it arises again it's easier to make it clear to those editors and to redirect their efforts towards more needed pages; based on the talk pages/comments for some of the pages I edited it sounds like it may have been difficult to tactfully push back without a pre-existing guidance, and while I agree most editors have decent judgment on what's relevant, as all this illustrates, one or two people can make a lot of edits.Untropicalisland (talk) 00:54, 16 August 2021 (UTC)