Simpsons Wiki:Frequently Asked Questions - Wiki

This page will list answers to some of the Frequently Asked Questions about why things are done the way they are on this wiki. For questions about The Simpsons TV series, movie, books and so forth, see Simpsons Wiki:Frequently Asked Questions.

Additional information can be found in the Help and Policies categories.

Sex vs. gender
Recently, a change was made to the Infobox for the characters to where we list a sex rather than a gender. It was pointed out that sex relates to biology and physical characteristics, whereas gender is more along the lines of a social role or personal identification.

Category spamming
At the bottom of each page are the categories that this page fits into. The wiki makes it easy to add a category by providing a button.

Category spamming refers to when a large majority or sometimes all of a person's edits are only about adding categories to a page. Many times, the categories being added are trivial or do not apply and only add clutter to a page. Avoid adding a category just to add a category.

Categories are used to organize into groups and should not be used as a substitute for putting that information on the page itself. For example, instead of putting a category like "People that Marge is friends with" on Luann Van Houten's page, put in "Luann is friends with Marge Simpson" in the body of the page itself (the words only, not as a category).

If it is determined that a person is category spamming, especially in an attempt to earn a badge, a short block may be placed on their account or IP address.

Labels
It is a natural tendency to want to label things. We do it to pages with categories and people want to do it with characters. However, labels on characters should be added only when they actually apply, and not simply adding a label just to add a label.

Vilains, enemies and friends
Most of the time in a series like The Simpsons, a character's actions can be described as not being nice or just doing their job. For some people, that's enough of a reason to label that character as a villain or an enemy. However, those kinds of labels or categories should only be used when it is shown that the character deliberately acted in that manner. The definition of a villain is "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot". It is that deliberate effort to hurt other people that makes a character a villain. To be an enemy, the character would have to repeatedly try to hurt another character.

Likewise, some characters are being labelled as a friend of another character simply because they met that other character. That is not always the case. Sometimes characters do not progress from "acquaintance" to "friend".

Try to avoid adding a label just to add a label.

Antagonist fussing
"Antagonist fussing" refers to repeatedly trying to pin down a character to being a specific level of an antagonist. This can also apply to protagonists, but occurs more frequently with antagonists.

This is covered in a little more depth in the Simpsons Wiki:Antagonists policy page, but when you start trying to pin down exactly what kind of antagonist/protagonist a character is, it's hard to get people to agree on that exact level. There have also been too many people antagonist fussing to the point where they contradict themselves and it becomes vandalism.