User blog:RRabbit42/The end of an age and relatives

Several weeks ago, the admins began discussing what to do about an issue that keeps cropping up, which is the ages of the characters are being changed frequently. As discussed in the FAQ, most of the characters don't have an age. That's because it wasn't important in the story they appeared to give them an age.

But, many people that come here try to invent ages for characters or they change the age that is there. Pretty much none of them ever say why they're changing the age via the Edit Summary line in the edit window. Most are probably doing it because they think, "The character's alive, they were born, so obviously they must have an age. I'll just put one in." That's a type of fan fiction, and we're not allowing fan fiction here because there are other wikis dedicated to Simpsons fan fiction. See the Fan fiction section of the FAQ for details.

We're going to fix this in two steps. The first step is to remove the Age section from the temple. This will hide any age information that might be in it.

The second step will be to move any age information into the main biography for the character. We don't have to have a separate Age section with its own header. Just incorporate it into the rest of the information, along with citations of which episodes or official publications the age can be found in. Any ages without an official source are going to be removed.

While we're doing that, we might as well clean up another problem area. Due to how inter-related members of the various families are in Springfield, the relatives section of the Infobox can be quite lengthy. On some character's pages, the Infobox is longer than the main description of the character.

We're going to limit what's in the Infobox to immediate family: parents, siblings and children. Anything outside of that needs to go into a Family or Relatives section. Add that section if needed. Inside the Infobox, add a "see more" in-page link, which would look like this:  see more .