Pixar Cars Wiki:Proposals

Welcome to the hub for proposals. This section of the wiki allows users to share their ideas for potential changes to the wiki and look for consensus in approving them. The goal of this feature is to promote collaboration as a community and ensure that all World of Cars Wiki users have a say in important wiki decisions.

Process

1. If you have an idea you would like to suggest, you may create a proposal by adding a topic under the "Active proposals" heading. Proposals can cover any articles and spaces. As the proposer, you must provide both an explanation of what your proposal consists of as well as a compelling argument to justify why it should be passed.
2. Once a Proposal has been created, the voting period begins. Users have one week to declare whether they Support or Oppose the given proposal. This can be done by signing your username under either the "Support" or "Oppose" sections respectively, accompanied by an explanation of why you feel the way you do. All users can debate and discuss with one another in the "Discussion" heading.
3. In certain cases, the Support or Oppose dichotomy may not do a discussion justice. Sometimes there are more options. In these sorts of situations, you can offer your opinion in multiple sections, so long as your selections do not contradict one another.
4. After the week-long period ends, the final result is determined by which section had the most names signed. If the majority of users chose to Support the proposal, it indicates consensus, and the change may now be implemented. If more users chose to Oppose, the changes will not be put into effect.
5. In the event of a tie, the voting period will be extended an additional week.

Rules

1. Proposals must provide a detailed explanation of the intended change, as well as a mock-up or draft of what the change would look like in effect.
2. You must choose to Support or Oppose, not both. In discussions with many options, you can sometimes pick more than one option, but make sure your answers are not contradictory.
3. While you are free to explain yourself however they like, you may not edit any comments that are not your own. The only situation in which a comment should be edited or removed is by an administrator in the event that the comment violates any of the site rules.
4. All comments must stay on topic.
5. While there are no limits or requirements for the lengths of comments, explanations should be as clear and concise as possible. Do not reply with sarcasm or "jokes" that do not reflect your true thoughts.
6. Proposals are all about discussing changes to the wiki. They are not a way to rally for community projects. For instance, an idea like "Upload screenshots for Cars: Radiator Springs Adventures" is not a valid proposal. These sorts of discussions are better had in the Forum.
7. Please be respectful. It is perfectly fine, even encouraged, to debate, but arguments should be kept formal and not personal. Remember: Don't be a jerk.

Active proposals

Decide how to organize character infoboxes

This time we're gonna take a look at character infoboxes, which have been another source of disagreement lately. User:124PX1 announced in a user blog a few months ago that he made new infobox templates and that the wiki would start using them, but after looking into it, it seems this was just an "executive decision" and no one (including the other admins) were consulted about it.

While I can respect certain aspects of those designs, I'm not sure they really fit in our wiki. They feature a very large amount of parameters, many of which are already covered on the article itself. I've always followed the belief that infobox templates are best used to display the essential character information, that being their gender, hometown, other names they are known by, etc. The infobox template we already had was short and simple and accomplished this well, though maybe not as well as it could have -- I have some of my own ideas about that.

I think that we should continue using the older, shorter infobox template, with a couple additional parameters to include other essential information. An example of one param would be a character's Make/Model, as that is basically the equivalent of Species in the Cars world. I have created a draft here of what this could look like. I also merged both "General information" and "Series information" into one "Character information" for the sake of making it as short as possible. I'm open to a lot of different ideas for what the template should include. I mainly just don't want infobox templates that run for half the page.

I still need to figure out how to run proposals with multiple options, but for now, just sign under Support if you want to use the existing, shorter version (the one in my draft), or Oppose if you prefer 124PX1's longer ones. If you want to add/remove a parameter from my draft, just say so in the Discussion section and we can take it from there... maybe run smaller votes later if there's any huge disagreement. ~~User:RodRedlineM1/sig 05:34, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Proposer: User:RodRedlineM1/sig
Deadline: Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 23:59 EST

Support

• User:RodRedlineM1/sig – Per my above explanation.
• User:ABG1304 – I'm in support for shorter infoboxes that explain things that are essential info and not techinal (ex: top speed or what tires they use). The only thing I would add is probably a Crew param for racers because it's important info that you should know about them. Along with their occupation (Ex: Race Car) as that's also essential info too. The reason why I recommended the Crew param is because, besides McQueen, no one else has a big enough, well known, crew to make a section dedicated to them on their page (ex: Jeff Gorvette and Lewis Hamilton). I also thought about a "Status" param too (if they're alive or not) however that wouldn't mean much since a lot of character's statuses are unknown in the series making it pointless in the end. That's all I have to say for my support for now.

Discussion

"Other admins were not consulted". Other admins ignored any message from me or anybody other for few months back when I was writing those. Stop accusing me of working without consultation, when you did not cared at all on what was going on this wiki and basically left me alone to make all decision. 124PX1 (talk) 15:22, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

While it is true that I was inactive for a long period of time, I can assure you it was not due to a lack of care. Aside from being both a college student and part-time worker (as well as having other hobbies), the main reason I was often deterred from editing here was because we lacked a mature userbase. It became tiring trying to run the wiki when the only active users did not speak English well and often ignored my warnings and edit summaries. A lot of the time I just felt helpless.

With that in mind, as I have slowly become interested in wiki editing again over the last month, I have been realizing that there is a lot more I could have done back in the day. We lack clear help pages and detailed guidelines for editing, as well as community forums and resources, which is surely a large reason in why a lot of people were making edits with technical or formatting errors. I am currently working to rectify that. In addition to not being proud of how I have behaved in the past, I wish I had been more responsible in focusing on administrative duties back then, and both of those reasons have been driving my contributions lately.

I have also been more than delighted to find that our current community is actually quite competent. We have several users who have been working to clean up grammatical errors and improve the writing, and generally just being really helpful. On top of that most people have been quite friendly to me, which again has inspired me to want to stay.

Lastly, while I am well aware that I ignored several messages over the course of the last few months and generally did not act responsibly as a bureaucrat, I am not sure now is the time to call me out for those things. ABG and I both left you messages recently asking to collaborate and you did not respond to those, and you also did not voice your opinion in last week's proposal. Regardless, while I have been doing my best lately to improve upon some of my past mistakes, I am not going to act like I have always been the greatest leader or person. I just want to be transparent about that. ~~ RodRedlineM1 (talk) 20:24, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

@ABG1304: I like the idea of a crew parameter. It's a good way for people to easily find related articles and so we don't have to list them off in a sentence. I feel the same about the Status thing, the vast majority will just be marked as "Alive", while the ones who aren't are immediately explained in the respective article's intro, making it kinda pointless.

And yes, occupation should be there as well, I think I just forgot about it when I made the draft. --RodRedlineM1 (talk) 09:28, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Completed proposals

Decide how to organize character articles

This is a poor example for a first proposal because normally I would not be the one drafting this proposal, but due to the current state of the administration I am going to have to take initiative in overseeing checks for consensus in the coming weeks.

The first matter that must be addressed is the character article format. In the time that I have been gone, User:124PX1 has been writing and updating articles in past tense, which is different to the way we have always displayed our content. I did not consent to this change and as from what I can see in previous threads, no one else has.

The layout of character articles will require a lot of different discussions, but for now we will focus on this proposal: We should continue writing articles from an out-of-universe perspective using present tense, instead of changing to an in-universe perspective using past tense.

Proposer: User:RodRedlineM1/sig
Deadline: Saturday, April 24, 2021, 23:59 EST
Result: PASSED! By 3-0 majority we will be using an out-of-universe style of writing, using present tense, for character articles.

Support

• User:RodRedlineM1/sig -- This is the way we have always presented our articles since the site's creation in 2011. It allows us to cover all Cars media without having to worry about playing the difficult game of discerning what is meant to be "canon" and what is not. The Cars universe is not meant to be taken super seriously and I believe this style reflects that. Snot Rod is a great example of an article using "my" format, if you would like to review. I also wrote more "in-depth" explanations here and here. I will be happy to elaborate and clarify wherever wanted or needed.

• ABG1304 -- I personally think the articles should've stay the way they were before. Cars doesn't have a strong canon and trying to make it seem like does is odd honestly. Especially since the "canon" seemingly is broken by Pixar themselves with them being very indirect about it. I mean just look at how they've been treating Cars 2 recently and you'll see what I mean. I just don't think describing characters who are still alive with the words "was" is a smart choice because it gives the feeling that the character is either dead or retired (excluding the actual dead and retired characters) when they're not. Making the info boxes ridiculously long also isn't appealing either honestly. I rather have them be short and sweet (like they usually where back then) with the "technical" information being saved for the "Physical Description" part of the pages. Okay here's an edit for something I thought of: I'm also not a fan of the way racers are described. "Racing driver" and "aerobatic aircraft" make zero sense in terms of context for the Cars Universe. There are no humans so why describe them like that? Not even in the universe are the racers called racing drivers or aerobatic aircrafts, they're called race cars or racing planes due to the lack of humans. I also think racing car is just pointless as well because "race car" literally means the same thing, same case with "stock race car". While it might not be grammatically incorrect it's pointless to put race between stock and car as the term "stock car" is already associated with racing itself and really nothing else so adding it between the words is super redundant. That's all I can currently think of right now once again, I might comeback and edit my support if I can think of anything else but for now that's it.

• Lumbud84 -- I am so relieved that I'm not the only person who was pushing for the wiki's format to stay the way it always has been during that period where 124PX1 watched over literally everything. I created multiple new articles upon the reveals of the names of certain Next-Gen racers (Jim Reverick, George New-Win, Will Rusch, William Byrev, and Carstin Dillon) and every single time I wrote one of those articles, the quality consistently dropped after 124PX1 made edits to it (you can look through the version history on the pages on any of the articles I listed before and compare one of my early edits to one of his later ones to exactly what I mean, I highly suggest you do that). Afterwards, I kept trying to explain to them that past tense should only be used when a character is dead or no longer a car, but nevertheless, they still made edits to the wiki that significantly dropped the quality of the pages they were editing. They even defended the idea that "these events happened a long time ago" when the new Next-Gen diecasts were revealed only a week earlier. All in all, the wiki was completely fine how it was before this whole "in-universe past-tense" thing. The changes that 124PX1 has been making to these articles have been mostly negative, filling the page with spelling and grammatical errors, as well as deleting in-depth explanations and replacing them with extremely dumbed-down surface-level descriptions. I vote to keep the wiki how it's always been since its creation, a well-trusted source for any and all material Cars-related.

Discussion

In response to ABG's explanation: 100% with you on the infoboxes. I think it is redundant to have so many features in the infobox when we already cover most of the parameters on the article itself. Totally agree about keeping things short and simple. I will say I do like 124PX1's infoboxes by themselves, but I just don't think they work well on this wiki, if that makes sense. Since you brought it up, we'll make that next week's proposal after this one finishes. In the future we will probably be able to run more than one proposal concurrently, but I just want to wait and see how this one works out first. Best to keep things simple while people are still getting used to everything.

@Lumbud84: I am pleased to see your name on the list and that you're still here. I recently read through the messages you left on both my wall and 124PX1's wall about the next-gen issues a while ago, so I'm already aware of what happened there. I'm really sorry that I never got back to you back then. I saw you haven't really edited since and I was worried you were turned away because of that. The good news is, I'm here to stay, so something like that will not happen again.

Great discussion, guys. Keep it comin'. ~~ User:RodRedlineM1/sig