Before I go to sleep tonight, I felt I needed to post this. I've been trying to come up with ways to make the standards more "friendly" to newer users in response to the countless times I've heard complaints about the article policy "limiting creativity". In the end, I decided that I'm not making the changes that many of you would have wanted me to. The claims about limiting creativity are just blatant cries of laziness, as the standards don't tell you what exact words to put on the page, just how much and of what topics to make sure that your article is easily understandable by everyone.
However the case is not yet closed, for there are still some changes that can be made. The first change concerns recolored images. I've never thought about recolors that much as I never really implimented a true recolor onto the wiki. Now that I've looked at the policy recently, I noticed a specific detail in the standard:
- Recolored characters MUST be identified as recolored images, and the base image used must also be specified.
It's no secret that users don't like having their pages marked with templates that quite visibly notifies everyone that they used recolored images, and up till now I saw no purpose for the templates to begin. After all, you're just letting everyone know what everyone could have already known if they looked at the page to begin with. It wasn't until now that I realized that the actual purpose of the template is simply to be a subtle "take that" to those who use recolors in the first place. You might consider that jumping to conclusions, and maybe it is. I might just be too tired and thinking about this too much, but I honestly can't think of another reason for that rule to exist.
Anyway, I suggest that it be removed and that we no longer require pages with recolors to be marked. Discussion, go.