Talk:Characters

Irregular thumbnail size in mobile skin
When User:Genma696 created this Characters page on their own initiative, they also supplied some thumbnail images. As the manga progressed and more characters needed to be added to the list, I sometimes grabbed an existing square image on the wiki to use for a thumbnail, or I created square thumbnails of my own, without much regard for resolution / standardizing hxw. (Sometimes I even took square screenshots intending to use them for both the character's article infobox and the thumbnail, which was lazy of me.)

In mobile view (I don't use it very often), the thumbnails display as varying sizes instead of one uniform size. It looks a bit sloppy, which is unfortunate since the Characters page has had 15,502 views in the last 30 days (that's a little over 2/3rds of the views the entire wiki normally gets for an entire month).

I initially thought this was entirely my fault, since I'd not adhered to strict dimension lengths for all images. However, Genma496 had mentioned at the time that Character lists were in vogue for wikis, and I do believe they must have used the Characters list framework that Bakemonogatari Wiki's Characters page uses, as they are active on NisioIsin Wiki(s). The tables' wikitext is essentially the same, and, if you append ?useskin=fandommobile to the URL, open DevTools, and switch the device toolbar to a mobile view, you'll see that the page suffers the exact same thumbnail sizing issue that we have.

See, the Fandom Mobile skin strips most site-wide and inline CSS, which is how we often wind up in such quandaries. (I should try and check how much we're allowed to get away with or try via FandomMobile.css.)

Mobile formatting headaches was a major reason why I never created a Characters article (with this type of image-centric, layout-happy formatting) when I founded the wiki. Or a Characters article for Baccano! Wiki, and so on. Well, now we've got to allievate the aesthetic headache, somehow.


 * 1) Option 1: Try replacing thumbnails or uploading new ones entirely with ones that all have the same exact dimensions (e.g. 200x200 pixels). My Civil thumbnail is something like 1,552x1552 pixels, which is massive compared to the original dimensions of, say, Soara's thumbnail, so it's perhaps not surprising that Civil's thumbnail dwarfs that one in mobile view.
 * 2) Switch to another layout entirely. The wikis that manage to keep these sorts of lists' images uniform usually practice extremely rigid, template-based formatting. I can't afford to spend the time a layout overhaul + template setup like that would require; there are a lot more important things to do on the wiki than fix the aesthetic of the Characters page, even if mobile visitors might think less of the wiki as a consequence.
 * 3) I've been tentatively experimenting with flex-containers in my Sandbox, which isn't a horrible idea, but I'm still trying to ascertain if I can reduce the size of the images/divs when the screen size is less than 800px instead of having the layout switch to one-column. Maybe mobile users would prefer one-column; seems a bit tedious to me.

Honestly, I'm just tempted to just swap out Characters with Category:Characters in the top-level menu in top nav; Category:Characters updates automatically vs. a Characters list needing a manual update, which is handy. (I usually prefer navigating via Character categories anyway). ...But I can't bet at all that most new visitors were accessing this page via the top nav in the first place. It's likely that many just reached it through search engine results.

But I'm rambling. And procrastinating on all the (did I mention) much more important things to do on the wiki. And...well, I'm not being paid for this, I have real-life work / academia to do (I have a life, really...).

Sorry. I've clearly been alone on the wiki for too long. If anyone can pitch in here, whether via thumbnails or via layouts and/or CSS (e.g. taking a gander at the flex-container idea, laughing at that before implementing a far better solution, anything), you'll probably do my dignity a solid. By which I meant the wiki's dignity. Yes.

Revriley (talk) 10:56, 24 April 2023 (UTC)