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Forums: Index Image Preferences in Articles
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SmartLinkScope
AhalosniperWho are we? Heroes? Monsters? Cowards?
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Greet'ns all; had something I've been meaning to ask for a while, and wanted to get a sense of everyone's general thoughts for reference's sake.

Images can end up being a pretty critical inclusion in an article. Not every one needs them, but when you're hoping to get your character to stick in a reader's mind at a glance, finding the right face can really help, especially when the image you find manages to communicate something like what you want to get across about the character; for example, it's no coincidence I've got a picture of a smiling character for a generally-happy Dyne-G217 in the infobox. A reader will see that depiction on the page ahead of everything else, and spot it when they happen across him in categories.

Finding consistent images that depict your character in the situations you want to put them in across their history gets tricky, though. Thus, some of us end up mixing and matching images, not just of the character and the locations they explore or equipment they use, but of different film or TV characters entirely to depict the same person at different points in their history. Sometimes these differences extend out to entirely different forms of media, as I've done with both live action and comic book images on Vinh-030.

In one instance, I even combined a live-action face and a comic book face into the same image to use for depicting one character's parents. Thing is, I had someone find it difficult to take such a direct contrast seriously when reading. Granted it's an extreme example, but I did end up changing it, and now I'm wondering about doing more to make my images consistent in each isolated article. In particular, Kimberly Ivy Blackburn comes to mind as setting itself apart visually by using predominantly black-and-white sketches, which I've rarely seen elsewhere, and that makes it memorable; if you want your character to stick in the mind, such an approach might be useful. The move I'm considering at the moment is to remove the live action images from Vinh's page to go with the more consistent use of comic book images. Elsewhere, people know I generally try to use anime images for my Gamma Company members, and I might make a conscious effort to use such sources exclusively in their articles.

So here's my question: what do you most like to see between images in an article, particularly character articles? Do you prefer they be consistent to one medium and/or source character? Do you have a preference for or against any particular medium? I know there's a few out there who don't much like to see anime characters keep popping up, but I also recall a discussion from long ago about the WWHalo policy about not using modern guns for future weaponry extending to live action images; using George Bush as some figure was, I believe, the example brought up.

What thoughts have you about this all, and what articles come to mind as sticking out because of their collected images? I'm also including a couple polls to see how preferences stack up numerically between site members. Have at 'em, let it be known what you think!





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