Thread:Profiler10/@comment-4705324-20191212134704/@comment-31999953-20200102224811

Yeah, obviously we would never actually force the idea on people, I'm just bearing in mind the possibility that someone might misinterpet our intentions in suggesting the use of Discord, if that makes sense. It's just something I try to be considerate of as much as possible.

That is actually a brilliant idea. I actually have a template with that image that I use for the Community Update posts (which I hope you don't mind but I gave you an honorable mention in the last post). I can look into how to work it on the main page. Might take some tweaking but that's a great suggestion. Thanks for that.

Alright, I just hope I can explain it right. Be warned though; this will likely not be short. Here it is:

I'm sure you're aware that Criminal Minds is more than just the show this wiki focuses on but it also consists of two spin-offs, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders and Suspect Behavior and one of the major topics on the wiki for a while now, even before I took my leave of absense, was the possibility of closing down the respective individual wikis for the spin-offs and moving all their content here, so all three shows are under the one domain. Now while I have to admit that has definite advantages, I'm personally not a fan of the idea and the reason for that is that I've seen other wikis for big TV franchises, taking the CSI and Law & Order ones as examples, do just that and the sheer amount of overlap creates an absolute mess. Any sense of organization gets lost in an oversaturated databank, at least that's been my opinion on them. Personally I've only been a reader on those wikis over the years and that's been my take on them the deeper I got into their content. Please note that I mean no offense to anyone when I say that, I just don't feel that keeping everything together has worked too well for those franchises. Not to mention the fact that for Criminal Minds, the themes of the spinoffs are distinct from the original show: Suspect Behavior, if I remember right, is darker than the original while Beyond Borders is more varied between the two. There's also the difference in color schemes, structure (especially in the case of Beyond Borders), etc., and the fact that there is a lot of overlap between the shows in characters like Matt Simmons so hypothetically if we were to combine the wikis, it could prove difficult to manage the overlap from the character's time in the spinoff and his time on the main show. Sorry for rambling a bit, I was just trying to explain it as best I could.

So I've been exploring other options for us to have the wikis interconnected while still keeping the three databases organised and one thing I noticed when I made my return to Fandom wikis was the announcement of a feature or a program that would allow for association between wikis if they have overlapping content, for example, a character. I can't recall the exact name of it, unfortunately, but I do remember the example they used in the article that I read and it sounded exactly what I personally think would be the ideal way to manage the three shows. The article took the character Luke Skywalker from Star Wars as an example, he has a page on Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki, but he also has a page on another wiki for a video game franchise in which he's a playable character. Now these two wikis serve different purposes, one covers the actual character and his storylines and progression while the other focuses about how he works in the game but because they have a shared focus on the character, this would identify that overlap and actively push anyone reading the article on one wiki that there is another article on another site on the same subject. So basically if someone were to read our page for David Rossi, they'd be informed that there is a corresponding page on the Beyond Borders wiki on the same character but covering his appearances on the spinoff show.

I was hoping this sounded familar to you and you could help me look into getting that implemented here, if that's possible. Sorry for the massive paragraphs and if you're not familiar with it, that's fine, I might have even misunderstood things when I was reading about it but it sounded promising for this situation so I was looking into it.