Talk:List of recurring alien characters from Futurama

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This article is part of WikiProject Futurama, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Futurama on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

[edit] Requested move

[edit] Ugly title

This page has a very long ugly title. All the characters in the list are alien except for Seymour, who could easily be merged to Fry's page (he only played a role in one episode, and appeared as an almost unnoticable background prop in another). Laïka 21:01, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Note that the original discussion for naming this article after the split can be found here for anyone that is interested. I've always felt that Seymour shouldn't be counted as a recurring character but others are opposed to that idea, or have been in the past. I would Support the move and name change. Stardust8212 22:00, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

I also Support the name change. "alien" beats "non-human, non-robot" for clarity anyday, and Seymour can get a paragraph on Fry's page. BryanEkers 16:50, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Alphabetical is wrong

There are many ways to organize an article like this one, but alphabetical would be the last one I'd use. Chronological introduction, for sure. Frequency of appearance, ok. Importance to the plotline or story arc development, absolutely. But alphabetical? That would make sense in some contexts, but I can't imagine using it in this one. It's particularly bad because the article was originally formatted to keep members of the same species together, which the alpha-ordering destroys, yet the formatting was not fixed. Maury 15:21, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

It just makes sense to make a list alphabetical. When you look at the table of contents that is the easiest way to navigate and requires no explanation to readers. It is also the way all the other Futurama lists are organized see List of recurring robot characters from Futurama, List of recurring human characters from Futurama, List of Futurama products, List of planets in Futurama, List of Futurama animals and List of Futurama places. The decision to alphabetize was originally discussed here before this page was split from that one. I still prefer alphabetical order, this may not be a dictionary but you may notice that encyclopedias are also alphabetized. Stardust8212 16:51, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Well that last statement just isn't true. Look at the list of aircraft engines for instance. Or photographic methods. Or just about any science topic. Like I said, it makes sense in some contexts but not others, and given that the characters on this page were clearly intended to be grouped by "race", by making the alphabetical you end up with oddities like the Nibblonians being spread out all over the page. I really don't think that's what people would want to see. Maury 19:06, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

The point I was trying to make was that when looking something up in a regular encyclopedia you would have to start by looking it up alphabetically, that is how encyclopedias are organized (by which I mean paper encyclopedias and yes I know Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia), apparently it made a bit more sense in my head. As far as other organizational methods go I don't think a chronological list would work here since the show doesn't keep a consistent timeline and it seems odd to me to expect a person to know when a character was introduced in order to find information on them when it would be much easier to look them up by name especially considering that this show was produced and broadcast in different orders and there are already enough issues dealing with that in just the major articles (see Talk:List of Futurama episodes#THIS IS ALL WRONG!!!). As far as organizing by number of appearances most of these characters only appear two or three times and you'd play into your own issue with splitting up the nibblonians since Nibbler has made many more appearances than the other nibblonians and Lrrr has appeared more times than Ndnd. Also how do you figure the characters were "clearly intended to be grouped by race"? Before your edits the Nibblonians were already grouped together so the only ungrouped race is Lrrr and Ndnd. I guess I'm not against merging those two as "Omicronians" similar to what is in the Nibblonians section however I don't think making Ndnd a subsection of Lrrr is necessarily the way to go there. So...that's my thoughts on the subject. By the way, what order were you going for when you previously reorganized? It doesn't appear to be by alphabet, timeline, number of appearances or plot significance as far as I can tell. This is why I really have an issue with it, if the reason they are in a specific order is not inherently clear then it only makes things harder to find rather than easier. Stardust8212 20:39, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Gah. Sorry, I don't have the interest level to reply to a 2000+ char message. Maury 23:19, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, just wanted to reply to all your points, I guess I was a bit overly thorough... Stardust8212 00:32, 6 March 2007 (UTC)