Template talk:Background characters

Use this talk page to discuss changes, fixes, and improvements for this template.

What exactly counts as "background"?
Stuff like the Banzai Bill on Yoshi's Island, the Sonic characters running on Green Hill and the Pokémon on Pokémon Stadium 2 definitely do, but several of the ones listed here have actual gameplay roles, either directly interacting with the players (Support Ghost, Bulborb, King Bulblin) or by triggering effects (Kotake and Koume, Kraid, Dialga and Palkia, Whispy Woods in Dream Land). Would it be more sensible to split them off in a "Stage hazards" template, or call this "Background characters and stage hazards"? (Plus it's missing some characters). --Menshay (talk) 06:06, 11 June 2015 (EDT)
 * I'd say for the purposes of this template any character not controlled by the character or part of an item is a backround character.--Dinodomain (talk) 12:57, 20 August 2015 (EDT)
 * The current policy I'd been working from was that named hazard characters (5-Volt, Flying Man, etc.) got pages, whereas background visual-only cameos don't (Magnezone, Celeste, etc.). This template's kind of in an awkward position as a result, although I wasn't really thinking about it when I set that as the guideline. Miles ( talk)   14:58, 20 August 2015 (EDT)

Hiding characters without articles
This is a pretty large template, and as it currently stands, the majority of characters listed do not have their own pages. Most of the links just redirect to disambig pages. I wonder if this hurts the template's value as a navbox. On one hand, it's useful to see all the characters listed in one place, but on the other hand it becomes unwieldy as this list grows larger and larger.

Below, I have the navbox in its current state (as of 16:53, January 4, 2020). All characters are still included in the code, but anyone who doesn't have their own article (i.e. have a role outside a background cameo) is hidden by the code. As you can see, this considerably shrinks the navbox's size and ensures that every link goes to a page, not a redirect or disambig.

Any thoughts? --PeabodySam (talk) 16:53, January 4, 2020 (EST)