Template talk:Care Bears

I replaced the link to The Hub with Discovery Family for "What links here" purpose, but just thought that the "Companies" group in this navigation template is not necessary. Should it be removed? Any opinions? JSH-alive/^{talk/cont/mail} 03:27, 18 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I should note up front that I'm not very knowledgeable on this subject. It seems to me though, that the only Care Bears program to air on that network was Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-Lot, which ran for a single season in 2012 - at that time, Discovery Family was still going by the name "The Hub". My personal suggestion would be to stick with "The Hub" then, since that's the name the network was known by when it had Care Bears programming.

I also noticed that Discovery Family is slated to release a new Care Bears series on Netflix in 2016. Once that series premieres, it might be worth updating the template, but I would suggest waiting until then. At that point, you might want to use both names, perhaps giving the respective years for when each name was associated with Care Bears programming - something like, The Hub (2012) / Discovery Family (2016-present). This is just a suggestion though. I'm not very familiar with templates. There's probably a MoS, or at least some sort of standard to follow.

I could go either way on whether the companies should actually be included in the template. Again, it would be worth seeing if there's an established standard for this kind of thing. --Jpcase (talk) 12:43, 29 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it doesn't seem that a Manual of Style actually exists for templates. So I opened a discussion about this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates, which seems like the next best thing. Maybe someone there can help. --Jpcase (talk) 01:01, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I agree that it's excessive to include every single institution that's ever had anything to do with the franchise; the template will be better off without the "Companies" section. However, the animation studios ought to be retained as they may be of interest to the reader—I suggest we put them in parentheses following the titles they created, e.g., The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings (Atkinson Film-Arts). Iaritmioawp (talk) 04:22, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As an animation fan, and someone who came to this discussion through the Animation WikiProject, I agree that the animation studios could hold interest to readers and should probably be kept. However, I have to wonder whether it would be undue weight to keep those, while removing the toy companies, since Care Bears is, after all, primarily a toy franchise (or at least, that's how I tend to think of them). Also, it appears that the characters originated as greeting card characters, so the company that created the characters in the first place, American Greetings, probably ought to be mentioned somewhere in the template as well.

Iaritmioawp's idea of listing the animation studios in parentheses is a good one. That way, we aren't giving any of the companies their own section. However, I wonder if something similar could be done for the other companies. Can the toys be divided into different subgroups? If so, then how about replacing the "Companies" section with a "Toys" section, and then listing the company names in parentheses next to the specific toy lines that they produced? --Jpcase (talk) 14:47, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Support after group refactor: Many of the links in "Companies" are relevant, but the group itself is vague, and can attract adding links with unintended WP:UNDUE weight. Breaking out the links into some arrangement that emphasizes their relevance would be best, such as the suggestions by Iaritmioawp and Jpcase above. That's going to take some thought and work, in maybe several smaller steps. I'd keep the group until it's emptied; it's not critically wrong, just less-than-optimal. --A D Monroe III (talk) 14:25, 31 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]