Talk:List of Street Fighter series characters

What a Neglected Article

When is the last time someone even cared about this page? Twelve's info is blank, while many characters don't have bios, just a link to their main page. Some one needs to help this article. The Red Guy (talk) 12:37, 20 December 2008

Table

How is anyone who isn't a Street Fighter fan supposed to understand what those numbers are supposed to mean in the table? 103.119.209.197 (talk) 22:17, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Came here to Talk specifically to see if anyone had explained it... 76.112.84.32 (talk) 06:51, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

I think when this got made the idea was for each entry to reflect the version of the game the character appeared in...it was salvaged from a much messier, longer list.

Issues with recent revisions

Alrighty, I’ve figured this out. This page and many related ones have been through massive revisions, it appears. I’m not entirely convinced of the merits of it, given the massive amount of content (especially real-world info) that has been lost in the process. I don’t think all of it can be dismissed as “fancruft”, at least in doing so you’d also have to consider a great number of character lists for any media franchise as the same; from List of The Simpsons characters to List of The Sopranos characters and many, many, many more. These lists are incredibly common on the site, and this haphazard culling doesn’t do justice to the hard work of editors on this page for over two decades.

So, on the issue of the table raised above. Yes, the numbers appear to refer to the revision of the game the character was added in. There’s no key to know which games those are, so I hope you know the names of every revision of Street Fighter II in order (and which of those revisions we’re arbitrarily deciding to number). Boldness refers to the game the character was first playable in, which is an absolutely meaningless feature for every character except Evil Ryu and Yun.

Yun, by the way, being one of the many examples on how this reorganisation has gone awry. Yun is marked on the table as appearing in Alpha (Alpha 3 if you can understand the table), but clicking the link on his name brings you to the character list page for Street Fighter III, which now has no mention of any Alpha games. There’s no mention on this list either, where previously there was before. To find out why, you would have to go digging specifically on the page for Street Fighter Alpha 3, where it finally briefly mentions he was added in the handheld versions. As opposed to previously, when you could simply read the paragraph: “After the Street Fighter III series, Yun appeared as a playable character Capcom vs. SNK 2, in the portable versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3 for the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation Portable and in Capcom Fighting Jam. They both later appeared as playable characters in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition.” Clear, concise info about a notable character. The kind of information that should be available on a list of characters.

Would you like to know about Rose, a character introduced in Alpha and who has reappeared in both 4 and 5? Well, the near sum total of information about her on Wikipedia now consists of this single sentence: “Rose, an Italian female fortune teller who uses an energy known as "Soul Power" who has ties to series antagonist M. Bison.” Compare this to the extensive paragraphs that previously existed on this very page. This is a character who is playable in over seven different games and has appeared in multiple media adaptations, and she has been reduced to a single sentence.

Having a central place for information on characters in a franchise is helpful - it allows a person curious to find the info they need instead of hunting through several different lists and articles, where even then most of the details have been removed anyway. If I even want to know the slightest more information about Rose, I would have to trawl through the pages for every single game she’s been in — and there’s no way for me to even know which games those are anymore!

Was all of the prior information necessary? No, absolutely not. There was plenty of redundancy across pages and, yes, fancruft. But removing nearly all of this info (and dispersing the remainder) has only worsened clarity, not improved it. Kung Fu Man, I implore you to please reconsider these changes. Geesi (talk) 17:54, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Here's the thing: this list was, essentially, nearly two decade old dumping ground of articles that were less an attempt to summarize things, but an 'out of sight, out of mind' approach to fixing notability issues, then festered from there as people added more and more cruft and non-cruft until it became a near unreadable mess. There is also the underlying problem that the SF franchise, as a whole, is often regarded in separate parts; the characters of SF2 and 3 have tons of reception towards them as a group which is necessary for a list to actually *have*. SF1's cast though? Alpha's few new characters as a whole? 4, 5, hell even 6? There's also a whole WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS factor to consider, that one needs to ascertain how worthwhile it is to perpetuate already bad editing habits.

Now if you have paid attention, what is happening is an attempt to try and reformat things steadily to a) figure out what characters are and aren't indeed notable and b) develop a list structure that actually informs the reader. You're pointing at Yun as an issue, but it's like it is because what was there needed to be TNT'd and it had to be rewritten. To boot, the twins are likely going to be spun out the next time I can sit down and hammer out their reception: they have enough sources. If you look at Hugo's section on the SF3 list, it's more in mind how the finalized ones will be, where they show a list of what the character was, what games they were in, and development info. There's nothing stopping you, as a fellow editor, from adding that information to the twins themselves. Same with Rose; you can easily expand her section in that article to highlight her other appearances. But the second she *had* here? That wouldn't even fly for a standalone character article.

And a monstrosity like List of The Sopranos characters which is barely sourced and so overdrawn there is no way a casual reader can even gather information from it is NOT an example to follow or even suggest.--Kung Fu Man (talk) 02:04, 9 June 2025 (UTC)