I am a member of WikiProject Video games and WikiProject Pokémon, and have edited Wikipedia over 12,000 times. I joined Wikipedia in 2008 to edit an article or two, but wasn't really active until March 2009, when I started editing video game articles, which were mainly Pokémon related. I became an active member of WikiProject Pokémon and helped improve many of the Pokémon list entries, along with many other things. I helped create many Pokémon species articles such as Charizard and Lucario.
In my opinion, the way character articles get handled is absolutely terrible. The general consensus is that in order for a character to have a standalone article, it must have significant reliable coverage from an "out of universe" perspective. This tends to be represented by "reliable" sites like IGN, Kotaku, etc "significantly covering" characters in the form of awards or recognition in "top characters in this arbitrary category" lists. While sometimes well written and nice coverage to include, most of the time these are completely out of context remarks that are made in a jokingly manner, and are not suitable for coverage on Wikipedia.
"Reception" about a character should be about how well designed it is, not what specific editors of video game journalism sites spout in articles. Prose should not be "X editor from Y thinks the character is cute", but "the character is regarded by [some/many/most] as cute", and left at that.(Although, hopefully the reception of the character should be a little more substantial then just "being cute", this is just an example)
What defines notability is whether a topic is suitable for inclusion anywhere on Wikipedia. This includes things lumped together in a larger article. What determines whether a subject gets split from a parent article is guidelines like size and undue weight. Just because a subject is "notable" doesn't mean it should be split, and this also means that things like lists of characters with large amounts of it unsourced are going against notability. Each character should have notability to be included, unless a special case can be made about the subject as a whole being notable. However, this notability does not need to be presented by these "out of universe" coverage bits, a reliable source covering the subject in an in-universe manner should be fine as long as its relevant to the reader, and not cruft, but useful information in understanding their character.
tl;dr - So my general point in all of this is that standalone articles should probably only be on "main characters" of a series, or those with lots of Wikipedia appropriate prose that would not fit in a parent characters article. Also, parent character articles should be a lot better written. Care needs to be taken to appropriately direct the prose to the reader of the article. Cruft is a bad thing, but well written descriptions of how the character impacts the game is great.
While I write this mostly seriously, I haven't edited seriously in a long while, and am mainly doing this as a late night sleepy rant, and realize that what I've said here probably goes against some of the articles even I have created in the past. I would like to refine this as something I could link in various discussions, and hopefully change some people's minds about how Wikipedia should cover characters. If you read this, feel free to discuss it with me on my talkpage :) Blake(Talk·Edits) 05:26, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
You can look here for my contribution statistics, or you can look here for what I have changed recently. Below are the articles I have either created or greatly contributed to.
For your contributions to the Pokemon articles! SpigotMap 14:08, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
The Userpage Shield
In the eyes of me, who is almost never on on weekdays, you've saved my userpage more than once. I don't know why you would bother. How would you find this stuff before the RC patrollers? Anyway, thanx alot. 2D Backfire Mastertalk, guestbook 10:24, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
Abra, Kadabra, and Alakazam
Koffing and Weezing
Caterpie, Metapod, and Butterfree
List of Pokémon (494–545)
