Wrestler Characters' Wiki Pages

Hey yo! Wrestling is weird, y'all. And we're gonna change some things in terms of how we handle wrestling character pages. Up until now, the character page has effectively been a person page with a list of gimmicks that person portrayed in the world of wrestling. That's all well and good for Wikipedia, but here we're talking about characters. Characters that appeared in video games.

If we were a movie wiki, we wouldn't have an Arnold Schwarzenegger page named after the latest character he played in a movie with a list of aliases of other characters he played in the past. That'd be crazy. But, that's basically what we've been doing here for over a decade.

It doesn't make sense have a character/gimmick listed as appearing in a game 15 years ago when the character didn't even exist yet just because the real life person was portraying that character then. For example, Goldust does not appear in WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling.

So, here's where the hard part comes. There's no hard and fast rule that covers everything on this. The best example I have is Charles Wright; better known as The Godfather...or Kama Mustafa...or Papa Shango. This man's characters are actually a perfect example of the two main situations we can run into with this method of determining what gets a character page.

Papa Shango is a voodoo shaman that appeared in the WWF in the early 90s portrayed by Charles Wright. He left the WWF and came back a couple years later as Kama Mustafa. There is no acknowledgement or correlation between the two characters in the lore of WWF (and therefore the games). We all know it's the same man, but that doesn't really matter. They're two completely separate characters.

Now, the second scenario. Kama Mustafa joined the Nation of Domination and slowly began being referred to as The Godfather, which led to him evolving from his militant gimmick into his pimp character. I would argue these two are the same character, because it happened more naturally through storylines.

Long story short, I would propose that Papa Shango be one page and The Godfather should be a separate page with "Kama Mustafa" as an alias.

The difficult part here is that someone with wrestling knowledge is going to have to make the decisions on what pages get split up. So, feel free to discuss it here and bring up examples of pages and we'll (the mods) sort it out. It's bound to get messy.

Dustin Rhodes should be split from Goldust. I know he was in WCW SuperBrawl on the SNES as 'The Natural' Dustin Rhodes. And of course he has been in many games as Goldust.

I would say Johnny B. Badd and Marc Mero should be separate too, although it looks like Johnny B. Badd was already not an alias, so he just needs a page. He was also in the same SNES WCW game as Johnny B. Badd and a bunch of WWF/WWE games as Marc Mero.

While those are ones I think should be split I can see keeping ones like The Giant and The Big Show together as they are pretty much the same character, just different names. Same for Mr. Perfect and Curt Hennig, and Lex Luger and The Narcissist.

There are a couple which I am on the fence about such as Kevin Nash and Diesel, 1-2-3 Kid and X/Syxx Pac, and IRS and Mike Rotunda.

@bobafettjm: I'm with you on Perfect/Hennig and Luger/Narcissist. I could see an argument for splitting The Giant and Big Show maybe.

The Hall/Nash/X-Pac thing is weird, yeah. If we take WWE's stance into consideration, Nash is different from Diesel considering they specifically inducted Diesel into the HOF. And were going to (will) induct Nash as part of the nWo. Same situation for Hall/Razor.

X-Pac is even weirder since it's 3 names. Canonically, WWE recognizes "X-Pac" as the former "1-2-3 Kid" though I think. If that's right, then the argument is Syxx a separate character from those two.

@marino: sorry to correct you but they inducted Nash as Kevin Nash not as Diesel

https://www.wwe.com/classics/wwe-hall-of-fame/kevin-nash-wwe-hall-of-fame-2015-inductee

It was Scott Hall that got inducted under his gimmick name of Razor Ramon.

There is one wrestler I don't think has been mention yet and could complicate things even further, Mick Foley he has appeared in video games under FOUR different names Mankind, Cactus Jack, Dude Love and as Mick Foley some of which are playable in the same game (Mankind, Dude Love and Cactus Jack are all playable in WWE '13 for example)

@supermutant42: The way WWE presents it is comparable to a personality disorder. They acknowledge that they're all the same guy. So, I would lean towards him being one page. Open to arguments otherwise though.

Good point well made