Help:Making a collection page

From The Build-A-Bear Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
"Collections" are groups of furry friends that share a common feature. This guide explains the common features The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers to use to define collections, as well as walking through the process of creating the pages to display those collections.



What makes a collection?

The Build-A-Bear Wiki looks for a few types of features to define collections:

  • Year released: Bears that were released within a given calendar year.
    • Many bears have more than one release date - for example, appearing online on a different date than they were set out in stores, or being released in different countries on different dates. For bears-by-year collection pages, The Build-A-Bear Wiki prefers to prioritize in-store release dates over webstore release dates and full launch dates over test launch dates (under the assumption that these would be what Build-A-Bear the company would use in a collector's guide), and prioritize releases in the same order as it arranges countries in a bear's infobox (see The Build-A-Bear Wiki:Style guide#Country lists for more details).
    • Examples: A bear that appeared on Build-A-Bear's US webstore in December 2022 but was released in-store in February 2023 would appear in the February section of the Furry friends released in 2023 page. A bear that released in Denmark in January 2013 and Australia in July 2013 would appear in the July section of the Furry friends released in 2013 page. A bear with no known in-store release date but a known webstore appearance date would appear in the section matching its appearance in the webstore.
  • Species: Bears that are based on the same animal, plant, creature, or object.
    • The vast majority of bears should be able to be placed into some kind of species collection. If you encounter a bear that cannot be put in any existing collections, your options are to leave it collectionless (and add it to Browse by species as a direct link to its page) or to slightly tweak another collection to accommodate it. For example, the Tardigrade Water Bear's closest relatives are the arthropods found in Insects and spiders, but from a reader perspective, combining them all in a collection called "Panarthropods" would be much harder and more confusing to navigate than just having the Tardigrade Water Bear separate from Insects and spiders. On the other hand, okapis are the only other member of Giraffidae with giraffes, so renaming the "Giraffes" collection to Giraffes and okapis is still correct while being just as navigable for readers as if the okapi had been collectionless.
  • Exclusivity: Bears that shared a special manner of release.
    • "Exclusives" can be a bit of a sticky word when it comes to Build-A-Bear Workshop products. It's not uncommon for a bear that was originally only released in one way to later be released in another way; for example, many of the Saint Louis Zoo exclusives were available on Build-A-Bear's US webstore or even on the webstores of other countries, and many originally-online-exclusive furry friends like the Axolotl eventually came to stores as well. It's fine to use your discretion in deciding whether a bear belongs in a particular collection.
  • Brand/license: Bears created in partnership with particular brands.
    • These bears should be very easy to identify, as they will generally have the brand partnership in their product names and/or branded on their bodies. In the same way described above for Species, if you encounter a bear doesn't fit into an existing license collection, your options are to leave it collectionless (and add it to Browse licenses as a direct link to its page) or to slightly tweak another collection to accommodate it.
  • Build-A-Bear collections: Bears that are part of collectible sets defined by Build-A-Bear.
    • These are bears released either together as a group under a collection name, or released over time into a defined collection. For example: the Zoorrific collection all released at the same time, but the individual bears from the Seasons of Hugs collection released one at a time over the course of a year. You'll know a bear belongs to a collection in one of a few ways: the collection may be part of the bear's name, Build-A-Bear may reference the collection name in their social media posts about the bear, it may be found in the collection category on Build-A-Bear's webstore, and it may have collection information on its hangtag.
  • Lines: Bears that are updated versions of previous bears.
    • While "lines" overlaps substantially with "collections," especially inasmuch as collectors will often make it a goal to have every version of a particular bear if they like that bear, the core difference between them is that when a new bear is added to a "line," the previous bear will be retired soon after (with a few exceptions). Bears in "lines" will generally share the same name but be identified with Roman numerals on their hangtags or birth certificate database entries.
  • Seasonality: Bears released to celebrate a particular season or holiday.
    • Bears celebrating a season or holiday will typically release 1-2 months before the start of the festivities, and will either be dropped as part of a themed collection or will be obviously themed themselves. Feel free to use your discretion to decide e.g. whether a pumpkin-themed bear without any jack-o-lantern patterning belongs in the Autumn collection, the Halloween collection, or both.
  • Traits/qualities: Bears sharing a particular feature not otherwise covered by other categories.
    • This is a catch-all section for community-defined sets of bears. Examples of the types of features that might belong here might include bears that are particularly big ("jumbos") or particularly small ("minis"), bears with velcro or magnets, or bears with embroidered eyes.

How many bears make a collection?

Because a collection is a group of bears sharing a common feature, by definition a collection must contain more than one bear. To avoid collection navigation pages becoming bloated and difficult to navigate, The Build-A-Bear Wiki suggests trying to find commonalities between collections with very few bears and placing them into a larger collection page. For example, many companies that have partnered with Build-A-Bear to make exclusives have only ever had one bear produced, so it makes more sense to place them in a greater corbearate exclusives page than for each to have its own collection page containing just one bear.

Making the collection page

On a basic level, collection pages are made in the same way as every other page: you can either search the name of the page you want to create and follow the red link in the search results to create it, or you can edit a link to the collection page into another page (for example, adding the collection to one of the pages under Browse furry friends) and use the red link trick to create it.

Naming collection pages

As with furry friend page names, the goal with collection names is to balance digestibility with accuracy. As such, you want to include the minimum amount of information necessary for a reader to easily identify the collection contained within a page. Collections typically do not have overlapping names the way furry friends sometimes do, so most bearchivists will never encounter a situation in which they need to use additional information to distinguish between similarly-named collections.


Writing lead sections

This is the paragraph that goes above the Table of Contents (if there is one), and also the portion of the page that appears (in part) in Google search results. The basic information you'll most likely want to include here includes:

  • What is the primary theme of this collection (for example, species, license, size, exclusivity, etc)
  • Do the furry friends in this collection have anything else in common (for example, stylization or gimmicks)? If so, what?
  • What year(s) was this collection released in?
  • How many known furry friends are in this collection?


Other suggested topics for the lead section include:

  • How much did the bears in this collection cost? Was it consistent, or was there a range?
  • What license are the bears in this collection based on? Describe the license.
  • History and context: Did anything change about this collection over time? Do we know why it was originally launched? If retired, do we know why it retired, and whether it was replaced with anything?
  • Other trivia: Did the purchase price of these bears include a charitable donation? Does this collection have a typical yearly release window?


The ultimate goal is for every collection to have a robustly detailed lead section, but as a bearchivist, if you don't have the time to write one, don't stress yourself out about it. Someone else can always write it later.


Filling in the bears

How you will want to present the furry friends in a collection page depends on the type of collection page you are making.

If your page only includes bears, you will most likely want to arrange them chronologically (oldest bears first, newest bears last), and you'll want to use either Template:Bearlist or Template:Bigbearlist to put in the bears themselves. For large collections, The Build-A-Bear Wiki recommends using Bearlist, which has smaller images and can fit more bears on a page, and subcategorizing the page into more manageable groups to avoid overwhelming the reader with a huge wall of bears. Suggested ways to subcategorize include by species, by color, by size, by release year, and by license (or type of license). Whether your page needs the smaller images and subcategorization is up to your discretion as a bearchivist.

If your page is a navigation page that includes links to other collection pages, you may want to arrange your bears non-chronologically, and you'll want to use Template:Bearbuttons. What type of arrangement is most suitable will depend on the content of the page; for example, Browse Build-A-Bear collections is arranged alphabetically, Browse by species is arranged roughly taxonomically, and Browse by season is arranged based on the calendar dates for the festivities the collections are based on. As with pages including only bears, it is recommended to subcategorize if your page is getting very long.


Categorizing collection pages

Categories are added to pages by linking to the category as if it were a regular page (preferably at the bottom of the text input). Collection pages should all be added to appropriate categories, as follows:


See The Build-A-Bear Wiki:Style guide for more detailed information about styling collection pages.

Templates

Bearlist

See Template:Bearlist for more details on how to use this template.
{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=

}}


Bigbearlist

See Template:Bigbearlist for more details on how to use this template.
{{Bigbearlist

|bear1=
|image1=

}}


Bearbuttons

See Template:Bearbuttons for more details on how to use this template.
{{Bearbuttons
|

{{Bbutton
|link=
|text=
|image=
}}

}}


Bears by year

Remember to replace all instances of the word YEAR with the correct year - including the one in the categories!
This is a list of '''all known furry friends released in YEAR'''.

There were approximately # furry friends released this year.

==January YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==February YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==March YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==April YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==May YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==June YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==July YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==August YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==September YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==October YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==November YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==December YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

{{Bears by year}}
[[Category:YEAR]]
[[Category:Collections]]
[[Category:Release year collections]]
__FORCETOC__


Retrieved from "https://buildabearwiki.info/wiki/Help:Making_a_collection_page?oldid=11661"