Oh I see. I think a heading like that would be useful. While the same information can also be placed in the article intro, the intros are often highly variable in length and content. Therefore, having an h1-level heading as you describe would provide a standard, easily-locatable section to link to the missions.

However, what types of characters would have such a section? For example, would Alex Vega have an "associated missions" section, given that she is involved with many missions? 

Maybe we could add a section to the character infobox for what missions they're encountered in instead? I've seen something similar done on other wiki's such as stating what mission a character first appears in.

The infobox idea could work, but would the limited interface of the infobox be able to adapt to different circumstances, such as when a character has missions across multiple games/DLCs? Also, is the list described in Mechemik's post a simple list with just the mission name, or would there ever be a description along with the misison name? 

As an example, Fallout Wiki lists missions (quests) in the infobox (example: Robert House).

Ah I guess that might be a problem. Also for characters like say Pritchard that appear in almost every mission of a particular game, is it worth stating what missions they're in? I'm unsure what Mechemik had in mind but I'd imagine most of the characters role in that mission would already be included in the biography section, but we can still keep it in mind as a possibility.

At the moment I think it's hard to make a final decision because I'm not sure exactly what characters this will apply to, and what the particular case for those characters will be. Maybe we can test one option first and if we find it doesn't work well we can change it to the other.

That's true, it gets more tricky when Jensen can communicate with others via infolink. Perhaps only include those who actively play a part in the mission? Like for instance Malik wouldn't be included in any except when she crashes and to pick up the scientists (and Shanghai Justice).

That'd be a good way of handling it. We could also just start with characters where the missions they appear in are important, like the Richard Smallhorn example I gave. For characters that appear in numerous missions throughout the game, I don't think this information is as crucial to include. Using a title like "Notable mission appearances" would hopefully make it clear that we don't intent for every single mission a character is mentioned in to be listed.

I think there are only a few character in HR and MD that might have too many appearances (Pritchard, Malik, Jim Miller, and Alex Vega). So maybe the heading "Mission appearances" should be the standard, and "Notable mission appearances" is used only in exceptional cases if necessary.

The phrase "(notable) mission appearances" sounds good to me. This heading is used in other wikis such as the GTA wiki (example). After looking at this example, maybe Malik doesn't have that many missions after all. lol.

I've implemented the proposed standardization for the following articles:

• Richard
• Faridah Malik
• Lucius DeBeers

Richard is your standard side-mission minor character. The reference to the mission name has been replaced by "If Adam Jensen meets Viznik in the sewers, Viznik will ask Jensen to investigate Richard's cult. If Jensen follows through with the task..." This conditional wording is a bit obtuse, but is necessary because completion of the side mission is not necessarily canonical. The other alternative is to place this info in the "mission appearances" section, but I think placing optional storyline information in mission appearances (where no particular outcome is established as canonical) probably isn't necessary for minor characters.

For Malik's article, I've utilized the "mission appearances" section to describe the conditional outcomes of the 2nd Hengsha visit. The "biography" section describes only the canonical outcome of that mission. The mission appearances section also lists her first appearance in the game.

For Lucius' article, I changed the sub-headings to years. To distinguish between Black Light and DXMD, I've used the headings "Late 2028 and early 2029" and "Later 2029." This highlights the limitation of year-based references, since Black Light, Children's Crusade, and DXMD all take place in 2029 (and the starting part of Black Light takes place in late 2028). This wouldn't be a problem for characters like Jensen, whose storyline is relatively well-defined.

...one more thing, for Richard and Malik, I've added the heading "Personality and traits." This heading is used in some othe Wikis, but can also be something like "Character", etc. if someone perfers a different heading.

You've done a good job on these articles, thanks! I wasn't sure about having a subsection for mission appearances as opposed to just mentioning it in the infobox, but what you've added to Malik's article has convinced me.

I see the problem with Lucious' article but don't really have much to suggest. Still think that the current format is better than using the titles of books/games though.

"Personality and traits" sounds fine to me. Looks like the heading on Jensen's page is just "Personality" so not sure if we'd like to choose one and stick with that.

This is to report that the standard "biography" section (with no game/book tiles) has been implemented for all characters in the DXMD characters list. Actually, the articles for all characters other than Adam Jensen were updated months ago, but I didn't get around to the Jensen article until last week.

The standardized "biography" sections look pretty nice for purposes of consistency of format. Having the first section be consistent, I think, is important to the overall feel of the Wiki, even if the remaining sections aren't nearly as standardized.

Still, I think there are some issues that deserve further thought.

One issue is whether optional/conditional sidequest content should really go into "biography" or somewhere else. For major characters like Jensen, the "biography" section is strictly canonical. However, many minor characters appear only in sidequests, and sidequests are not necessarily canonical and may have variable endings. As noted in my post above, for the Richard article, sidequest information in "biography" have been described using optional/conditional wording (e.g., "If Adam Jensen meets Viznik in the sewers...If Jensen follows through with the task")." In retrospect, I don't think this is necessarily the best way to handle things, because such optional/condition descriptions (using "if", "may", etc.) aren't truly consistent with the concept that "biography" refers to canonical information.

I think a possible solution might be to use an additional section like "Interactions," "Gameplay interactions", "Interactions with the player character," "Game apperances", etc. where sidequest and other open-ended content can be discussed in greater detail. This section would include "mission appearances" as a sub-section, but would be more generic and encompassing. Under this approach, the line between gameplay information and canonical information would be more clearly drawn, although a potential issue is to avoid redundancy between "biography" and the gameplay section.

Some of these headings already exist in certain articles (see Michael Berry, Tomas Romanek). The Romanek article is an example of where gameplay information is much more prominent than "biography." The Romanek article is also a good example of why "mission appearances" doesn't always work, since the character is part of the open-world interaction, and not necessarily part of any mission.

Personally, I think the nature of the game and story of the series should play a large role in how articles are laid out. Mechemik mentioned Assassin's Creed earlier. Assassin's Creed games, however, have closed-ended storylines. Since the events depicted in AC are the memories of ancestors, it is clear that everything depicted in the game actually occurred, canonically speaking. Thus, in AC, you only need a "Biography" and nothing else, as far as gameplay interactions go. Bioshock also falls into the same category.

The polar opposite on the spectrum would be Fallout and Elder Scrolls, whose games are open-ended stories (with lots of sidequests). For this reason, Fallout/Elder Scrolls character articles focus heavily on gameplay "interactions" and do not use "biography" at all. The Elder Scrolls wiki has separate articles for different game appearances of the same character. Mass Effect and Dragon Age probably fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and their wiki layouts somewhat reflect this. 

Therefore, the style we used here should reflect the type of storylines presented in the Deus Ex series. DXMD is certainly very sidequest-heavy and is more open-world than some of the previous titles. Thus, I think DXMD has nudged the classification a bit away from close-ended-storyline franchises like Assassin's Creed. For this reason, I think it's worth looking into using a section that is more suitable for gameplay information of characters.

Personally, I'm also curious as to what Mechemik thinks about this, given that Mechemic is an admin on the Witcher wiki and recently posted a character layout guide.