Forum:Use of present tense in History and Synopsis sections of Character pages

Upon reading a few character pages, something has been troubling me. When we talk about things that have already occurred in the Bleach universe, in order to be grammatically correct, we should be using the past tense. A lot of pages seem to change tenses repeatedly in the same paragraph, and most are predominantly in the present tense. As an example, I will use the first paragraph of Yamamoto's Soul Society Arc synopsis.

As it stand now, the paragraph reads:

"Yamamoto is first seen during a meeting between captains over their fellow captain Gin Ichimaru's failure to kill Ichigo Kurosaki. Upon arrival Gin gets into a argument with 11th Division Captain Kenpachi Zaraki and 12th Division Captain Mayuri Kurotsuchi. Yamamoto tells them to stand down and then asks Gin if he had been informed about the reason he has been summoned. He then details that Gin acted without permission and failed to capture the target, which he feels is unusual for a captain. He then asks for an explanation."

Since the events being described occurred in the past, we should be writing these in the past tense, like this (I also fixed some other grammatical errors, and clarified some wordings that were grammatically unclear, but the text remains basically unchanged except for the tense):

"Yamamoto is first seen during a Captain's meeting about 3rd Division captain Gin Ichimaru's failure to kill Ichigo Kurosaki. Upon his arrival at the meeting, Gin got into an argument with 11th Division Captain Kenpachi Zaraki and 12th Division Captain Mayuri Kurotsuchi. Yamamoto told them to stand down and then asked Gin if he had been informed about the reason he had been summoned. Yamamoto then went into detail, explaining that Gin acted without permission and failed to capture the target, which he felt was unusual for a captain. He then asked for an explanation."

I realize that most, if not all, character pages are written in this strange mixture of past and present tense, but most of them just don't make sense grammatically. The sentence from the original paragraph "Yamamoto tells them to stand down and then asks Gin if he had been informed about the reason he has been summoned." jumps from present to past tense then back to present all in one sentence.

At the very least, I would like to change the History sections of the character pages so that they are consistently in the past tense. Ideally, I would like to change every synopsis to the past tense, since that is the grammatically correct way to refer to things that have already happened. I am willing to do this myself, although it will undoubtedly take me some time to do so. I am a bit of a grammar Nazi, and things like this just don't look good.

I already fixed Yamamoto's history section and made it consistently past tense, to show you what it would look like. It makes way more sense now than it did before I changed it IMO. But I don't want to go through and start changing tenses (even if it is grammatically correct) only to have someone revert all of my changes. So I am asking if it would be OK for me to at least fix the grammar and tenses of the history sections of character pages, and ideally if you'd be willing to let me change the tenses of the synopsis sections too, that would be great.

I know I've had my share of problems with some of you, but I really am just trying to make this wiki better. CorpusDei 23:42, November 25, 2009 (UTC)