Template talk:Metacritic breakdown

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Beland, thanks for creating the template! It looks great overall. I'm wondering if there is a way to reduce the white space above and below the "Metacritic review breakdown" graph caption"? It feels a little too much.

Separately, I think we could have some documentation about when to use it. Like I think Mercy (2026 film) is a good instance as seen here because it shows the distribution of mixed and negative reviews. Thoughts on that kind of thing? Erik (talk | contrib) 19:07, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

I added some background and usage details to the documentation here: Template:Metacritic breakdown/doc. EDIT: To show an example of where seeing the distribution sheds more light, for Freakier Friday here, it has 22 positive reviews and 20 mixed reviews with the overall indication of "mixed or average" reviews. Thanks, Erik (talk | contrib) 19:38, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for expanding the documentation! Yes, if you open the template's wiki source code, you'll see some CSS which you can feel free to tweak. In case you're not familiar with CSS, I'll explain enough to do what you're asking...

The first "div" element controls the outer box. Margin refers to whitespace outside the border box, padding refers to whitespace inside the border box. Reducing padding would reduce space above that line; padding is also used on the sides. In case you're not familiar with CSS, here's an explanation: https://www.w3schools.com/csS/css_padding.asp

The second "div" element controls the invisible box around the "Metacritic review breakdown" line. Reducing or eliminating the margin on the bottom of that box would reduce the whitespace below the line.

These may require some tweaking to avoid text from colliding with lines or other text, and generally to look nice. My advice is the simpler the better, if you can eliminate some of this CSS and it still looks good. -- Beland (talk) 20:55, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Is this template necessary??

above title. I kinda feel like it detracts clogs up reception sections of both film and music reviews, and also holds metacritic-approved sources to a higher standard, when there are many which may not be included within it but are nevertheless useful i.e. non-english language sources. also, more importantly, i feel the review breakdowns are probably more useful to wikipedia editors than to readers trying to understand things, as i'd have thought (the amount of) commentary from mixed/negative reviews would ultimately been discussed in relation to their WP:DUE weight? any futher discussion is welcome, reception sections are my weakness. // Chchcheckit (talk) 19:51, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

oh also not to mention 1.) reviews without scores that aren't on metacritic, which can also include stuff from end-of-year albums lists if you're that utilitarian and 2.) gonna self-cite here, but id expect there to be times were there are too few metacritic reviews to appropriately cover the actual consensus of reviews and other sources are needed, such as when i was working on Who Are the Girls?; i did not include the usual metacritic prose line (i.e. "[...], indicating universal acclaim") and instead supported a general description of acclaim with two other sources because it seemed silly for metacritic to say four was enough for acclaim when there were many other positive reviews extending beyond it ig?? if you get whatever im trying to say // Chchcheckit (talk) 19:56, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't think this template needs to be used everywhere, but it is statistically better than Rotten Tomatoes, which simplistically marks a review as positive or negative and aggregates that. Aside from the RT critics' consensus, we can't use the RT score to write prose about how a film was received. (E.g., what does 60% translate to?) MC is better but still also has its proprietary weighted average calculation that it does, but it does show the distribution where RT does not (and RT no longer has an average review score).

At the end of the day, both RT and MC are commercial services, and for the encyclopedia, we should leverage these in the best way we can. Ideally, if we have good retrospectives sources about the film, we wouldn't need either at all. The documentation outlines when the MC template could be used, certainly not everywhere. It's better with a strong sample size and where the distribution of reviews is more spread out. It's not useful when there's only a few reviews or when the reception is strongly positive or negative. These recommendations are covered in the documentation but could perhaps be more spotlighted. Erik (talk | contrib) 12:40, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

you make some good points... would adding a minimum ratings threshold make things easier i.e. add if mc has 10 or more ratings? // Chchcheckit (talk) 15:24, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Oh. This is new. A decorative supplementary table like this might seem harmless but if we accept this for Metacritic people will want a widget for Rotten Tomatoes too. Highlighting one aggregator over the other seems WP:UNDUE at best (especially when so many editors already complain about how much attention this encyclopedia gives those aggregators). See also WP:PROSE. It also feels a bit like a backdoor reinvention of {{Film ratings}}. It might be "optional" in theory but without strict constraints it will end up spammed almost everyone, because that's how it always goes with templates. Please stop now before it is too late. -- ~2026-20754-35 (talk) 17:57, 27 June 2026 (UTC)