Nothing for me to add to the Wiki

This isn't much of a complaint, more a testament to the knowledge and commitment of the community.

I love Giant bomb for its Wiki and I want to get in there and make it better than it was before. Whenever I try to do this, however, pages are almost always completely filled out with everything you need to know and fairly well written/formatted. Take Dead Rising 2: Off the Record for example. A game nobody really cares about, and yet has an excellent Wiki page already. I know a hell of a lot more about the Dead Rising games than the average person and yet there is almost nothing for me to add. I am surplus to requirement. The only thing I have found my 'place' in is slightly obscure pages like Phoenix Wright characters. I don't like being relegated to pages that are so barren that clearly nobody cares about them. In fact, I had to create most of them.

I don't see a solution to my problem. It really is only my problem though, and is actually a great thing for the site but... I want to contribute, about games that I play and know about. Rather than complain, I'll just say the Wiki is great and the community are prepared to write about the games they care about. A light criticism would be that Wikipedia of all things is still more useful in accessing information outside of the outline of the game, and the current format of the Wiki cannot solve that problem.

Here: http://www.giantbomb.com/wikid/task/queue/ 
 
Plenty of pages need filling out. Those are the tasks for them. And it's obvious that any known title will have a decent wiki page on this site. If you really want to contribute and can't find anything, you need to either seek recently announced titles or obscure ones. 
 
And maybe you're not searching hard enough. I mean, you said you're a Phoenix Wright fan, right? Well, this character page has practically no information and she's pretty crucial to a case in the game she's in.

I feel the same way sometimes. That's why I stick to the Screened wiki.

@FluxWaveZ: I don't feel right researching games I haven't played, or don't give a damn about just to satisfy the task queue and fill out a page. It is a good initiative, but unless there is a game I like and know something about (which is a lot of games) I'm not too interested. When I do check there isn't much there, like now. Like I said though, that is my problem not the site's.

Edit: I could do some more Phoenix Wright pages, sure. I did a lot some time ago (check out the Miss Oldbag page, I put in more information than she deserves) but gave up because I felt like nobody would care but since I lost my job I have some free time and might get back in to checking out those pages. I played every phoenix wright game every night for a year so I have a stupid familiarity with the details of those games.

There is always stuff to edit, take the Ratchet and Clank game franchise for example, has every single enemy, item, world got its own page, I very much doubt that.

@Hizang said:

There is always stuff to edit, take the Ratchet and Clank game franchise for example, has every single enemy, item, world got its own page, I very much doubt that.

I could, for instance, add every combo weapon in Dead Rising as an item but I don't know how I feel about that. Seems like bloating the Wiki.

@AlisterCat: When a wiki has gotten to the point when that is all that you need to add, the Wiki is at its prime.

Why not just improve pages, then, go and add links or touch up the presentation.

I just filled out a couple of hours worth of Phoenix Wright characters. Enough to hold me over for a while.

The wiki is pretty robust, like all of them though popular games/memes etc are much better fleshed out than the more obscure stuff.
 
There is also a lot of little completionist detail missing from most of the entries (related loocations, concepts) and there are other pages while basically complete looking are out of date given current events.  Not to mention there doesn't seem to be a set style for most of the pages and many of them could potentiality benefit from having a uniform styel

I think there will always be stuff to add to the wiki for those inclined to do so.

It seems like old arcade, pc, and japanese games are the place to look for adding new stuff not on the task page. Pretty much anything that is going to be covered by Giantbomb in the podcast or quicklook is pretty much pointless to even try.

There are still tons of holes in the Wiki. Older games are usually the best place to start. There are a ton of older games with hardly any content at all. It's really only the super high profile older games that have decent content. A random example - Chrono Trigger is super detailed because it's a hugely popular game today. Axelay, which was a decently popular game back in it's day, just has a super short overview. I'd recommend looking up games from your childhood that weren't super high profile, and haven't kept a large following as time has passed.

And always keep an eye on the task page, there are always good pages to contribute to on there.

Don't be silly! I added the Wolpertinger page just yesterday! Theres plenty of things that arent in the wiki. You just don't know what you don't know so go learn some obscure shit!

Giant Bomb - Random Page

Someone made this a while ago. Hit it until you find a bare page, research it and fill it out if you want to get involved!

Actually, quite the opposite - I would say that there are quite a number of pages that would benefit from stuff being subtracted. 
 
Anyway, there's always some kind ofrefinement that can be done; I find most pages are sorely in need of proofreading. Aside from the usual grammar/spelling mistakes, there's also the fact that a lot of pages read like poorly-written fanboy blogs or verbose FAQs.
 
Also, don't forget, that there's concepts and objects to fill in!

I've no trouble finding areas that could use expansion. In fact, I have a list of stuff I plan to do. I forgot about it until just now, but most of the stuff on it probably still needs doing. Take a look, maybe there's something that interests you.

Wikipedia will ALWAYS be a better source 99% of the time because they have a bigger and better user base....and the current format of this wiki is simple because the user base is small and having a complex system would turn people off and nothing would get done.....however its a double-edged sword because its restrictive.

Maybe you can add guides and helpful info on how to get achievements? Even major titles on here lack any sort of guide and i end up going to gamefaqs for that stuff.

@AlisterCat: Sorry you lost your job duder.

I suggest simply broadening your horizons and playing more types of games than you are normally investing time in. Well over 2/3rds of the game pages I go to are thin or completely empty, because I'm not jumping on the new release bandwagon. I would rather play new games, and write about old ones.

Also, do not sink too far into the motive of doing it "for the wiki". Do it because you want to tell people about the game. The page will be better for it. Game pages are just 1 of 10 wiki categories on GB. If you think all an object page needs is a witty deck, then you're giving up before you've even started. :)

The thing Jeff always mentions when people ask him where the wiki can be improved is People pages and credits. Sometimes tracking down a single public photo of a person can take hours, and sometimes I get to ask them on twitter or facebook which one they wouldn't mind being posted. It's worth the effort! I had Chip Hinnenberg clarify his job titles and games I never knew he worked on. Grab a manual off your shelf and dig in.

The solution is simple: play more games so you have more to fill out!

@AlisterCat: If it makes you feel any better, I've been adding Japan-only PS3 pachinko slot machines based on Neon Genesis Evangelion lately.

@Jeff: I can't walk into a game store around here without seeing those cursed things. You're making me feel a profound need to add the pachislot sim for 24 as well as all of those delightful horse racing games for the SNES I always find in the bargain bins.

@Jeff said:

@AlisterCat: If it makes you feel any better, I've been adding Japan-only PS3 pachinko slot machines based on Neon Genesis Evangelion lately.

Do actual pachinko machines count as "arcade games?"