Publishing Aliases

Often, publishing companies change names or get bought up. Articles on publishers (or developers) should reflect the history of the developer. When filling out a a specific game's release form, you should be able to choose which alias of that publisher displays, so that the record accurately depicts who published that game. If Bally-Midway published a game, I should be able to put Bally-Midway as the publisher, not whatever each are called now.

This is definitely another one of those situations that needs to be cleaned up/clarified by a Style Guide. For a lot of the more venerable companies we do have their previous "legacy" incarnations as separate Company pages (take Namco and Namco Bandai for example, or Squaresoft), but there's also plenty of situations where the older company name has been superseded by the new one with the former being added to the latter's page as an alias.

I think we should probably ensure that there's separate company pages for every obsolete company, with links on those pages to indicate who now owns them or what they're now known as where applicable. Would probably be less messy than incorporating an alias-switching widget. (But then there's also the confusion that comes when people erroneously credit games made by the old company to the new one and vice versa. Hence it being a sticky issue that needs clarification from the high-ups.)

That's another way to do it, and I did consider that - but for a cohesive article about the company, isn't it (sometimes) better to have the complete story in one article? Atari for instance, makes a great read. It would also make about a dozen company pages, each with mere paragraph-long entries, rather than one cohesive story. Either way, the end goal is to have the games with the (temporally) correct publisher.

@bhtav: The complete story thing you could do for the most recent incarnation of the company, and leave the older ones with the paragraph-long entries. Atari's definitely had a crazy history, but Atari Games and Atari Corporation (and Atari SA for that matter) were completely different entities and worth keeping separate.

But yeah, I don't really have any decisive plans on how to handle this. I just concur with you that we need the older companies connected to the games they made. It's like crediting Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Wings because that was the last thing Paul McCartney was in.

Perfect analogy. I also agree; short articles, and the full history on the current incarnation is a logical route.

Agreed.

@snail: Welp, Just had my submission for DMA Design Ltd rejected because of the Rockstar article. This is exactly the problem. Now games published by DMA, long before Rockstar ever existed, are shown as published by a company that wasn't even around. Moreover, DMA didn't properly even "become" Rockstar, it was acquired, making the decision to reject doubly wrong. There really needs to be separate articles for separate publishers, because as it stands, the Wiki is completely inaccurate. Star Wars is a Lucasfilm, and the Disney Acquisition does not make Star Wars a Disney Production, because Disney did NOT produce Star Wars.

@bhtav: You're right, this must end. How many more innocent pages must be forcefully filled with crude misinformation until our foolish tyrannic governors open their eyes? Grab your pitchforks and torches, bring your families, your friends, your neighbors. Tonight we storm San Francisco, and the CBSi building shall burn, its every floor a glowing inferno, it will stand as a monolithic funeral pyre for a bygone era, and then we, the people, will preside and define a new generation of wiki-editing. And the coveted power to craft the Tools of Editing shall at last be in the hands of those who most use them.

Or you know, just tag @rorie and @jeff, and await that either of them or a mod kindly visit this thread.

The publishers and developers in the database have always been a mess dating back to the initial data import, from what I understand. And it was from the data import source that we wound up with a mass of disparate company names where boundaries blur. For a good example, type "Konami" into the search box and see how many company names pop up. Now try sorting through which of those Konami branches are publishers versus developers (or both!), which are just duplicates of the other, and which are actually associated with the games that they should be associated.

I award you 37 Internets.

It appears that way. The question is now how best to sort it all out before it gets worse. There are articles I'm holding off on, just so I don't have to go back again when this gets figured out.

@bhtav: Regarding that content that you're holding off, even if you think the studio you're writing an article for should be named differently on the site, or should perhaps not even have a page on the site, or exist as a separate page than the one you're writing for, whatever information you want to add probably belongs somewhere, if not as a whole wiki article then as a subsection within one. So if you add it to the site now, it can easily be cut/pasted later should it be required!

@snail: You're definitely right - it's just a pain to keep track of everything that will need to get fixed if it takes a long time to fix.

The issue with the publishers has existed for nearly five years. Don't expect it to be resolved any time soon.

:Grumble Grumble: