Weekly Wiki Update - Friday, August 22nd 2014.

Another week means another weekly wiki update. I hit a couple of milestones this week as I ended up passing 300k wiki points and 1600 pages made. Despite making sure I work on the pages that I have created over the years I also ended up jumping around a bit and updating some other pages as well. Sometimes I end up filling in some credits, sometimes the body of the page, and sometimes it was just adding more concepts and such.

Created Pages

So I just noticed that this week I surpassed 1600 pages created. I feel like my current quest to try and fill out my created pages as much as I can will probably be an ongoing thing for a long time to come. I kind of went all over the place with the games I worked on this week. Everything from a childrens Game Boy Color game to an Xbox Live Indie game to a Wii singing game.

I actually ended up playing through the entire game of Blue’s Clues: Blue’s Alphabet Book. I also had a really tough time tracking down the information for the Kevin VanDam Big Bass Challenge game which really took a lot more time away from being able to work on more pages.

Here are the pages I put a decent amount of content into from my list:

• Teddy Defender
• Blue’s Clues: Blue’s Alphabet Book
• Kevin VanDam Big Bass Challenge
• 180
• We Sing: 80s

Steam Trading Cards

Nothing much to say about these this week. The place that I usually get the info from about new trading cards seemed to stop updating. I did find another way of knowing so I will hopefully be able to keep these updated.

Here are the games I had to add to the wiki because of the trading cards this week:

• Battleplan: American Civil War
• GEARCRACK Arena
• Tango Fiesta
• Aritana and the Harpy’s Feather
• Momodora III
• Royal Quest
• Dungeons: The Eye of Draconus
• Shan Gui

So this weekend I will be plenty busy building myself a fence and a deck so I will probably not be able to get to too much editing. I am hoping this week to try and get more pages knocked out from my list, but every time it seems like I set high aspirations something ends up happening that makes it hard, stupid real life.

I have been noticing a decent amount of wiki editing going on this week, but I am also noticing it is mostly done by a handful of folks. I am super excited that you folks that regularly work on the wiki are doing it, but I really wish there were some way to pull in more new folks to get into it. The other problem I notice is that a lot of people get started into it and then only do it for a short while before falling out of it.

I was pretty excited to see that Jeff answered my question on the newest Jar Time video this week.

Alright, enough rambling from me this week. If any of you out there have any kinds of activity this week or have anything else to discuss about wiki editing let us know!

I went and added a bunch of games to the newly created MOBA genre :o

Also, I found a "there"/"their" error in the wiki :| I wonder how many more basic grammatical errors are just lying around. I know I've also seen a lot of "it's" and "its" used interchangeably...

This week was a lot of polishing up of existing pages for me. The Lu Bu page in particular required a lot of cleaning up, as well as addition, as it was mostly just a portion of historical information with nothing in regards to his actual game appearances. It could probably stand to be improved even more.

I also worked on the Jiraiya page. Before I really touched it this week, all it really had was some info on the character's Persona 4 appearance and a line noting not to confuse him with the Jiraiya of Naruto. So I went digging on the internet to do some research and found some good information on JIraiya's background to add to the page for proper detail.

The funniest edit of the past week was a quick edit I made to the Resident Evil: Revelations page (in the midst of all of @yummylee's own improvements). There was a strange section that labeled the game's lack of a save data reset option as a "controversy", which was hyperbolic. But the more bizarre thing was that someone had apparently taken a line referencing the game's instruction manual in which the word was not only spelled "Manuel" but linked to the Manuel Noriega page. It still annoys me that some people are treating the wiki as some sort of venue for snarky humor and sarcasm.

@hailinel: Nice work yet again on a bunch of character pages that are an interesting read thanks to me knowing nothing about them before. I am also annoyed every time I run across pages that try to be humorous, which usually makes the page a joke, which will make people not take this wiki seriously.

I also run into pages every now and then that try to inject something about how bad a game mechanic is or the graphics or even just the overall game.

@beachthunder: What?!? I totally missed that MOBA was added as a genre, that is great news. As for the grammatical errors there are plenty. I am sure I have been guilty of it sometimes, but man some of the pages are pretty bad. The thing with its and it's still baffles me, one is abbreviated for it is and the other is not.

@hailinel: I believe you mean the Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D page. :P That's actually the second time I've encountered someone getting those two mixed up recently. Anywhoo the Revelations page isn't quite up to snuff, though I have recently purchased it on 3DS to compare to its HD counterparts (so far, I think it's actually much better on 3DS) so I'll be able to refresh my memory and hopefully motivate myself to put a little more work into it.

Ah, right! There was so much talk about Revelations this past week that my wires got crossed.

Close to the end of November '93 now, probably be done with that month by next week. Then it's the 50+ games that were released in December. What's nuts is that 1994 and 1995 both have around 33% more releases than 1993 did, so I'm going to take a hiatus after finishing December '93 to work on a few smaller projects in order to refresh a bit.

No fun stories this time, though I did have to clean up a weird case where two US boxing games were rereleased in Mexico with a few superficial graphical changes (they're both headlined by a popular Mexican boxer instead). Chavez and Chavez II now point to the games they were based on, rather than having their own pages. Oh, and I added another mahjong game with girly pics. You know, important enhancements to the wiki.

Though speaking of which, it was cool to see Jeff talk about the wiki a bit this week, between the MOBA announcement on UPF and his answers regarding the wiki on the recent Jar Time. That I learned that I'd been doing something wrong (we shouldn't be adding the general "Sports" genre to games that have specific sports-related genres already like Football or Hockey, nor should we be adding "Fighting" to wrestling games) kind of confirms in my mind that we really need that style guide. I'm glad Jeff plans to stick to the finer details too, rather than focusing too much on creating page-building tutorials and the like. As always though, it makes little sense to put out a style guide when there's a big wiki update coming that'll no doubt prompt a revision or two. Just gotta wait and see I guess.

I'll admit that my ears always stand up whenever Jeff even makes a single mention of the wiki, if only in passing, but man... it's kind of a sad state of affairs when a mere mention is just about all this thing actually gets these days. Jeff's also the only one of the crew who actually seems to care as well; whenever Patrick or Vinny create a game page for the sake of a QL, they never even bother to fill in the basic details. Like, come on guys! Set an example.

Also, is this 'big wiki update' actually a go? I feel like I've heard that brewing for a year at this point. Oh, and congrats boba for hitting over 300K!

Whoah what did he announce? Was it related to the thread request I made?

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/delete-combine-requests-34/delete-moba-1490569/#11

I had no idea a big wiki update is coming! That's pretty exciting actually and makes the lack of style guide make some sense. Although in a way it might be best to do that beforehand so that the engineering work can be tailored to how Jeff wants it done.

Personally though I don't see the harm in getting the guide out now, people are probably doing it wrong in some fashion now and will have to change when the guide hits anyway. I don't think a Guide has to be set in stone, hopefully it is as adaptable as the wiki itself. It could be beneficial to get the 70-80% of it that won't change out now to at least get that corrected as early as possible.

Oh my god, the B.B. Hood page. Who uses tables to format entire articles of text? WHO DOES THIS?

@slag: I believe the wiki update was specifically singled out as the reason why a style guide and any other FAQ-like wiki additions will have to wait. I'm guessing the reason why Jeff doesn't want to work on a style guide right now is because he's already spending a lot of time figuring out what he wants the new update to include.

Jeff did indeed announce the new MOBA genre listing on UPF, probably in response to your thread and other requests like it. I'm wondering if it won't be followed by some kind of "online open-world survival" genre, given how those seem to have had a similar meteoric rise in popularity.

I think the one problem I've been seeing most frequently that could be fixed with having a style guide is how a lot of pages will just start the text section without an "Overview" heading, or any heading whatsoever. The headings are used for navigating the page from the drop-down menu, so they should always be there. Because I always add an Overview on every new game page I've worked on, I'd like to see an addition in the big update that just creates an Overview heading as default on any new page. That's probably the only universal one, besides maybe "Gameplay".

@mento:

Wow very cool!

Hunh I forgot about those kinds of games. Maybe you should ask him? Now might be a good time if they are already doing that with MOBAs. It might be easier for them to do that at once while they have the engineer's attention, instead of separately.

I have to imagine that amount of work has to be intimidating, especially if getting engineers lined up to make changes is something he doesn't often get to do. I don't blame him for wanting to focus on doing one or the other properly. I still think it wouldn't hurt to even get a very barebones very preliminary one out there for issues like the basic page structure (like the overview inclusion issue you mentioned), a style guide I think is something where "perfect" can be the enemy of "good enough" unlike the engineering change where you do probably need get that nailed down before it gets out the door (especially if he doesn't have reliable access to engineering resources). But I can certainly understand too from a personal workload side of things if that's just more than he can juggle atm. Especially if he has to make all those kind of decisions by himself.

But in any event however you slice it, these are all very exciting developments for the wiki!

Just a request, can we start at least adding decks to games that don't have them?

@beachthunder: @mento: I always try and add a deck and a small overview for every game when I see them blank or create them. I don't think I write very good decks, but I figure at least a very short description is better than nothing.

Also as a shout out I noticed the great job @fiye has done on the Spitting Image page, which is a game I have never heard of.

@bobafettjm: @beachthunder: I think decks might be the most intimidating thing after releases for wiki editors, neophytes and veterans alike. For one, a new editor might not know what a "deck" is and leave it blank during the page creation process, or skip past it if they're editing an existing page and don't notice it. If they follow the instructions and write a "short description of the game", they might not be sure what works as such. Even veterans might see a blank deck and wonder how many of the usual rules ("no second person, no past tense, no subjectivity") still apply if it's meant to be a short, breezy synopsis.

I know when I was doing NES games a little while back, I'd keep them fairly terse with decks like this: "An RPG game for the NES developed by so-and-so and published by whatstheirface in 1988. It was never released outside of Japan." I later realised that such a non-descriptive deck can be fairly useless for someone trying to search for that game based on its content, and the information I'd included (like release year and platform) would already be apparent from wherever you're seeing the deck (either the page itself, or the more detailed search engine). Most don't even realize that you don't need to include the name of the game in the deck, because the deck follows right underneath the title of the page. (I try to visualize it as "[Name of the Game]: A game where the player beats up horses. It didn't sell well.", where the title is pre-colon and the deck is post-colon. Eww, post-colon.)

These days I try to mix the terse with the descriptive. I'll include its genre and developer for search engine purposes, and then try to sum up the game's content succinctly without breaking those three rules I mentioned earlier. I'm still persistently worried that I messed up or that the deck doesn't work for one reason or another, but like bobafettjm says: any deck is better than no deck.

(I wouldn't even know what the deck rules are for, say, character or company pages, since I don't do a lot of those. Probably a good idea that you mention the game/series they're best known for, I guess?)

I certainly hope so, because I've been doing that for a couple years now when I see pages missing one...