Weekly Wiki Update - Saturday, September 6th 2014.

Here we go with another week chronicling the stuff I have been up to in the wiki. I spent the first couple of days working on games from my created list but then for whatever reason stumbled across the page for Super Collapse! And found it to be completely empty. This surprised me quite a bit since I remembered it being a pretty popular game at one point so I decided to fill in a bunch of information about the game.

Created Pages

This week I decided to start off with something other than a game page from my list to I went with the planet from Star Wars Episode 1 Racer, Mon Gazza. I kind of jumped around quite a bit this week going from a location page to a mobile game and then a couple of Xbox Live Indie Games.

Here are the games from my list of created pages I worked on this week:

• Mon Gazza
• Zenonia 4
• Jigsaw Jumble
• Dot.

Steam

Not too much activity this week on getting pages up for Steam games. I spent more time working on other pages…and maybe playing a whole lot of Dead Rising 3 on Steam.

Here are the games I had to add to the wiki because of Steam:

• Date Warp

While I ended up getting some more done, it still wasn't as much as I would have liked. I ended up actually playing games a bunch this week instead of just writing information about them. One thing I have noticed however is that even when playing for fun I play games in a different way than I used to. I find myself wanting to document every object, take tons of screenshots, and notice concepts in games I never did before.

Just in case not everyone noticed, we now have a platform page for the New Nintendo 3DS system, which I am all in favor of.

One thing I have been thinking of more and more lately is the fact that I think too many games have just one single page for multiple releases, despite some of them being very different. It seems to be a hard thing to judge as to how many or what kind of differences would qualify a game to have a separate page.

Anyway, what have all of you been up to in the wiki?

Ha...yep. The majority of my wiki points are from adding as many objects/concepts to games I've played. I have to say, there's not enough focus on non-game pages (concepts, objects, locations, etc...).

Finished the Chaos;Child demo so added a couple of stuff to that. Added lots of dates and stuff to Assassin's Creed: Unity, also a overview which was blank. Added releases to Destiny, Forza Horizon 2, The Evil Within.

Also encountered a bug, adding a new release removes the "First Release Date" for some reason

I've just started getting serious with the Wiki now. This week I've just been adding some stuff to the Dan Ryckert page, but I'm planning on adding a lot of stuff to different event pages tomorrow and going forward.

I made a thread recently bringing up the idea asking what is enough for a game port to get a new page, as like you said the requirements are all a little murky really. I still haven't received an answer as to whether I should create a new page for Revelations, either...

Anywhoo, wiki'ing! I haven't done anything major, but I have been writing some overviews for previously empty pages like Until Dawn, Gat out of Hell, Silent Hills, and I recently started working on Resident Evil: Revelations 2! And on that note, the Bloodborne page is just as vacant as ever... Saying that I could fill it in a little, but I admittedly haven't been following that game very acutely.

I got super side-tracked this week. Shortly after completing the US Block for December '93, I decided for whatever reason that I ought to be screencapping the company logo screens at the start of the games I was covering, at least whenever they were different. I've added about 150 of those to the relevant company pages.

At which point I got distracted by how empty those company pages were of text and worked on a few of those too.

And then I started discovering cases where we had multiple similar company pages that needed combining. Loriciels and Loriciel SA; Gremlin Graphics Software and Gremlin Interactive; Virgin Games, Virgin Games and Virgin Interactive; Pack-In-Soft and Pack-In-Video; Victor Entertainment Ltd. and Victor Entertainment; RSP and Riedel Software Productions. Most are cases where a company renamed itself something very similar at some point during its existence, meaning there should have been a chronological division between the two pages; however, because the names were so similar there were plenty of cases where a wiki editor more or less flipped a coin when it came to crediting a game page to one or the other and the two pages became an unholy mess. We might still have a lot of cases remaining where the wrong company page is attached to a game at the release level (it'll just say "Delete" for developer/publisher) so if any of you editors find one, feel free to change it.

Anyway, I'm absolutely with you with regards to single pages for multiple releases. Can I assume you're referring to things like game shows? A lot of the licenses to those adaptations passed hands in the 30 or so years they've been around, and even though the games are functionally identical each developer had different ideas for the presentation and interface. There's a few other licenses that had the same issue too (an anime called Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes, had a single game page for what turned out to be at least six identically-titled but otherwise separate adaptations).

The whole single page for multiple releases is the result of the the search on the old site only showing the title of the game, so the moderators were very reluctant to approve multiple game pages with the exact same name. I basically had to plead with ZombiePie for quite a while before I was given approval to split the Dick Tracy games into separate pages.

The policy was never officially abandoned as I recall, but it's obviously not enforced any more (and not really necessary with how search works now). I've personally had my eye on the Home Alone page for some time, just need to muster the will to do it.

There's a lot of inconsistency with the way games with multiple released revisions are handled. A page ofr Dead or Alive 5: Final Round was recently deleted at he behest of a user that considered it just a content compilation of previous releases, but we don't know all of the details on what will be included, whereas Ultra Street Fighter IV got and kept a new page right out of the gate despite it largely being content that came from earlier Street Fighter IV versions.

@beachthunder: I find that pretty much every time I open a page for a non-game (locaction, object, ect.) the page is pretty much completely empty.

@mento: The company pages are a total mess it seems like. Also yes game show pages are some of the worst for this, but once in a while I come across others like Willow that are also very different but yet share a single page.

@amyggen: Great! Welcome to the world of the Giant Bomb wiki. We can always use more people willing to put some work in.

Sigh, I just noticed that pages pre 2013 seem to have associations missing. I know I definitely added a lot of concepts/objects to Borderlands 2 and Alpha Protocol and now they are gone :|

/me sighs. I miss this place.

Did you add them all recently? There was an incident months back where it was occurring to quite a lot pages, and not just associations but credits as well =/. Maybe nobody ever got around to re-adding all of that stuff to Borderlands 2 & Alpha Protocol since then.

No, it was years ago :|

I suppose I'm going to have them all in again...

@brackynews: Aren't you here?

Also, I am not sure if it was ever discovered exactly what was causing the association to go away, but I am still finding pages every once in a while that have them missing. Not sure if they are newly missing or just from back when it all started.

Is this a suitable place to discuss "editing disputes" or whatever? Because not to long ago I removed the WiiWare and DSiWare platform assiocations from Mecho Wars, since while they were announced in 2009, I could find no indications that they were ever actually completed and released. Even noted this in the page body. But now I see that @beachthunder has added them back in with no comment, and I'd like to know if this was an oversight or if you think I was wrong.

Righto. It's gone again now.

Also, I'm sure Bobafett doesn't mind people posting editing disputes here.

@beachthunder: @blacklagoon: I absolutely encourage people to talk about wiki issues or concerns, ideas, or anything else that gives it some attention.

@bobafettjm: So rarely now. I'm mainly on wiki.eveuniversity.org these days. :D

@brackynews: You should come back!

It seems to be an extensive problem . A couple months ago I spent several hours adding a hundred or so associations back to Bioshock.

What's odd is the counter acts like the association is still there, yet it's not visible on either page (e.g. x character appears in two games and lists none)

@beachthunder: Thanks.

@slag: Jeff has been talking about the wiki having trouble with pages with lots of associations for a while now. Similarly to what happened with large user lists it's just not built to handle them, and they don't have an usable way to fix it this time. I suspect them disappearing is just a quick fix to keep the site from breaking.

hunh ok, that's good to know.

So basically adding them all back just potentially compounds the problem then?

I have seen games lose associations (like Lost Odyssey) that maybe only number a few dozen or so, so it doesn't purely seem to be huge lists only.

@slag: I have seen it happen on some of the character pages I made that were only attached to 1 game and barely anything else.

@bobafettjm:

did those games themselves that the characters were connected to have a lot of associations?

If Blacklagoon understood Jeff correctly, then what I think he was saying that problem is generally on the game pages themselves. Associated pages like character pages break because the game page association list breaks from becoming too large.

E.g. When I was fixing the Bioshock page, Andrew Ryan's page listed two appearances, yet it only mentioned one specifically (Bioshock 2). When I fixed the Bioshock page it automatically fixed Andrew Ryan's as well. (2 appearances, 2 games listed). So even though Andrew Ryan's page only had 2 associations it still broke, because what it had been connected to was broken.

What I was getting at with Lost Odysssey is that was a game that didn't strike me as one that had a large number of concepts, characters, objects etc connected to it ( I could be mistaken as I'm not very familiar with the game) so it didn't seem like one that should break.

@slag: One of them that jumps out in particular is Kinect Sports. And now that you bring it up all those associations are gone, and there really wasn't too much on it before.

@bobafettjm: hunh,well that's depressing.

makes you wonder if list size is the real issue or not.

I see that page was edited in April. If I remember correctly that was around the time the bout of associations disappearing seemed to be happening en masse.

There's also an issue with adding associations for pages that no longer exist - for some reason, some things appear on the dropdown list that shouldn't. For example - do not add 'paintbrush' to the objects list, instead add 'paint brush'. If you add paintbrush, the edit won't go through.