The Wiki Discussion Thread

@beachthunder: The 'save page now' feature is relatively new compared to the Wayback Machine (Oct 2013 vs early 1996), and the vast majority of its records were crawled by machines. But the crawls aren't always complete - maybe I'm lucky, but I quickly found a releases page that had never been archived, despite the game in question getting several archives since its creation - and they used to take months to become available. It's faster now. Anyway, not disagreeing, the manual save option is very useful. And at least personally I write my stuff offline and paste it in when done, so at least I'll always be able to read it.

Pedantic edit update: Turns out I was mistaken; I forgot all the URLs got changed a while back and a copy on the previous design got saved. So technically there is a release page available, just not one that would get found for the current address.

I'm probably missing the right thread for this, so apologies in advance, but has there ever been a definitive order for game wiki headers (i.e. Overview, Gameplay, Story) on the GBWiki? Also, should "Characters" be its own H2, or would that go under the "Story" H2?

As far as I know there isn't one. But man I think it would help a ton, if there were guidelines like that.

fwiw, and this may be 100% wrong, I've always gone - Overview, Story/premise, gameplay (and sub headings such as modes), anything else (characters, powerups/weapons table, release version difference, critical/commercial reception, PC requirements what have you). The reason I do it that way, because in my experience that is how most old gameplay paper manuals generally did it.

But I'd recommend looking at pages made some of the other posters in this thread for best practices, as they are some of the very best editors the wiki has.

For me Characters are always their own H2, especially because in some genres especially fighting games, characters can arguably be the mechanical core of the game. They also tend to be the aspect of a game that is most readily remembered by the general public (e.g. my grandma knew who Mario was, but had no idea what a platformer was) and the aspect of the game that can transcend the game itself, as characters core part of a marketing campaign around the game.

@slag: This is pretty much the order I always go in too.

@slag: Thanks for the feedback! Speaking to the "Characters" heading, I can see your point regarding fighting game characters being under their own H2. For story-driven single player games, though, I feel like you could place "Characters" under the "Story" H2, since most NPCs in those kind of games only exist to interact with the player and drive the story forward.

It seems kind of crazy that there's no official GBWiki article layout guide, though. At least then I'd have something to refer to when I'm trying to clean up some of the more egregious game pages. Like you said, I guess I'll just have to follow some good editors and take cues from their articles.

@mrsensible:

re: characters - I think you could very easily make an decent argument either way, it's really a stylistic choice than a clear cut &dried right or wrong kinda thing. It's one of those things that has to be decided by the staff. And until they tell us how they want it done all we can do is make our best guess.

That being said, in my mind the Characters section only is for playable characters or AI controlled companions. NPCs like you mention, especially if their only purpose is dialogue, probably do belong under Story.

I've just made a concept page for the FOX unit from Metal Gear Solid and I'm trying to add Columbia (the country) as a Location on the page, but I'm getting an error message. It appears that the wiki is trying to create the association based on the URL "http://www.giantbomb.com/colombia/3035-3004/". However, the location page for Columbia (again, the real-life country) appears to reside at the URL "http://www.giantbomb.com/colombia/3035-690/". Do I submit a bug report about this or something?

EDIT: Sorry to be so nitpicky, but I also noticed the location article for Groznyj Grad is misspelled as Groznyi Grad. How would something like this get corrected?

@mrsensible: Okay, I added Colombia to the list. The issue is that the wiki still keeps deleted pages listed in drop-down menus, if you select the deleted version of the page, you'll get the issue. The wiki can be messed up in some strange ways.

Okay, now that I fixed that...I can't seem to edit anything else in the wiki o_O It just pops up with an error any time I try to do something... I logged out and back in and now things work...

@mrsensible: Add a comment to the Rename and Alias thread about the misspelling.

This seems like the best place to get this off of my chest: I really feel like parentheticals are one of the biggest issues with the GBWiki. Let me be clear that, in limited cases, parenthetical remarks can be useful and perhaps even necessary to express related ideas within a sentence or paragraph. That said, oh my god can excessive parentheticals really kill an article's flow and make me not want to bother reading it. I've even re-written certain paragraphs, most of them no more than a few sentences, that contained upwards of five or six separate parenthetical remarks...only to find later someone's reverted my edits. WTF?

TRDL; The love affair that some GBWiki editors appear to have with parentheticals needs to end. It's just poor writing.

Can you give us an example? What was the page you're referring to that got reverted?

@beachthunder: looks like it may have been Kirby Super Star.

@slag: Yes, this was one example that I've since edited again to remove parentheses. I'm not trying to put other editors on blast, but it's very frustrating to see this happen after carefully rewriting a paragraph. Plus, all the parentheticals that had been added to the Overview H2 were regarding specifics about regional releases of the game. That's redundant and excessive detail that has no place in the opening paragraph; in fact, it's exactly why the "Specific release details" sidebar exists.

I also don't want to wallpaper over everyone else's edits and have been trying to preserve as much of the existing articles as possible, but some articles need editing more severely than others...

@mrsensible: I would argue that there are a lot of people that don't bother reading anything but the article, so sometimes that information should be in there somewhere. Not that I am agreeing with the large use of parentheses. Also, some times an article just needs to be reworked, even if someone may have already spent a chunk of time on it.

@mrsensible: I get your frustration, we've been pretty fortunate here so far that there haven't been many edit wars. It's tough because you don't want to tamper too much with something somebody probably put a lot of time into writing, since that can sting to have that done to your own edits.

I don't know if I totally agree with your interpretation of what counts as excessive detail and parentheses usage, although I can see your point of view. What I really do wish is that the wiki had a style guide. So there would be an agreed upon standard that could be used to settle these kinds of disputes, but we've been waiting years for that. Unless the staff ever gives us one, chances are editors will continue to run into these kinds of problems that frankly should be pretty simple to resolve.

Wish I had a better answer for you, all I can say is the other editors probably are just trying to do their honest best just like you.

Folks are naturally territorial of their wiki work especially if they are working on group of pages within the same franchise. Wiki editors are especially OCD, and any changes might make them uneasy. I had that experience before.

For the parentheses issue, I think you should ask that wiki editor. I'm assuming that wiki editor isn't a native English speaker. I'm not one either. I have my grammar quirks which I can't shake off. Some folks are harsh on punctuation and grammar while others are lenient. I met a guy who uses a ton of semi-colons in Anime Vice and writes long sentences. Not being an expert in English, I didn't bother him since he was doing his own thing and contributing a ton to the wiki pages. The only time I step up was when an article has a lot of spelling errors and reject wiki submissions. You can easily put your article in word and fix most spelling errors except for ones that are like homophones.

I do agree on having a wiki style guide and a clear set of rules for the wiki pages.

I need some help. This is a really weird page that mentions an "upcoming" game from Artech Studios and 505 Games that was apparently going to come out in 2010...

I cannot find a single thing about this supposed game anywhere online - except for the GB wiki page itself. I came across this page because I was looking for another Tides of War (from 1999), but there's no mention of that game on GB's wiki, only this mysterious other game. Was this 2010 game page originally supposed to be related to the 1999 game? Should I just edit the page to make it about the 1999 game? I'm really confused.

@bobafettjm Do you remember editing this page at some point? You have 1 point.

@beachthunder: I don't remember it at all, I probably just fixed a small piece of grammar or something. This game seems to be a mystery, the closest I can seem to find is Naval Assault: The Killing Tide, which is the same developer and publisher and also based in WWII.

@beachthunder: @bobafettjm:

I know you guys asked this forever ago, but I just happened to see your conversation today. So I googled around a bit and discovered this

This is a press release for Naval Assault: the Killing Tide (emphasis mine)

https://www.develop-online.net/press-releases/505-games-reveals-official-trailer-for-naval-assault-the-killing-tide/0143798

505 GAMES REVEALS OFFICIAL TRAILER FOR NAVAL ASSAULT: THE KILLING TIDE

Gamers Travel to 1943 Where Submarines Command the Tides of War

Global video game publisher 505 Games and developer Artech Studios today revealed the official trailer for Naval Assault: The Killing Tide, available nationwide on June 15 exclusively for Xbox 360™.

Seems like a pretttttty big coincidence to use that specific phrase in a Press Release for a WWII game released in 2010 by 505 and Artech studios.

I'm going to be whoever made the page initially either was going off old info (maybe Naval Assault was originally intended to be called Tides of War but ran into trademark issues with the 1999 game) and the game's name was later changed, or they got confused and named it the wrong thing.

Either I think Bobafettjm's guess is right and this page should be deleted since Naval Assault already has its own.

EDIT: found something else

here is a UK retailer listing for a 360 game called "tides of war" that released on 6/15/2010 by 505

http://www.tower.co.uk/games/xbox-360/details/tides-of-war-xbox-360-114343515

It lists a a UPC code, 812872013060 , which if you google returns Naval Assault: the Killing Tide at other merchants

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Naval-Assault-The-Killing-Tide-Xbox-360-/121842059762