Weekly Wiki Update - Friday, May 9th 2014.

Alright so with this being the third week of doing these blogs I am actually confident I can keep this up. So I have been trying to figure out lately how we can really pump this wiki up and get more people working on it. I’ve tried bringing it up as much as possible and tried tweeting it out and such. I figure bringing the wiki tasks back will help somewhat, but does anyone else have any ideas? I would love to see more folks doing regular work on it, even if it is just small details.

Goals

Another week means another week of trying to work on some more release dates and basic data, BUT I decided to do another week on trying to work on the good old Game Boy games. There still seems to be a lot of forgotten games out there for the old brick, but I love it. I really did not get around to nearly as many games this week as I wanted to because of not feeling too good and work ramping up. I have not decided if I am going to focus on Game Boy games again next week or start on what my next idea is. Anyway, here are the couple of Game Boy pages I spent a little more time on this week:

• Torpedo Range
• Penta Dragon

Steam Trading Cards

Who would have thought that this week there would be more games adding Steam Trading Cards? This marks the second week in a row with a farming game, whoo hoo. This week I did not think there would be much for games adding Steam Trading Cards, then it seemed like there was a sudden glut of them. This time around however quite a few of the games that added cards were already in the wiki. Once again here is a list of games I had to create so that I could add them to the Steam Trading Cards concept.

• Farming World
• A New Reckoning
• Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments
• Space Run
• The Culling of the Cows

And that is it for this week. It was not nearly as productive as I was hoping it was going to be, but next week I hope to pick it up a little bit. Coming up in a couple of weeks will be when I have to slow down on some of the wiki stuff as summer for me is far more busy for work than the rest of the year. Let me know what kind of stuff you guys are doing or interested in doing in the wiki.

Coming soon: Farming World: The Culling of the Cows.

I think simply giving it more exposure would really go a long way. Highlighting certain wiki pages on the front page--if not eventually building a whole wiki hub--for instance would at least give any budding wiki editors some good examples to how they should maybe format a page ect.

@lordandrew: The amazing new gritty crossover.

Great work, man. Have you been keeping up with Game Boy World? It's a video series like Chrontendo that Jeremy Parish (the Gamespite guy, and the dude behind a lot of USGamer's better retro-gaming articles) is doing, looking at all the GB games chronologically, presumably for as long as he can take that sort of punishment. Figured it was germane to your interests, given what this recent anniversary seems to have inspired.

I haven't done too much this week what with all my dumb time-sponging Steam nonsense, but I did make a new page (albeit for a Japanese-only Monopoly conversion). I'm also kind of happy with how the header image for the Edo no Kiba page turned out, even if I couldn't find that much information to put on there.

And yeah, we'll definitely have to bring back Wiki Tasks or something like them at some point.

@mento: I have not seen those videos, but I am going to be now. Also, going through various board game/game show games and figuring out the different versions and such is something I have wanted to do but boy is that a large undertaking.

@bobafettjm:

Definitely think the Task system would help, it could focus the edits and get some of these pages more or less finished. Ideally I'd think a good number of these pages, especially on older games, will hopefully reach a state where they possibly could be considered closed.

Other ideas, most of these are outside our ability to do unfortunately..

1. Landing Page- I think they know they could use some key features like a better wiki landing page hub for editors, where you can see the most recent edits. You can get an idea from what the recent edits are by seeing which games are there, but it doesn't have the social reinforcement angle that points, seeing people's names attached to edits etc provide. But a better landing page would ideally also be a resource center for wiki editors, example pages, tutorial on how to use the interface, direct links to wiki forum discussions and most critically a wiki Style Guide
2. Cloning New Releases- A nice thing the wiki could have is allowing the user to Clone Releases when adding New Releases, so that you don't have to reselect every option over and over for each specific region and platform, when really all you want to change is 1-3 bits of info. That's one reason I stopped doing it. It was getting super tedious to repeat it over and over and over for every bit of DLC for games. It's more a problem today than in 2008 now that some games have dozens of DLC releases.
3. A more explicit Style Guide - Also, and this is something that really prevents me from dropping too much effort into the wiki, We really need a more explicit and complete Style Guide than what's posted in the stickies.e.g. Someone editing a Tiger Woods Golf Page should at least have an idea of what sections should belong on a Golf game Page and what order they should go in the article. I know I haven't done as much in the last couple years, because I'm simply not interested in dropping hours into something only to find out later I did it the wrong way. This one is probably also the easiest to accomplish, no coding is required. All it takes is time.
4. Tagging System for Incomplete Pages - And lastly what could really help is if users are allowed to tag pages as incomplete/need work in some fashion and have those appear as wiki tasks or suggested tasks. e.g. You may not know anything about Blood Knights, but you can see that the page is virtually empty, by tagging it you may alert someone else who does know something about it that it's unfinished. And people should get a small amount of points for tagging. If we had an explicit style guide, the tagging system would hopefully be flexible enough to allow users to select tags that demonstrate what is missing/incorrect on the page (e.g. missing Plot, the page uses Second Tense, missing release info etc).

@slag: Those are some great ideas, I especially like the idea of being able to tag them. People have been saying we need a real style guide for quite some time, and honestly is probably one of the first things we need.

Thanks man!

yeah it's kinda hard to do some more advanced features like tagging with the wiki without finishing the stylistic foundation first. At this point I don't think a guide needs to be perfect on day 1 (like the wiki itself there's no reason it couldn't be fluid enough to change as need be), it just would help to have one at all. Then once that's there, then you can really start building these other systems to grow and maintain the userbase of editors.

another idea I forgot to include is maybe some small financial incentives tied to wiki points. E.g. $5.00 off giantbomb store coupon for reaching 10K points etc. Something where there is no out of pocket for GB itself, but gives something to heavy contributors and has a high enough barrier where plagiarists won't try to game the system.

And it would be neat I think for elite contributors like yourself if you guys got a custom t-shirt prize, custom avatar badge or something like that for reaching elite thresholds (like 100k points). There aren't many of you guys and likely never will be so it wouldn't cost a lot of money (my guess is less than 150 dollars a year), but it would be a nice way to show appreciation and subtly encourage others. Obviously you guys don't do it to get rewarded, but I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to get a tangible thank you every once in awhile.

@slag: I don't do anything in the wiki for any type of reward. It is just an outlet for me to work with one of my biggest passions, which is video games.

Oh I know, It isn't why I've done it in the past and very occasionally still do either.

Just thinking about ways they can get others involved . Different Strokes for Different Folks, you know?