SmashWiki talk:Community portal/Archive 3

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Hey

I've got a few questions:

• Why don't you guys upgrade Smashwiki? I noticed the MediaWiki version it is on is version 1.6.8, why not upgrade to 1.9?
• Why not have release SmashWiki's content under a free license? It makes uploading and adding image soo much easier. Just use a creative commons license that requires attribution.
• There are a lot of terms on the wiki that I have never heard of. Could we, instead of using shortforms, use the full terms? I mean things like SD, ADA, etc.

That's pretty much it.--Richard 23:40, October 25, 2007 (EDT)

The first two questions are out of my scope to answer. On the third one, I agree. Any instance of terms like "ADA" should be replaced by down aerial, or whatever long name is appropriate in the community. I'll be on the lookout. – MaskedMarth ^{(t c)} 21:33, November 2, 2007 (EDT)

I know this sounds pathetic, but I need to know what aerials and stuff do. I haven't played Smash much in my life, and I have to beat someone on Hyrule Temple who is either using Young Link or Sheik. I am using Kirby. Can someone tell me what the stuff does and maybe a few strategies? Thanks.

Skill

How do you determine your skill? I see lots of Pros, but are there any other ranks? If so, how are they decided? - hydrokyogre]]

We don't have a formal ranking system (the closest thing you have is Power Rankings, which are usually amongst only the best players in a region). So it's kind of murky, deciding who's a pro and who's not. It's mostly based on a general idea, because we don't have as far-reaching a tournament circuit that would allow us to base a player's skill on tournament results alone.

I recently protected the Professionals page so that people can't wrongly put themselves as pros, and I'll let the talk page decide what changes to make. Based on videos and on hearsay from already-established players, we can make an educated guess as to whether player X is truly pro-level. – MaskedMarth ^{(t c)} 21:54, November 2, 2007 (EDT)

Current events

I removed the outdated tournaments on the Current events page and made a suggestion on its Talk page about linking it on the main page . I realized that it was allready linked but underused, but i think we should probably link it between tournaments and tiers (wait i forgot my signature lolz) --Shyne - (Talk • Contributions ) 17:48, November 12, 2007 (EST)

Mass Vandalism

We've just been hit by a member from another Smash Bros based Wiki, User:Zoomer555. He has edited about 200 articles and replaced them with "THIS SITE SUCKS" and a link to the competing Wiki. I'd say this guy needs to be banned IMMEDIATELY, and then we all need to work together to restore the assload of articles he's damaged. This part is of course a piece of cake, but given the amount of articles it is very time consuming, and on top of that I don't have very much time to do the restoring myself at present, so I'll definitely need some help. Back to banning Zoomer, is there someone who can quickly contact an admin? -Thores 23:14, November 13, 2007 (EST)

i think i got them all. my hands hurt. :C we need to change coding so bots can't edit like that. can someone please notice me and make me a sysop already?? FyreNWater - (Talk • Contributions ) 00:02, November 14, 2007 (EST)

I know from observing Requests for Adminship at Wikipedia that users trying to be admins tend to receive more support votes if they say they just think they'll be trustworthy admins who have been around the site long enough that they believe they'll use the tools well, as opposed to users that state out loud "I really want to be an admin". While I don't doubt you would use the admin tools well, that's just a little something to keep in mind. ^_^ But thanks for reverting all those edits. =D

Anyway, I'm assuming no one here knows how to create and run a bot, and neither do I. Which is kinda a shame, because bots would be excellent in reverting obvious vandalism for us, like replacing pages with short allcaps messages, and replacing all instances of "Pokemon" with "Pokémon" and correcting misspellings, as the best examples I can think of. Erik, Lord of Universes 02:23, November 14, 2007 (EST)

Looking into this matter: I don't see any user at the competing Wiki named "zoomer" or "Zoomer555" or anything like that. In fact, if I were the one reverting all those edits, I would've assumed this vandal was yelling it's the competing Wiki that sucks and was trying to rub that fact in our faces. Anyway, in either case it's an issue on our end that we should blast away. Erik, Lord of Universes 02:40, November 14, 2007 (EST)

Thanks for reverting all his edits, guys. I protected the Main Page, so hopefully any future vandalism won't be as dangerous. Do you think I should send a message to the competing Wiki about this? None of the users there resembles Zoomer555, and most of them seem to be contributing to their Wiki more or less innocently. – MaskedMarth ^{(t c)} 13:27, November 15, 2007 (EST)

Also, I blocked him permanently, in case you were wondering. – MaskedMarth ^{(t c)} 14:58, November 15, 2007 (EST)

I don't know if this was vandalism or not, but someone just took away the "impress your friends" part of the "Kirby" page. -A new member

Sysop Nominations

I've been considering the issue for some time (most actively in the past couple of days) and I'm going to post details about the new sysop nomination process. Since this is a wiki, and I'm aware that people are wanting to see this sooner rather than later, I'll post my current thoughts on it, and you can let me know what you all think of the process. This is not the place to actually nominate sysops, so don't do that now. Here's what I have in mind:

• Someone who wants to become a sysop must nominate themselves. (If you think someone should become a sysop but they won't nominate themselves, you're free to convince them to do so. If they choose not to, however, you can't nominate them.)
• Nominees post their name on a special sysop nomination page, and other users are welcome to post their thoughts on that person's nomination. Much like Wikipedia's pseudo-voting mechanism, people can elect to support or oppose someone's attempt to become a sysop.
• The consensus of the user community will play a role (though will not necessarily determine in its entirety) whether or not a user's sysop nomination will be approved. Current sysops will have more influence in this process, but when it comes down to it the actual changes need to be made by a bureaucrat, and all decisions are subject to SW leadership approval. (That said, I don't expect community consensus and SW leadership decisions to come into conflict very often, if at all.)
• I haven't decided whether I want nominations to be ongoing, or to only last a certain amount of time. I'm leaning toward the former, but reserve the right to close nominations if they get out of hand. I definitely don't want to end up adding more sysops than we need for the activity we have, and this is (for me) one of the main sticking points.

This is what I have in mind, but I'm aware some people could take issue with these points. But it's reasonable enough that I shouldn't try to evaluate community response without posting this here. So voice your concerns (or your support), and if there are no apparent problems I'll post the actual sysop nomination page in the next day or two. --Kirby King 11:48, November 19, 2007 (EST)

An existing active administrative force on the wiki would be the best judge of who to appoint to SysOp status or not; those who can perceive the difference between a quality contribution and a well-intentioned one that just happens to read like a colouring book. Allowing people to nominate themselves and then receive votes from the clearly wiki-inept community would do more harm than good I think, and ultimately, it would bring about the same problems that exist on the forums themselves--namely moderators who don't understand what a moderator is and what roles and responsibilities are tied to that title. Contributing to the wiki is not enough to make it a top-level media presentation; you have to have a bold, administrative force behind it who understands exactly what they are there to do and doesn't feel the need to get community consensus every time a contentious issue surfaces.

I've been kickin' around here for awhile now so you can probably trust me when I say that you do not want to leave the appointment of sysops and bureaucrats up to this community. Spend a month checking the Recent Changes and browsing random articles if you don't believe me, but this should NOT be a democratic process. Most of the contributions require cleanup to meet the standards of a presentable encyclopedia, most users have no idea how categories work, most don't understand talk pages or signing comments, and most have no concept of how templates work. Those are all core functions to understanding how a wiki is run and how a community-written encyclopedia can succeeed; based on that principle alone, this should NOT be a democratic appointment of new administrators. --RJM ^Talk 13:53, November 19, 2007 (EST)

Setting aside for the moment your criticisms of moderators (I disagree with your assessment of our moderator team, but that is best dealt with in Forum Disputes, not here) I agree that the process should not be wholly democratic. The consensus of the community should be a factor in the decision making process, but by no means is it sufficient alone to either make someone a sysop or derail their chances. I think I made this reasonably clear above, but I can't tell whether you're disagreeing with what you think I said or if you're lending support to that idea. Either way, I think it's important for sysops to play a role in helping to educate new users with the ideas you mention. And part of that involves a commitment to helping rather than criticizing newer users who are well-intentioned. (This is a goal that applies to the network, but in the context of SmashWiki it's an important consideration for potential sysops.) --Kirby King 14:58, November 19, 2007 (EST)

A large part of the reason that well-intentioned users don't know how to operate the wiki rests with the very tedious administrative task of building a backend to the community with intuitive help files, guidelines and project pages. This is something I've held back from doing myself, but am not opposed to tackling--I just wasn't sure of the future of this wiki. Hopefully, this is a step in the right direction. --RJM ^Talk 16:11, November 19, 2007 (EST)

The Sysop Nominations page is now up. Comments on the talk page, if you have them. --Kirby King 19:30, November 20, 2007 (EST)

Fighter pages

Should a link to a character's general information page be provided in the disambiguation template? Seems like it might be appropriate. For example, on Yoshi (SSB), the disambiguation would read as follows if what I were suggesting were to be accepted:

This page is about Yoshi's SSB appearance. For information about his Melee appearance, see here. For his Brawl appearance, see here. For general information about Yoshi, see here.

As far as I know, links to the general information pages are rarely found, so this may direct a bit more traffic towards these pages. - EPX2 21:51, November 21, 2007 (EST)

Or is this a matter of such minor consequence that I should just go ahead and do this?... User:EPX2/sig

I think that's a little too much for a template to be honest. A better solution for finding more links to general information would be to link to the general info page right off the bat in the fighter page article. So Yoshi (SSB) would open like so: "Yoshi (ヨッシー, Yosshī, sometimes spelled Yossy in Japan) is a starter character in SSB."

Frankly, I think the Melee article has it right with This is about Yoshi's Melee appearance. For other uses, see Yoshi. --RJM ^Talk 23:10, November 22, 2007 (EST)

Even better. I'll go ahead and edit the fighter pages. User:EPX2/sig 10:40, November 24, 2007 (EST)

Massive Cleanup

The vast majority of the stuff up for deletion are gone. Discuss in this topic if you have any complaints or pages you'd like to see back. Thanks for reminding me, EP! --Pyoro T

No prob, Manta. Also, I fixed your link for you. User:EPX2/sig 13:56, November 24, 2007 (EST)

SWF bannings

Shouldn't users who've had their accounts banned over at Smashboards also have their editing privileges revoked here at the Wiki for the duration of their banning? I've already seen two instances (here and here) of banned users continuing their antics over here, and it seems like the most logical option would be to prevent them from accessing this site.

I understand that the Wiki and the boards are two separate entities, but we *do* use a singular account system to access both sites... if you do something to negatively affect your account at one site, I see no reason why you shouldn't be affected at the other. User:EPX2/sig 12:28, November 25, 2007 (EST)

Agreed. --RJM ^Talk 15:53, November 25, 2007 (EST)

I also Agreed, cause I cannot disagreed without a degree. jo joooooo jo que les parecio?But seroiusly, IDIDITFORTHELULZ just caused vadalism and I have to revert a lot of his edits.--Fandangox 17:55, November 25, 2007 (EST)

Interesting... seems that the admins have already considered this (see last sentence in parentheses)... User:EPX2/sig 19:33, November 25, 2007 (EST)

Well, that's pretty obvious If you are banned from a forum were you have more freedom, how come you wouldn't be banned in a enciclopedia???? (@'.'@) jo JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO jo. yep, I'm annoying.--Fandangox 16:15, November 26, 2007 (EST)

This is supposed to be the case, but doesn't quite work with the infraction system on SWF. I don't have a fix for this at the moment. --Kirby King 22:18, November 28, 2007 (EST)

Humongous templates

Sorry if this is the wrong place to discuss this, but I'm not sure where the ideal talk page would be so I'm putting this up for debate here. The new expansive universe templates that seem to have been distributed throughout the Wiki, such as Template:Mario Melee, are ridiculous. Why have these giant templates on every freaking page, when you can simply go to the relevant universe article instead? Especially when, in most cases, the template is bigger than the article it's posted in? They're obviously useful to some people, so I wouldn't mind these templates being linked to or something on the relevant pages, but putting the template itself on the articles just clutter them up too much, sometimes obnoxiously. I move to remove them, at least to an extent. -Thores 02:48, November 27, 2007 (EST)

If there are problems with its hugeness, we can use that template hiding thing. – Smiddle ( Talk • Conts ) 09:17, November 27, 2007 (EST)

Automatically hiding templates is a good thing to know about, but more importantly, we should try to emphasize that just because an article is included in a template, does NOT mean that the template has to be in that article. There are plenty of inline links designed to redirect users to related topics, but only properly fleshed-out, non-stub articles should have templates. For instance, Template:ccsc includes all articles related to the CCSC such as Lord Efrem, but that particular article is much shorter than the template itself and so it only appears on longer articles like Kithkin and Teh Fair. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that all articles that are too short to justify including a template at least link directly to another related page that's long enough to have it. (i.e. Anti-Wendy Wu Crew doesn't have a template, but it links to Jiangshadow which does) This intuitively directs readers to a "portal" into the subject matter without cluttering up every little article. --RJM ^Talk 15:20, November 27, 2007 (EST)

Why we just instead of have a original smash bros template, a meele template and a Brawl template, we just create one template with all links refering to that universe.--Fandangox 15:23, November 27, 2007 (EST)

That auto-hide feature sounds like the perfect solution to me. That way, on any page you can just open up a template to get to a related article in a more orderly fashion, instead of looking at the categories and spending time searching through them. Until now I would've supported removing them all, but now I think they're great to keep if they can be hidden and extendable. Erik, Lord of Universes 01:56, November 28, 2007 (EST)

Until an auto-hide feature is actually implemented, I propose we strip down the templates to remove details that may not be as... essential to note as others. Basically, I think the templates should list characters and stages (and possibly stage locations, items, and other [non-playable] characters) exclusively; everything else can be removed in my opinion. It would definitely kill the size of some of the larger templates, which tend to be bloated due to moves and trophies (see: Template: Mario Melee).

Besides, I think it's safe to say that it when it comes to moves and trophies, most visitors aren't really going to be thinking in terms of game franchises - that is, their train of thought likely isn't going to be, "Hmm, I wonder what moves and trophies xxx universe contributes to Smash?" Thoughts? User:EPX2/sig 20:50, December 6, 2007 (EST)

See Template:Mario Melee for an example of what I mean. User:EPX2/sig 19:37, December 7, 2007 (EST)

Alright, I went ahead and stripped down the SSB and Melee templates. However, I would like some input on what to do with the Brawl templates. Should Assist Trophies be listed? On one hand, the item can be considered similar to the Poke Ball and since I removed Poke Ball Pokemon from the Pokemon templates, some may feel that I should do the same with the ATs. However, since ATs comprise characters from several Nintendo franchises, rather than one specific series, others may find it appropriate to list them as they likely have some significance if they were chosen to be ATs. User:EPX2/sig 16:59, December 8, 2007 (EST)

Great work with the templates, it makes them a lot easier on the eyes, and in a sense, practical; after all, it's the categories that are supposed to be much more comprehensive in the articles they encompass, and it's the templates that should link to the most important and practical articles among the pages covered by the categories.

And maybe you should put the helper characters in the templates that aren't Pokemon... That's a hard question to answer, though. Erik, Lord of Universes 01:59, December 10, 2007 (EST)

Alright, since no one else has anything to add, I'll continue downsizing the Brawl templates while leaving Assist Trophies in. User:EPX2/sig 09:20, December 15, 2007 (EST)

MediaWiki Upgraded

I just finished upgrading MediaWiki to the latest version. It was a little difficult (and long-neglected) because of the modifications we made to integrate with vBulletin. That said, I think things are still functional, since I've been able to log in and out, but if you hear about any problems (specifically, people trying to log in for the first time) please let me know. (Also, the wiki was really slow for awhile after I finished, but it seems much better now.) --Kirby King 00:18, November 29, 2007 (EST)

Well, I didn't have any problems at any point, but mind telling us about everything new and different? :D (Well, so far I see the edit-sizes listed in Recent Changes as one improvement) Erik, Lord of Universes 02:15, November 29, 2007 (EST)

If you click on the "history" tab of a page, you can also undo an edit done by another individual.—Preceding unsigned comment added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]])

URLs that link to offsite images no longer appear as images, which will be helpful in cleaning up some of the crew banners and other miscellaneous image-based spam that tends to float in every now and again.--RJM ^Talk 12:40, November 29, 2007 (EST)

Pressing "Show preview" shows a preview of what the edit summary will look like right under the Summary box. Also, if you try to recreate a page that's already been deleted, the article's deletion log will appear (here's an example). --YodaMasterZ 18:25, November 30, 2007 (EST)

But yeah, great updates. -- The Magnum Master 09:08, November 29, 2007 (EST)

Anyway to make the search results (either "Go" or "Search") case-insensitive? Wait, nevermind. Anyway to make it so that linking to a page is case-insensitive? It's kinda silly to have to create a page that redirects to another due to capitalization differences. =/ User:EPX2/sig 20:38, December 7, 2007 (EST)

Bigger fish to fry, I think. The case-sensitivity of MediaWiki is a pretty fundamental part of how the core of it all works--I don't think there's much we can do. Besides, there could very well be a smasher called Bat Drop who shouldn't be confused with the bat drop stadium mode based on capitalization alone. --RJM ^Talk

New Template

Should we create a template like the smasherbeta or "character" template for crews with basic information like number of members, ranking (if it have one) founder/leader, # of tournaments attended, activity (active/inactive). It is just an idea that I think it would make organization easier.--Fandangox 21:57, December 12, 2007 (EST)