Talk:Greatest of all time

Deletion for this, along with other pages

I agree with the deletion tag, and also would like to simultaneously nominate Top 100 Melee Players of All Time and Top 100 Smash Bros. Players of All Time for deletion as well, on account of all three being entirely subjective (with the "top 100" flat out saying they're subjective to begin with). Not every little detail has to be covered, Ac2k. Aidan, the Festive Rurouni 00:34, December 8, 2020 (EST)

First of all, just because information is subjective doesn't mean it can't belong on SmashWiki. SW:NPOV clearly says that subjectivity is allowed as long as it reflects the consensus of the Smash community, which this article does. Name a Melee player who believes that one of the four players mentioned isn't the GOAT, or name a Brawl player who believes that Mew2King isn't the Brawl GOAT, and maybe I'll agree with you.

Also, every single power ranking system ever created is subjective by definition, including SSBMRank and the global Ultimate rankings. They're decided by a panelist of several players, who rank each competitor based on a variety of subjective factors. Are you suggesting we delete those too?

In addition, I don't think it's fair to describe the idea of the GOAT of Smash as a "little detail," when there is a significant amount of discussion within the Smash community surrounding it. Google "goat melee" and you will find countless videos on YouTube 1 2 3 4, discussion threads on reddit 1, and news articles 1 2 3 4 5 6 talking about the greatest of all time in various Smash games. Awesome Cardinal 2000 02:50, December 8, 2020 (EST)

Subjectivity aside, I fail to see how this article is even necessary. The phrase "greatest of all time" is very self-explanatory, and frankly the article as a whole reads more like an elaborate April Fools joke than a serious article. Alex the Weeb 10:21, December 8, 2020 (EST)

The phrase "button mashing" is very self-explanatory, do you think it deserves a page? How can you claim to have a non-biased view of the subject if you immediately go off claiming that it reads like an "April Fools joke?" You've seen what SmashWiki actually looks like on April Fools right? Awesome Cardinal 2000 15:11, December 8, 2020 (EST)

Button mashing does deserve an article because it has an effect on gameplay, that is being able to get out of grabs, sleep, stun, etc. It can be useful to know what effect it has at all levels and know the specifics at competitive levels. --CanvasK (talk) 15:30, December 8, 2020 (EST)

I understand, I'm just arguing that it's a bad reason to delete an article. Awesome Cardinal 2000 18:17, December 8, 2020 (EST)

I have to agree with Alex. There's a difference between "even non-competitive Smash players know who the best at the game are" and "not everyone who plays Smash knows about this mechanic that actually has an effect on the game".

Also, to go back to your initial response to my comment (apologies for getting to this so late):

• Alright, I'll concede that. I could probably make a case for M2K being a GOAT in Melee, but, given that my competitive knowledge is lacking (though not nonexistent), I don't know how well that case could be made (and I definitely wouldn't be able to tell you who would agree with me).
• I'll concede this too, though I would like to reemphasize my nomination for the deletion of the "top 100" pages, as, frankly, going outside of a top 10 makes things way more subjective than it needs to be (as in, there's much more room for debate and argument).
• Practically every competitive game ever, fighting or not, video game or not, has their discussions about who's the best at the game, but not everyone notes it as a major point. Yes, we, unlike a lot of other wikis regarding competitive games, actually cover the competitive scene behind our games, but not everyone focuses on it because it's not as important as other aspects. That is not to say it is unimportant altogether—by all means, note that Isai, Armada, M2K, ZeRo, and MkLeo are the best at each respective Smash game—but there is no reason to spell it out on a full page when it can be covered in one sentence to get its full meaning across.

Aidan, the Festive Rurouni 19:03, December 8, 2020 (EST)

"not everyone focuses on it" is not the same as "absolutely nobody cares about it." This page goes into far more detail than any of the smasher articles, because there is significant debate in Melee over Armada vs. Mango, which this page explains. Also, SW:NPOV states "Avoid giving undue prominence to certain views". This would keep fringe opinions like Mew2King being the GOAT of Melee from cluttering the page. Awesome Cardinal 2000 02:27, December 9, 2020 (EST)

In addition, SmashWiki is not ranking the 100 players on that list ourselves, we are only reporting on a well-known and reputable source from the community, which is not the same. (This is basically how all global power rankings work.) Awesome Cardinal 2000 02:28, December 9, 2020 (EST)

I strongly question the need for this kind of article, never mind the fact that it looks a mess. Reading this talk page hasn’t answered my questions either. Support Black Vulpine of the 🦊Furry Nation🐺. Furries make the internets go! :3 21:04, December 8, 2020 (EST)

I agree to delete this page, and the others too. Too much subjectivity, article is hard to take seriously. I fail to see much reason for these articles to exist. Omegɑ Toɑd 21:38, December 8, 2020 (EST)

Ok I'll frame my argument as follows:

I think that as established users on this site, we often forget why random people on the internet use SmashWiki. People (including fans of competitive Smash) come to SmashWiki to receive an organized and collectible source of information. Information in the Smash community tends to pretty disorganized because it gets scattered all over Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Smashboards, Facebook, and other sites. SmashWiki solves that problem by putting important info all in one place.

There's a reason why almost every YouTube video about Smash Bros. uses screenshots of the Tier list article (look at videos like this as an example). Also why when you Google something about Smash Bros. SmashWiki is almost always at the top spot. This page is less than 48 hours old, and already if you Google "smash bros greatest of all time" this article is the top search result.

In addition, past experiences have suggested that increasing our competitive-related content is beneficial to the well-being of the wiki, while removing/deleting competitive content hurts the site.

• Three years ago I made the article Universal Controller Fix, which was nominated for deletion by an administrator. Even though the admin argued that the topic wasn't notable, the SmashWiki article is still the first Google hit when you search "universal controller fix" and even appears above the dev team's official website.
• The "Super Smash Bros. in competitive play" articles (which I largely helped author), have taken off to become some of the most popular, collaborative, and highly edited pages on the wiki.
• I created the first "tier placement and history" section seven years ago. Since then, SmashWiki editors have added these sections to every single fighter page across the whole series. (To me this indicates that adding competitive content makes the wiki more collaborative.)
• SmashWiki's greatest PR moment of the past five years was when an administrator reached out to the competitive community and made a reddit post discussing our coverage of the sexual misconduct allegations earlier this year.
• Meanwhile, SmashWiki's worst PR moment of the past five years was when we tried to get rid of the Project M character pages (you can read some of the community response in this thread). The proposal was supported by tons of inaccurate and poorly researched information, and was clouded by a lot of users' personal bias against PM and the competitive community.
• SW:OFFICIAL and SW:SPEC both state that reporting on widespread opinions held by the Smash community do not count as subjective material.
• In addition, since this article was published, at least three other users have added new content (beyond just spelling mistakes and formatting), including an IP address, which is indicative to me that the topic is at least somewhat notable, and not entirely lacking in notability as suggested in the opposition.

Given the examples I listed above, I think it's pretty clear that expanding our competitive coverage is only beneficial for us. Considering SmashWiki's previous mixed-bag handling of competitive content, do you still feel that my judgment here is completely 100 percent wrong?

If you don't really care for competitive Smash, I hope you can agree to leave the article up to support the people that do care about competitive Smash. The ultimate goal of SmashWiki is for readers to learn something, which, given the articles numerous citations (including quotes from the people mentioned in the article themselves), this article clearly achieves. Overall this article does a good job of separating itself from the mainspace content. Right now the article "Greatest of all time" is linked to from exactly five places: three redirect pages, and two smasher articles. If you choose not to click on any smasher/competitive articles, you will probably never encounter this page in your lifetime.

Answer me honestly: do you truly feel that SmashWiki would be a better place if this page was deleted? Awesome Cardinal 2000 02:24, December 9, 2020 (EST)

In spite of my general lack of interaction with the greater Smash community, I can agree that we should keep competitive content on here. There is much benefit to be had from keeping said content, and to do so otherwise would A. cut out a huge portion of the wiki (especially considering we only have five, six if Smash 4 is counted separately, games to work off of), and B. be ignoring one of the largest fighting game and video game communities out there. That much I will admit. I just don't see a point in lengthily spelling it out when the job can easily be achieved elsewhere; I made a whole discussion about this very topic, albeit for stuff related to the games themselves, where I suggested the idea that a character who acts as a move itself (as an example, F.L.U.D.D.) should not get a page for the move they're used in and for the character itself. The same logic applies here, though I will 100% back down if the general agreement shows the opposite (and I won't be a thorn in the bush about it).

To give you a specific answer to your questions, I do not believe your judgement is 100% wrong. There are certainly arguments to be made (and have been made already). Had this page not existed and we still lived in a timeline where there's a mere mention on the pages that "X Smasher is considered the greatest player of Y game", I think we would be better off; now that this page has been made, I am admittedly a little more hesitant, because I too have seen comments on how the wiki handles things, and would like that "reputation", so to speak, to be fixed. My argument isn't that this isn't a notable topic—as I said, regardless of this article, feel free to mention that Isai, Armada, M2K, ZeRo, and MkLeo are the best at each respective Smash game—I just don't believe that a full page for this topic is inherently necessary.

Also, as an aside, that "greatest PR moment" was done by yours truly, not to toot my own horn; I have been meaning to get around to giving the SmashWiki more of a community presence (i.e., social media), but that requires me getting off my ass and actually going through with that (which has proven difficult, but not impossible to do). Given your clear ties to the competitive scene, I may ask for your help and others in giving it a little boost in community recognition of that when the time comes. Aidan, the Festive Rurouni 12:17, December 9, 2020 (EST)

I argue that the forum post represents completely different circumstances from the one here. For characters like the pig from Zelda/the Horned Dynastid from Animal Crossing, most of their info is centered around their appearance in a non-Smash Bros. game. We also have other wikis/the NIWA alliance where we can link to our partner wikis. For a competitive article topic like "greatest of all time," basically all the information is one hundred percent based on the Smash games. Even for an article like Navi which was kept here, its Ultimate description, is just one line saying that "Navi appears in Young Link's taunt," which is far less substantial than the multiple paragraphs and sections written on the page here.

Merging the page would also defeat the purpose of a wiki in my opinion. All the "List of trophies"/other list articles are for topics where there's not enough meaningful topic on each individual subject to deserve its own page, and by merging into a list, we don't lose anything that can't be cross-sourced to other NIWA pages. I argue (and hopefully you agree with me) that merging articles should not result in a net loss of knowledge/content across both/all the pages. If we took all the info about Armada and Mango's GOAT argument and moved it onto their separate pages, we would probably have to either remove a lot of the references, quotes, and "fleshy" content (making things less informative overall) or have two giant subsections taking up a significant chunk of either page, which makes things less organized overall (this then begs the question as to why they aren't their own article anyways). Plus merging this page means you can't compare and contrast them as easily (which I think paragraph #8 does an effective job at), lowering its informative value. In my opinion, keeping this page would perfectly fit the purpose of a wiki: topics with enough substantial information should be on their own page, in the process avoiding a clutter up of the main smasher articles, and allowing interested readers to learn more by clicking on the topic.

Finally, I wanted to go back to the point about subjectivity. I would argue that a wiki needs both objective and subjective content in order to be as informative as possible. On the Tier list debate forum post, a majority of users supported Option #3 (looking for an aggregate source of well-respected tier lists from top players, etc.). In my opinion (but almost definitely shared by others who voted for #3), picking one/a few sources of info over others (like the Smash Back Room) can seem like we're "choosing favorites," but the tier list article would feel worse and less encyclopedic overall if we didn't mention any specific lists at all. In addition most different tier lists by different players/boards are always very similar, for example no one argues that Bayonetta is bottom tier in Smash 4. I feel that the same applies to this page. Combining both an objective numbers-based ranking system (like the 100 Greatest Melee Players of All Time list) with subjective info (based on widespread community opinion) creates the most informative and encyclopedic content possible. Yeah it sucks that we have to choose basically a single source to list here, but the authors of that source are well-respected within the Melee community; ask any top player and their rankings won't be much different from that list (tier lists and rankings are basically just an objective measure of subjective opinions, anyways).

That being said, I definitely agree with you now that something can/should be done about those other two articles you mentioned. I would not be opposed if "Top 100 Melee Players of All Time" were merged into this article, simply because that individual list is almost certainly less notable than the general topic of "GOAT" itself. I think listing the current rankings' 100 players at the end of the article would be fine (or maybe just the top ten to be honest). As for the "Top 100 Smash Bros. Players of All Time" page, I realize now that the list was made by a reddit user (even if it's largely accurate). I support deleting the page, and possibly citing the page in this article, noting that "a reddit post ranked Mew2King as the greatest overall Smash player of all time" or something like that.

As for your last comment, I'm just a fan of competitive Smash who has never participated in a tournament/never really interacted with any other smashers in a meaningful way outside of SmashWiki. There are probably better people to pick here with regards to reaching out to the greater community. Awesome Cardinal 2000 21:28, December 9, 2020 (EST)

I guess a case could be made for some repeat information; it'd be one thing if we had, as you brought up, sections discussing debates on whether Armada or Mango were the best Melee players already existing, and then made a full page about it, whereas this could be the equivalent of mentioning a move on a character's fighter page, and having the separate page for the move in general going in-depth. It would definitely have to be a case-by-case basis, if you ask me.

I will agree with you on that; it's partially why I made the argument in the first place, because I think that everything should be easily available to access without having to jump through a bunch of hurdles. It's why I tried to suggest we give special move pages their most recent name, because it is simply easier to look for what you know than to look for something conjectural. I can, however, see a case being made for having a separate page over sections in regards to covering the exact content; like I said, it's about ease of access. (Also, in addition to what you stated, part of the reason we don't have the trophy pages merged is because they'd just be too damn big for the wiki. The full list of spirits takes forever to load simply because of how much info is in it, and who knows how long it would take to load if all the images were there too, but I digress; point being, I'm sure we both don't want excruciatingly long pages on the wiki, regardless of topic.)

I think that we are in a unique position amongst the NIWA, as (to my knowledge, anyway), we're the only ones who both majorly cover, and promote the covering of, the greater community of the people who play the games. Sure, Inkipedia and Bulbapedia cover numerous tournaments for Splatoon and Pokémon, but they don't go into quite as heavy detail as we do, and I also don't think it's their place to do so personally, primarily because those haven't had quite the same impact as Smash (though, given the rise of #FreeMelee and #FreeSplatoon, that may change, but that's up to Inkipedia, and I digress). Even ignoring Splatoon, you have Melee's legacy up against the constant switching to the newest games for Pokémon; you could make a case and say that Pokémon has numerous releases, but even in Smash, there are still people who stay dedicated to Melee and ignore the newer titles (which personally confuses me, given how messy the game is, but, again, I digress). You'll notice that I supported option #3; I can definitely see the merit of having a conglomerate of information rather than one specific source (which is exactly why the forum exists in the first place, since the SBR isn't exactly the best source to pull from as of late). Though I will say, and I think you're in agreement on this as well, I think that there should be a line drawn between what subjective content should be here (page or not, a declaration of a player being the greatest of all time) and what subjective content shouldn't be here (a single person making a ranking of the best players ever).

That's why I said "you and others". I know not everyone invested in the competitive scene (as in, paying attention to it) has ties to actual people within it, but you never know. Aidan, the Festive Rurouni 02:19, December 10, 2020 (EST)

The official name thing might have something to do with SmashWiki's simplified search system in my opinion (afaik it doesn't do spell checks and doesn't search for the singular/plural form and vice versa, among other things). That being said, a lot of the competitive articles here (like "Super Smash Bros. in competitive play") probably end up getting found through Google most of the time, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Hell, this page is only 2 days old, and if you Google "smash bros greatest of all time", this article is already the 2nd result on the page. And the Google search algorithm manages to skip all the Melee-specific stuff about Armada/Mango, then highlights the line about Mew2King's overall greatness all the way at the bottom of this article. Which is to say, I think articles like these (plus SmashWiki overall) do a pretty good job of displaying Smash-related info in an organized manner.

After looking at it more, I do agree that putting that one ranked list on the page would make it more like Option #2. But even if you take that ranking out, you still have the opinions of tons of top players that are all pretty consistent (example, if you search "goat melee" on YouTube you'll see lots of pro players giving their opinion, and they all have the same two people in the thumbnails.) So that could make the page look more like Option #3. Right now the article includes both paraphrasing the general opinions of the top players/smash community, as well as direct quotes from the players involved. I think it's fine to have information that many top players agree on, though if we wanted make it so the page only includes direct quotes, that would probably be okay too. After all it never hurts to have more references/citations in an article (though I think this is an entirely separate issue that has to do with SmashWiki's historically low usage of citing sources). Also would be fine to just remove the full table of the "100 Greatest Melee Players" ranking, and instead use it as an in-line citation, to avoid an Option #2 scenario.

Also for the record, the guy who made the "Melee is broken" videos made a series and did it for every Smash game. I have no idea if he's biased towards any specific game, but Melee's continued popularity as a competitive game (it reaches similar and sometimes even greater viewer numbers on Twitch compared to Ultimate) should warrant increased attention on the competitive scene here.

I think judging competitive articles on a case-by-case basis would work fine. These types of articles don't pop up that often, because you have to gather citations and reliable sources for everything. This is my first time editing SmashWiki in almost two years, and I'm pretty sure that the articles I made this week (+ the Big House article) are the only new competitive articles in that timeframe, so I think it would definitely be manageable. In addition, the mere creation of one of these articles is usually enough to inspire other users to help edit them (see this page for an example), which keeps the articles organized and up to date.

All that being said, regardless of what happens to this page, this has been an enjoyable conversation for me that's helped me rethink some of my original opinions, and I want to thank you for taking the time to discuss this with me. Awesome Cardinal 2000 04:00, December 10, 2020 (EST)

Allright based on the discussion that's happened here I propose that we do the following:

• Keep the page "Greatest of all time" but add more citations and references from top players.
• Merge the article Top 100 Melee Players of All Time with this page and list the top 10 players in a separate section this article.
• Delete the article Top 100 Smash Bros. Players of All Time and cite it as a reference in this article.

Is this an OK plan? Awesome Cardinal 2000 10:37, December 24, 2020 (EST)

Assuming that others are okay with it, I am fine with going ahead and taking care of the deletion part. Aidan, the Festive Rurouni 12:47, December 24, 2020 (EST)