Forum:Making this wiki more appealing to competitive players

Forums: Index → Watercooler → Making this wiki more appealing to competitive players

As Omega Tyrant has pointed out several times recently, our scope on competitive Smash could definitely use some improvement. There's countless Smasher and tournament articles that need updating, not to mention the incompleteness of our SSB 64 and Melee character articles in this regard. I have created this forum in order to discuss ways of attracting more competitive players, as well as a hub for targetting specific areas for improvement. Mr. Anontalk 18:12, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

We could ask SWF or AiB users who are more knowledgeable about competitive Smash to edit the wiki, or encourage existing users who do know more about the competitive scene to be more active. Air Conditioner Clever text goes here. 18:16, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

Or you could just read and search the internet for the SSB 64 and Melee characters while going through SWF and AiB for info on tournaments. MegaTron1XD 18:23, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

The attribute sections for pretty much all our character pages(except for maybe Wolf) needs revamping, including the brawl page. Another change I've yet to see is incorporating the changes OT suggested here. I'm currently drafting on a major rewrite for the Marth article in Microsoft Word as soon as I finish that, I'll do Falco. Also I'd like to propose we find new data regarding the matchups (both melee and brawl). Both tables are sorely outdated. Hardly anyone believes the matchup between Pikachu and Meta Knight is truly even, and also, the matchup between Jigglypuff and Young Link is now said to be in YL's favor.--Brian^{Don't try me!} 19:14, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

That is part of what I tried to do yesterday. Unfortunately, Smashboards has very little competitive info on SSB 64, as the character forums are pretty much inactive. Furthermore, most internet guides seem to be outdated. Mr. Anontalk 19:52, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

The matchups aren't outdated (those are what are on the SBR's official matchup charts). Just some of the matchups (like Pika/MK) are heavily disputed. Omega Tyrant 19:54, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

From my experience, I can pinpoint two reasons why competitive players don't come here; many are simply not interested in contributing, and to the majority, the Wiki is a joke. Why do they see the Wiki as a joke? Here are some reasons I suspect:

• The character articles (what are pretty much our most important articles) are atrociously poor. They pretty much all suffer from a combination of the following problems: lacking information, containing outdated information, containing flat out false information, containing excessive irrelevant information, having walls of text with no sense of paragraph breaking, attributes sections that read like a random throwing together of traits information with no sense of flow, and just being poorly written in general.

• The notoriously poor smasher space. While having poor coverage of lower level or even mid level players could be forgivable, having such terrible coverage of even the top smashers hurts our respectability among the competitive community so so much. We still lack articles on top smashers like Nick Riddle and Kain, had an article on Atomsk created just three months ago (despite Atomsk being one of the best players since the beginning of Brawl), and have articles on top players that simply lack any information (such as the aforementioned Atomsk and Anti), or are just grossly outdated (such as Ally and the Mew2King). Granted, we have made some improvement in this area, though we're still missing too much, and the majority existing are both poorly written and/or bare bones.

• Miles, our most prominent user on AllisBrawl (being a super moderator on there), insists on being our ambassador (most notably, having "of SmashWiki" in his name), while doing a piss poor job at it. Miles is notorious there for being a pretty terrible moderator that is disliked by the majority, and because of his name and being our de facto ambassador, they link him to us, thus sullying our reputation.

• The fact SmashWiki consists nearly entirely of and is run by casuals, quasi-competitive wifi players, and users who don't even play the game. The latter is especially bad among the admins here, where I'm the only one who actively plays the game competitively, and Toomai is the only other admin who plays to some degree. The majority of the admins can't even claim to be a part of the Smash community. I know it's general consensus among the users here that whether you play the game or not is irrelevant, but the fact is it does matter (your Wiki won't be looked on as a respectable source if the ones running it don't even know the subject the Wiki covers). Look at the comments of this blog Miles wrote on AiB where he's boasting about being a mod that doesn't play the game. The comments there are pretty hostile towards him for it, and this comment by our Koro particularly stands out: "Why did I laugh. On a serious note. Go play a match. I mean you f***ing mod smash-wiki so play the game."

These our the problems that must be fixed if the Wiki is to gain respectability among the competitive community (and in turn, attract competitive players to contribute). Omega Tyrant 13:30, 6 September 2012 (EDT)

The sad thing is, that's basically all correct. What's even worse is that not all of this can be fixed. This discussion would imply that Miles isn't going to be changing his AllisBrawl username any time soon. Other parts of this can be fixed with a bit of work. Eventually the character pages should all be revamped, it's a slow process, but I reckon it will happen in the end. The Smasher space needs a lot more work, but with a bit of time, it can be fixed. It won't necessarily happen, but the possibility is there. The part regarding Miles is the only one which really sticks out as an issue, because as the matter is technically property of AllisBrawl, I would think it's beyond our control, especially if the discussion I linked to is anything to go by. Toast ltimatum 13:53, 6 September 2012 (EDT)

We need some more templates made. The smasher template is decent, but could be improved greatly, and we have no template for tournament pages at all. If someone could make tournament templates similar to those at liquidpedia, we could create and improve a lot of our tournament pages very quickly. Nocturnal Dragon (talk) 00:35, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

What improvements could the smasherbeta use? And I would +1 a tournament infobox template. Omega Tyrant 12:10, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

I am on {{Infobox Tournament}}. Toomai Glittershine The Celeritous 12:59, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

Yeah, all the reasons that you guys said is why we don't have enough information on competitive smashing. A good goal is to made this wiki have people see both the non-competitive and competitive side of this game as KoRoBeNiKi said. We should also try to get rid of jokes too. Dots The Bomb 17:30, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

If we could a bracket template also that would be a big improvement over linking a picture of a bracketNocturnal Dragon (talk) 19:25, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

Hate to stomp this but it won't happen, at least not for full brackets. Look at this utter buttload of code needed for a 64-player, single-elimination bracket - it's bigger than the entire Apex 2012 page. (Yeah some whitespace can be cut and CSS tricksies can be done but the point is that this is not simple.) Toomai Glittershine The SMASH-GINEER 20:32, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

Would it be possible for us to do a seperate page just for the bracket? Nocturnal Dragon (talk) 00:15, 11 September 2012 (EDT)

Is there a double bracket template?--Brian^{Don't try me!} 04:28, 11 September 2012 (EDT)

An image of a bracket works perfectly fine. It shows the entire bracket in full detail, while taking up minimal space on the page, and being much simpler to include on the page than these suggested alternatives. Omega Tyrant 05:19, 11 September 2012 (EDT)

If we use a bracket template though, we could add more data, such as the score of the set what characters they used. we're supposed to be an encylopedia on smash, so we don't we have that information? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nocturnal Dragon (talk • contribs) 22:20, September 11, 2012

Didn't see your post until now, but I'll answer anyway; that information you suggest we have is information we could never realistically obtain. Tournament result threads never have that data, and the only way to know that would be if people who edit the Wiki attended the tournament and saw every match, and/or every match was recorded and uploaded online. Omega Tyrant 21:54, 22 September 2012 (EDT)

What about a tournament like MELEE-FC, which has the bracket and games won here [1]?Nocturnal Dragon (talk) 15:28, 30 September 2012 (EDT)

I'm really pleased to see that we've made advancements in the competitive areas of this wiki. We've definitely improved upon some of the weak aspects here. We now have a "Notable players" section on every character article that brings out the most influential players of a character. The "Tier placement and history" paragraph has been added to some character articles, and explains how a character's tier placement and metagame has changed over time, and it really gives a good analysis of the main competitive influence of a character. The "Matchups" section has also been expanded in several articles, and it basically gives exact statistics of a character's matchups, as well as reasons why certain matchups are notably close/one-sided. The "In competitive play" sections don't feel so blank and empty anymore with just a matchups chart. More articles have also been created on top-level smashers, and while can still be problematic (especislly with Japanese players and inactive players), it's definitely an improvement from what it was before.

The wiki's articles on competitive play and the competitive scene could still be improved however. Here are some things I (we) think we should work on:

• Create articles for every Brawl national tournament so far (which I've been working on right now). I may do Melee ones later but I'm more interested in Brawl. I also want to include a paragraph listing the most influential events at a tournament (such as notable placings, upsets, memorable moments such as ZeRo vs ADHD at SKTAR 2, etc.), as the tournaments should be more than just the results. It would be harder to do this for older tournaments though.
• Create articles for all of the best players in the world (if you need ideas, I made of list of Brawl players on my userpage, though it's incomplete); by looking at tournament results, you should be able to find them out. This will reduce the amount of red links we have and improve the quality of the smasher namespace a lot.
• Add a list of notable tournament placings to all of the best players in the world (at least national tournaments). This should expand the smasher articles a lot. The tournament articles also need to be standardized (the dates are written differently, etc.) and players of multiple games such as Chu Dat will need more than one table, as well as low tier side events for low tier players such as Mekos).
• Add raw statistics and numbers about each character's tier placement.
• Add the tier placement and history sections, as well as the matchup sections, to every character page. I'm not the most knowledgeable at the matchups though.
• Improve the character attributes sections so they provide an accurate, well-written description of the character's fighting abilities. This will probably be the hardest part for us to write as writing them requires a lot of knowledge.
• Create articles on more topics relating to the competitive scene (Stage striking, Livestream, etc.)

Here's some other ideas I have/others have suggested that I'm not so sure about adding. Please provide your thoughts:

• Adding a rollover section to every tournament results that shows what players they defeated and who they lost to. The standards could be adjusted for notability.
• Adding information about tournament success and how much money the character makes. I'm not really sure about this one, as getting the data would be really difficult, and I don't feel it's the most notable. I think that adding info in the Tier placement and history paragraph would be sufficient. For example, Brawl's Zero Suit Samus would have Salem winning Apex 2013, Nick Riddle placing 3rd at MLG Columbus 2010, etc.
• EDIT: Create and expand articles on the major Smash regions such as Tristate Area. I'm kind of stuck on content to put on them and would appreciate your opinions.

I know I have some other ideas, but I've forgot them :(

So please tell me your thoughts on this and any other ideas you may have. Awesome Cardinal 2000 22:39, 29 October 2013 (EDT)