Forum:Recategorizing tournament series pages

Forums: Index → Proposals → Recategorizing tournament series pages

This discussion is in regards to a proposed change on SmashWiki. The discussion must first meet with a consensus before it is implemented.

A while back, a new change was implemented regarding categories for tournament pages, where the old categories were replaced with "Regional", "Superregional", "Major", and "Supermajor". As we also discontinued using the term "national", the category has since been retired, and efforts have been made to recategorize all tournaments that have that category. However, while doing so a new issue has appeared: dealing with tournament series pages.

Currently, there are no specific categories for tournament series aside from Category:Tournament series and Category:Discontinued tournament series. On the other hand, many tournament series have been categorized using regular tournament categories, and as such tournament series often have multiple tournament series categories. For example, currently Kagaribi has the following categories: Category:Superregional tournaments (SSBU), Category:Major tournaments (SSBU), and Category:Supermajor tournaments (SSBU). Not only is this not helpful in determining what level of prestige the tournament series is, but it could be confusing to readers: how can a tournament series be a superregional, major, and supermajor-level tournament series all at the same time? Of course, these categories are merely identifying the sizes of the tournaments in the series, but then the categories are effectively pointless on the tournament series page, especially if there is no indicator which events in the series are of each tournament size. In addition, currently many tournament series are not properly categorized with the new categories by game, and as such a page like The Big House would be very much bloated with many different tournament categories.

As such, I propose one the following two options in fixing the issue:

• Option 1: Create new categories for the tournament series, sorted by game as well. The major issue with this are the border cases, in which case it can be considered by a case-by-case basis, but I believe this should cover most if not all tournament series on the wiki. A rough idea that I have is the following:
  • Category:Premier tournament series for the most prestigious tournament series (GENESIS, Smash Con, Big House for Melee)
  • Category:Major tournament series for tournament series that have some national-level presence but nothing on the scale of the premier events (Glitch, Smash 'N' Splash, Sumabato). I would personally prefer "National" over "Major" however I would rather not use a term that we have effectively discontinued its usage.
  • Category:Regional tournament series for tournament series that are on a regional-level or are mostly composed of players from in-region (Show Me Your Moves, Overclocked, Orbitar)
  • Category:Weekly tournament series for weeklies (Mega Smash Mondays, Ignition, Nimbus).

Likewise, we could use the same category names as what we have for the tournament categories.

• Option 2: Remove these categories entirely. To me this is the easiest way to do it all and is also what Liquipedia does, however there would be no separation between series like GENESIS and series like Overclocked.

There is also leave as is, however the issue would still remain.

In addition, majors on these pages should be bolded, while supermajors should be bolded and italicized, just like what we do on Smasher pages.

I would like to hear all of your thoughts on this. Personally, as much as I think Option 1 would be great, I believe Option 2 would probably be the best and most "feasible". CookiesCreme 22:42, January 1, 2024 (EST)

Comments

Support Option 1: I believe this option works fine if we separate the premier, major, and regional categories by game, but it might cause a lot of category bloat under certain circumstances. Though at the same time I don't believe this would really be a major issue. Señor Mexicano (talk) 00:32, January 2, 2024 (EST)

I would like to suggest some other ideas.

Option 3: Categorise series by frequency. "Weekly", "Monthly", "Yearly", "Irregularly-hosted", "Discontinued". This chooses to ignore the "prestige" of a series in favour of a different, still useful, more objective set of boxes. The major issue I can foresee is that the boxes would be very different in size.

Option 4: Keep the existing categories, but assign a tournament series the size of its largest member, rather than all sizes of each of its members. This simplifies the existing system without changing it, though possibly making it less useful.

Option 5: Categorise series by the pot size of its richest member, e.g. "Four-figure tournament series". Logically this should have a correlation with its prestige. The complication would be assigning a base currency (probably US$ just for being the most common) and dealing with exchange rates.

Toomai Glittershine The Sphere 07:42, January 2, 2024 (EST)

I think these certainly are possible options as well, though I have reservations for option 5, mainly due to outliers such as Thunder Gaming's Thunder Smash series, which have large prize pools but only has one tournament considered a "major". Not to mention, there are many tournaments, especially in Japan, which consistently reach major/supermajor status yet don't have prize pools due to laws on such. CookiesCreme 13:47, January 2, 2024 (EST)

An issue I have with Option 1 is that it could be hard to discern which category the series should go in, especially in series' that span multiple games and have changed in size over time. Once upon a time a series may have been considered a "Major" for one game, but currently it isn't. Or, a series was mostly Regional except its most recent iterations have become majors. I think that overall Option 2 is just easier and more practical, however I think it could still be useful and easy to add just the Weekly and Premier categories since there are fewer and they would hold less debate. Levii (talk) 13:28, January 2, 2024 (EST)

Lean Option 1: I think there's value in categorizing the page for something like Genesis differently than something like MSM, we should think of good ways to deal with ambiguous cases like series that are majors for one game but not others or series that fluctuate between major and regional (eg Sumabato) but I don't think that invalidates the value provided in differentiating the unambiguous cases. Stuart98 (talk) 13:20, February 7, 2024 (EST)

Addendum

It has been a bit of time since I first proposed this. In the last few months we have been working on clearing out the VIP categories on the wiki, which made me realize there could potentially be one for tournament series as well. As such, I'll also propose creating a VIP category for tournament series for the most prestigious and iconic series, with users voting on what series should belong in the section. I decided to make this addendum since there has not been that many responses on this proposal yet, as I am wondering whether this should supersede option 1. CookiesCreme 15:35, March 11, 2024 (EDT)