Forum:Crew namespace/Archive 1

Forums: Index → Watercooler → Crew namespace/Archive 1

Well, after the Smasher namespace was added, I've also noticed that there's a number of crews that are still in the main namespace. What do you guys think of a Crew namespace? This way, crew articles would be seperated from smasher articles. Do you guys have any opinions on this?--Richard 20:32, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm hesitant to add my opinions on this. On one hand, I'm not sure we need a namespace for crews, on another, I'm not sure we need a separate namespace for crews, and on the third, (zomg!) I'm not sure that we shouldn't have a separate namespace. I'm leaning most for the first option, considering the reaction of some users to having a new namespace to play with... I'll wait to see who comes to discuss on this. --Sky (t · c · w) 03:56, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

What exactly is a namespace? I didn't pay much attention to the smasher namespace thing, so I have no real opinions about this. just questions. PeetzaLink 19:12, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

From what I can tell, a namespace is when a lot of pages begin with a name like "Smasher:" or "Template:" or "Talk:" or "User:" or "User talk:" or "Forum:". (Right now we're talking in a page that's in the Forum namespace. ^_^) A main thing that makes namespaces practical is that they don't count alongside the normal gameplay articles towards the total article count that's seen on the Main Page.

Honestly, I think a Crew namespace is a good idea, better than merging it into the Smasher namespace anyway. Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 20:25, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I really think it would eliminate confusion, especially with crews with strange names like Absence of Evidence that are easily mistaken for some sort of glitch, character, special event, or advanced technique. - Gargomon251 20:45, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Also Rupee,Level 10,USB,Foot to Ass,Elite 4.- Gargomon251 21:07, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I guess it would be a good idea! PeetzaLink 22:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I feel pretty strongly about this much: we should not create a Crew namespace only to come back in the days after it's added to decide that we also want a "Tournaments" namespace, or an "Advanced Techniques" namespace, or anything like that. I don't see why a Crew namespace needs to be separate from a Smasher namespace. Obviously you couldn't call it the Smasher namespace, but conceptually, the two are very closely related (within the context of this wiki). This discussion should have taken place during the Smasher namespace discussion and not now, so I think any other changes need to be thoroughly vetted and thought through carefully before they get implemented. (I also reject the argument that a crew name might be too confusing for a reader, provided it does not conflict with something that is actually in the game. Wikipedia does not have a separate namespace for things that are fictional--they do sometimes have issues with such articles being written as though they are portraying an actual person/place/whatever, but their stated goal is to make the distinction clear in the article itself. There's no reason the same could not be done with crews. Maybe that doesn't justify leaving crews in the main namespace, but in any event, the "it's confusing" argument does not hold.) --Kirby King 00:16, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The big thing with these two proposals was, that the mainspace should be reserved for in-game content. Smashers and crews are more of a community thing. --Charitwo 00:19, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

That's fine--I don't know if I agree, but that's fine. My main point is that these decisions should have all been made at once. We shouldn't decide to expand the namespace we just created (or create a new namespace for something very similar) right after wrapping up a discussion about the new namespace. Do it once, do it right. --Kirby King 04:11, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, maybe there should be a Tournaments namespace... But Advanced Techniques would count as "normal" stuff like characters and stages, I think. Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 00:25, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I'm aligning to KK's line of thought; it runs parallel to my own that wowwiki shouldn't have made one namespace for servers and one for guilds, but rather, one for servers, and then let the guilds be subpages of the servers. And Erik, no. /me beats Erik with a long hard stick. However, I'm still hesitant in moving them... --Sky (t · c · w) 00:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I support moving all crew and community related articles to the already existing Smasher namespace. We don't need a separate namespace for each type of community article, but they certainly don't deserve a spot in the main namespace. I would like to start a discussion on the wiki's scope in which we can determine these policies. Dtm142 01:01, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Then I would consider it necessary to first draft a comprehensive guideline that outlines what constitutes a "community-related" article--crews? tournaments? tier lists? advanced techniques (which are, after all, developed by the community)? You need to be very, very clear where the line should be drawn. I would also say that moving these things to a namespace called "Smasher" is wrong (because we're now saying a significant port of these articles will not, in fact, be related to "smashers" at all, except perhaps tangentially). As I tried to point out above, just because it's too inconvenient to undo something that everyone shortsightedly signed onto in the first place doesn't mean that the convenient solution is correct. (Relatedly, I think that the fact that Ken has a Wikipedia article about him is weak justification for the idea that his article "belongs" in the main namespace, and I would argue that expanding the criteria of articles that should be exiled from the main namespace only weakens the argument that Ken should remain.) --Kirby King 04:11, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Ahahaha, see now this is just getting funny and my frustration with how much time everybody's wasting on this merge has been replaced by a bemused resignation. By the time someone forms a committee to decide who's going to be on the panel to draft a policy that makes sense, the game will be so old and we'll be so exhausted from the bureaucratic process that nobody will even have the energy to write the actual articles. But at least they'll all be in the right namespace!! --Randall00 12:27, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Your sarcasm is not welcome, Randall. Either aid us in the process, or, to put it not so nicely, gtfo. That you disagree with any of this is quite evident from the previous discussion we had; if you had wanted to, you could simply have informed us that you also disagree with this. --Sky (t · c · w) 22:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I believe I did. I just used different words. I don't expect to make an impact running around to every talk page saying, "I disagree. That is all." My points are valid and my vehement objection is being washed out by the hoards of people who have no concept of the significant and extensive competitive following and are far more interested in making a nifty website than they are in making an encyclopedia. I'm obviously not going to "aid you in the process" that I firmly object to and your other option is telling me to get the fuck out of a discussion involving the permanent relocation and fundamental depreciation of a branch of articles that I have spent THOUSANDS of hours working on. No thanks. --Randall00 15:54, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I believe you didn't. Using different words in this case added a distinctly different tonality to them. And nowhere did I say your points were not valid.

Silly. :^) There is no tonality in text-based communication that the reader didn't conjure themselves and it often surprises me how distinct the difference is between being misunderstood because of what you've written and being misunderstood because of what someone else read. --Randall00 18:07, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Aid in the process as in "find a more positive way to say it", not using sarcasm. The process as in "let's talk this over and figure out if and how we want to do this", not "Waah. I worked hard on them and now they aren't gonna' be in the main space". Seriously (I realize the irony in telling you to stop being sarcastic, but that is essentially what I heard). Are you willing to talk nicely? --Sky (t · c · w) 03:06, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

It's important that you realize this is not about me or my pride and not a personal matter on any level, really. I don't understand how you can interpret what I've said as my whining about the articles that I've worked on because of their virtual relocation on a server I've never even seen. My gripes are clearly based on the principle of the thing, equal rights to notability between two needless divisions of people who both love the game in different ways. --Randall00 18:07, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Look, I realize this is frustrating for you. It's just as frustrating to me. I've been having this argument over the tier list, for Pete's sake. I agree with your point below that namespaces are tossed around a little too much, and that the majority seem to favor not having them in the main space, but you need to speak calmly and eloquently, not sarcastically and around the point you wish to make. --Sky (t · c · w) 03:11, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

I am hesitant to jump in on that tier list discussion because I saw that one coming a mile away but I appreciate your will to defend it. However, just as most of my points aren't getting through to the Wikia veterans, your justifications for its inclusion in the game and arguments in support of a competitive following seem to go in one ear and out the other and that's where this merge starts to get messy. Tier list isn't the only article that will be called into question, but it's a very good example. I know I'm not fun to argue with and for that I apologize, but sometimes it's hard to tell which side of the argument you're on, Sky! You and I agree on the notability of a tier list article, but to keep the tier list in the main namespace and to exclude the smashers and the community that drafted it promotes an uneasy double standard. It works against what we do to encourage tournament play in exchange for casual players de-cluttering the information they are exposed to by putting up a block wall to depreciate content that they don't understand so they don't have to read it. I just don't see how that's fair when the alternative prior to the inception of the Smasher namespace does no harm to casual players beyond having to press "Random page" a few more times than they were counting on. --Randall00 18:07, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

• I'm all for anything that will trim away articles that don't relate to gameplay. I'd like to be able to hit the random button and get something gameplay-relevant, not a random list of people I don't know and probably won't ever know, and thus don't care about. Wildfire393 06:34, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

This issue of the "Random Page" button keeps coming up as though it's the only function of a wiki--even I could come up with a better argument for creating a whole whack of new namespaces. Which is one of my primary criticisms of the Wikia community; that's a frequently-used button across the wikia network because the focus of the project is about making the information ACCESSIBLE to a wide audience instead of comprehensive and informative for research purposes like an encyclopedia should be. Ironically, Nintendo pulled the same move by simplifying and slowing the pace of Brawl from Melee. All of this creates a totally unnecessary division between competitive and casual players when the goal of the competitive community has been to unite all players and open the floodgates to a phenomenal sport following that would enrich the game for all who embrace it without shafting casual players. If you think that pressing the random page button and getting an article about a guy you don't know who has actually achieved something by traveling around the country attending tournaments is some sort of diss to a casual player, that's not his problem--and good luck trying to tell him (or me, or the tournament director, or the people he traveled to play against) that his article is not related to gameplay. --Randall00 15:54, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Well said. --Sky (t · c · w) 03:06, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with your sentiment, but not necessarily with your reasoning. Accessibility isn't a bad thing. If I go to Peach's article, I probably expect to read about Peach, be able to learn about her attacks, etc.--I don't expect a disambiguation page that links me to all the Smashers whose names might be Peach, or who play Peach, or who like to eat peaches. (I know this isn't what we were doing before, it's just an example of how maintaining some degree of accessibility is important.) If I read Barack Obama's page on Wikipedia, I expect to get an overview of his life, accomplishments, etc.--if I want to know more about his time in the state senate, though, there's a brief synopsis and another article about it.

A lot of people probably don't care about what Obama did as a state senator. But if you click the random button on Wikipedia, you might encounter that very article (or any number of other uninteresting, confusing, or hypertechnical articles, none of which are relegated to their own namespaces). And what's the worst that can happen? You'll either go somewhere else (you did just click the "Random page" link, you know) or, maybe, you know, learn something new. I'll grant that you're probably not going to learn much from most Smasher pages (i.e. ones about smashers, since I guess that needs to be clarified), but if the distinction between "Smasher" and everything else is going to keep getting distorted, then let's rename the Smasher namespace "SmashWiki" and call it a day. --Kirby King 16:48, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

You said it, brotha. You're right, there is nothing wrong with accessibility, I'm just saying that it's a sad justification for segregating the community like this. My ultimate vision for SmashWiki's smasher articles was to make them readable and accessible by players who knew nothing about the smash community and could conceivably learn more about it via the article. A big problem with this merge is in timing because not all smasher articles were polished up to these standards when the merge occurred, so it was a bit like submitting a half-finished, coffee-stained resumé to Wikia and saying "here ya go!" When in reality, it should've been a portfolio showcasing the framework we were trying to build with examples of the existing category structure and formatting conventions as they applied to our best streams of articles so we could work constructively behind the scenes with Wikia to bring these two feeds of information together. Preferably in a way that doesn't resemble putting a bunch of dog trainers in a cage with wild wolves for a few days and hoping that everything fixes itself. But of course, we weren't consulted.

In fact, now that I think of it, I had two players who found my article on Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash on SmashWiki about six months ago and they ended up coming to one of the tournaments! Tangible results! I even got a phone call from someone who lived in California who found the article and was interested but didn't realize I was from Canada (all the accessibility in the world won't save people misreading some things :]) The only question that remains now is how many smashers, crews and tier lists have to end up in the "Smasher" namespace before the tournament articles start to disappear, too.

Hmm... Does that mean it'd be a good idea to have all articles on non-gameplay stuff like smashers, crews, and tournaments under one "SmashWiki" namespace? Or just put all the Smashers under "SmashWiki"? (honestly, either of these is sounding pretty good to me personally.) Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 17:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Haha, better sign that big ol' petition to unmerge! :^) --Randall00 18:07, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

It's a great idea, I agree with you, I sometimes confuse names of crew with glitches xD --Jigglypuff is God 13:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Is that before or after you read the article? Serious question. If it's after, it should be fixed to reflect that it's a crew article. Otherwise, I don't see your point. (Read what I said above about the "it's too confusing" argument, and Wikipedia's articles about fictional things.) --Kirby King 15:39, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Before reading an article, when I see a link in some pages --Jigglypuff is God 03:37, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

When you did "Smasher:" U should do "Crew" with crew pages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Geo635 (talk • contribs) 23:05, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm replying here since the previous subheading was too big, but I agree that the "random page" argument is not really an issue, if you actaully want to learn something about a specific character or strategy you can just go directly to that page. However, I also agree than non-gameplay related information should be kept in a separate namespace, just to keep things organized. Again, most average players have no use for the various Smashers, Crews, and Tournaments unless they are especially important to the overall community like Ken Hoang etc. This isn't Wikipedia, so you can't just say "oh just stick new articles anywhere", it's much more focused and organized around a specific topic, and there are much fewer articles, editors, and Admins so it should be easier to keep straight. - Gargomon251 18:18, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with this idea totally. It makes sense too, when I look up death for example, I'm not looking for Death by Rape's page. if we can do it with smashers, why not crews? All crews are are collections of smashers. And looking through this, (I did skim though) the only argument against it that I've seen is that people don't like having a whole bunch of namespaces. Bit of a weak argument...(feel free to point out my errors and I will gladly accept your ideas and weigh them against my own) Solox 22:25, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

What makes it a weak argument? It's a perfectly applicable argument, especially because there's a Wikia-wide policy that restricts the number of namespaces any project is supposed to use. Splitting everything up into different namespaces is not a realistic solution--why don't we split up articles into stages, characters, items, or trophy namespaces? Even if you think "gameplay only in the main namespace," that's only justification to create a condensed namespace of non-gameplay-related articles--which is not compatible with the decision to make a namespace called "Smasher." My point is that the community should stop being rash and changing its mind, and it should leave things as they are (were) until it can figure out an actual, workable solution. (And "gameplay only," as I've said above, requires at least that someone create an unambiguous distinction between what constitutes "gameplay" and "non-gameplay". That won't be easy to do, and I haven't seen anyone try. And yes, we are much smaller than Wikipedia--even less reason for us to need a plethora of namespaces to do the work of simple categories.) --Kirby King 00:53, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

My overall opinion's that all non-gameplay-important subjects be in one "non-official" namespace so that it doesn't make the article count on the top of the main page misleadingly large. I'm starting to see a problem, though, with how hard it is to decide whether some of these categories of subjects/topics count as important to the casual Smash player like the normal gameplay stuff or the hardcore Smash fan like the non-official stuff that's mainly the Smashers/crews and the tournaments/real world events. (Are tiers, Smash-related websites/communities, fandom things like Super Smash Flash, and advanced techniques more qualified for the non-official namespace or the official one? That sounds perfect for prickly discussions. O_O; Enough that maybe the namespace stuff should be reverted/dropped for now and the main page's article count shoots back up to a number that feels higher than it should.) Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 17:57, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Do I really even need to point out how ridiculous this is getting? Have we gained anything other than problems since this merge occurred? All I know is that all this yammering about namespaces never would've come up at SmashWiki. Are we here to write the articles or what? Yikes. --Randall00 00:25, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

There should be one. I am trying to get members in my WiFi Battle Crew (see my smasher page for more details), Team Triforce, and having a Crew Namespace would be a valuable asset.

--Arutoa 21:34, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Well then, how about we just put the crew articles in the Smasher namespace?--Richard 18:59, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

That I don't know would be so good either, because a crew isn't a smasher. Arutoa says a crew namespace would be personally beneficial to him, however.

Perhaps one way we can look at it to find the ultimate solution is that, as with any other wiki, articles about players and groups of players of the games is pretty much vanity that a lot of encyclopedic folks would decry. Thus namespaces for smashers and crews (which is just putting "Smasher" and "Crew" before their article titles, really) is outright moral and sensible for these. But that's not the same as real-world tournaments/events and fansites, which at least have some more "official" relevancy to Smash fans than fellow players of which very few might even be encountered by Smash fans in their lives. Based on this, I feel it is justified that we have the vanity-ish Smasher and Crew articles in namespaces of some sort (whether they're separate namespaces or together we'll still have to decide), but have no need for putting any of the other articles into namespaces too. Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 18:03, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

A tournament is nothing without its players. I guess I never realized you weren't a competitor, Erik, but it seems pretty obvious now. :^) --Randall00 05:31, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, well, to you I'll say that I'm sorry the merger has been infinitely more beneficial to me than it has been to you, me being only interested in the "official" content of Smash games. :/ (But that's a bit off-topic...)

But anyway, at this point I feel I should remind everyone that removing the Smasher namespace and treating all the player and crew articles just like the normal gameplay and character articles IS still a valid solution should every other idea fail. I'll explain why: Wikipedia itself covers sports and has separate articles on players of each sport (as in: sports celebrities), because articles about sports players can appeal quite a lot to your typical casual reader. And wikis about sports would CERTAINLY have articles about players of these games. And the Smash Bros. series and its fanbase with tournaments and events IS like a sporting event and community (Sakurai said it himself in his very first DOJO update that Brawl "is almost like a sport")... It frankly would mean that a wiki based on Smash would inevitably have articles on players of the game regardless.

So if there's enough people wanting to drop the whole namespace concepts, I'll frankly support it too for these reasons. Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 06:25, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

yes Tino768 17:17, 4 May 2008 (UTC) yes