Forum:Crew namespace
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I opt to re-open this discussion, as many crews have been formed, and they are taking up much of the main namespace. I believe they should get their own namespace, that way 40% of the time I hit random page, it won't be a crew.
UP/T/O 19:32, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
Agreed, too many random crews are being formed to be in the main namespace.Smoreking(T) (c) 21:34, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
How about we don't. It's been argued before, and yes, we have a lot of random crew pages. Instead of enabling people to create more articles about crews we don't need, how about we delete those random crew articles? How about people need notoriety in order to have a crew? I've really wanted to go on a anti-crappy crew page rampage for some time now, but I think that a namespace is a bit of a drastic step. Too many namespaces is sloppy...if we get a crew namespace, there is no grounds of which a Universe namespace (or even a Mario/Zelda/Kirby namespace) can't exist. The Smasher namespace exists because professionals are a category that many gaming wikias don't have, and this still is technically a a semi-Smashboards project. Semicolon (talk) 23:00, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
- Then people get angry because their page got deleted, but I do believe deleting would be the only good option.Smoreking(T) (c) 23:10, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
- I think Code Blue might be the first to go, since there isn't really any kind of competition here. Hosting these SW tourneys is a bit iffy for me... Blue NinjakoopaTalk 23:22, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
I like Semicolon's option. We can get rid of the ones that haven't been updated in a long time or worth enough notability (famous enough). Many of these are crews that needs to be axed. Friedbeef1 1/26/09! 23:48, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
I do not agree with Semicolon.
I believe we should have a crew namespace for crews that have insufficient notability, such as the Aftermath Dynasty and Code Blue(and the others that SK mentioned), while notable crews can go in the main namespace. The whole thing would be similar to the Smasher Namespace, and Ken Hoang not being in it.UP/T/O 01:10, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
Here's the thing about having insufficient notability, cause, see, SmashWiki is a place for notable things to be recorded, and only those things. Lately, those standards have taken a beating, and they need to be returned to. You don't even need much to be considered 'notable.' Papercut would have their page stay because they actually host some tournaments, even if they are online. Some crews, like CTTS, which I do not paraphrase in quoting "CTTS is a crew located in Georgetown, Ontario. Both members attend CTK High School. They hope to attend a tournament soon," need to be deleted. The only content-ful edits to it were the first two edits it received, recorded at the same time. This crew is not active, it's not even a crew. It's two guys, who I suppose like to play Smash Bros, but I can't even be sure of that. They are not notable, they don't deserve an article. SmashWiki does not need a namespace to harbor drivel like this. In essence, I'm saying SmashWiki doesn't need more pages like this; it needs fewer, far fewer. I would like to propose some guidelines for what defines 'notability.' I'm going to get working on that. Semicolon (talk) 01:43, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
- Hmm, I understand your point. I also agree notability is very subjective, so do we need to achieve a universal consensus of notable, or simply define it right now and see if it is agreed?Smoreking(T) (c) 01:52, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
I have defined it here. Semicolon (talk) 02:02, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
- Indeed, and agreed.Smoreking(T) (c) 02:04, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
- Proposed Policy under SmashWiki namespace now.Smoreking(T) (c) 02:07, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
Crew namespace
Crew pages have to get out of the mainspace. However we decide to do it, they need to go. The main namespace should be about the games- not the people who play it. Nobody really cares what crew I join or what my smasher name is. They care how much damage a Bob-omb deals or what Galleom's attacks are. I have no evidence to support my claim that people don't care, but it's what I believe common sense says and my opinion is still valid- you can not dismiss it any more easily than I can dismiss yours.
The Smasher namespace is for people. The Crew namespace is for groups of Smashers. The mainspace is for game content. Clear-cut and simple; there's really not any problems to be found.
There are no disadvantages to separating all crews into a separate namespace. It increases readability. People can filter out the crew namespace from their RCs, since crew edits generally don't need patrolling; Special:Random will no longer return pages about an obscure crew that nobody knows about and will likely never care about. Once everything is standardized into the namespace, findability becomes a non-issue- only the most extreme of idiots won't be able to find the page they want if they're all named the same way. It rehabilitates the utility of Special: functions like Special:ShortPages, Special:LonelyPages and Special:AllPages, which are mostly unusable at this point- if I feel motivated enough to go looking for articles in those categories to improve, chances are I'm not going to be working on a crew page that I've never heard of. The sole "advantage" of leaving the crew pages as they are would be that we have to do nothing- and seeing how poorly designed our current system is, the "benefit" of doing nothing is, frankly, nothing.
I too have wanted to go on a crew-repair rampage for a while now. But really, the only feasible way to do it is to move it to a namespace. Purging all crews is a fine short-term solution, but what will it accomplish in the long term? Unless we purge and then set up a separate namespace anyway, all crew pages will end up back in their state of disarray- as they are now- which is the entire point of this proposed namespace.
"Instead of enabling people to create more articles about crews we don't need, how about we delete those random crew articles?" I thought that too, back when I first thought about how we were going to fix up the crew pages. But, the problem is thaw about people need notoriety in order to have a crew?'t neither you nor I nor anyone will ever be able to solve is a criteria for notability. It is not our place to determine who is pro enough to have a page and who is not. You may say "They must have participated in a tournament." Three problems: 1) Who are we to arbitrarily decide which tournaments qualify for notability? 2) What about the people who come in dead last in those tournaments? Are the failures notable for losing 5-0 against some other random person who also is not notable? 3) Even if we actually do manage to come up with a criteria for what tournaments are valid and even if we decide what rankings must be achieved in these tournaments (good luck olol)... how are we supposed to prove that someone participated in a tournament? Demand they give out personal information? :/
"...if we get a crew namespace, there is no grounds of which a Universe namespace (or even a Mario/Zelda/Kirby namespace) can't exist." Slippery slope is slippery- and even if that argument wasn't fallacious, there are grounds with which to reject it. Primarily that the relation between the Smash and <insert series here> universes is thinner than a hair. Whereas crews are a relevant part of the Smash community, the Water Temple from Ocarina of Time is not relevant. Their only relationship is of course the characters from Zelda and the stages from it. However, seeing as neither the characters nor the stages directly relate to the Water Temple, there doesn't need to be a page about it. Nor anything else that isn't present in Smash. Thus, we don't need a namespace for any such.
I would suggest that we not allow any exceptions; once the line begins to bend, we'll never be able to straighten it back out. --Shadowcrest 04:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
A couple of things, which I'm going to bullet in order to tidy this up:
- This wiki is, actually, very much about the people who play the game. This wiki was established by the SmashBoards (one half of it, anyway) to become a repository of concrete knowledge on Smash Brothers. We have always kept information on the prominent players of the game and their conventions/establishments. There is nothing wrong with this. Most people may come here for knowledge on Smash Bros characters/stages/items (and you, of course, cannot know this for sure--just as many or more could be coming here for information on Smashers), but it's irrelevant in the end what the resultant traffic's greatest desire is. What matters is the relevance, and seeing as this wiki is committed in content to both the game and the competitive scene, there is no fault in retaining this knowledge in its original state. If you want to have an argument about whether we should actually have this information or not, that's fine, but that does not belong here. I reiterate: it is irrelevant whether the traffic is coming here for Smasher knowledge or game knowledge.
- I would explain my position this way: I'm against parsing this information into namespaces. I don't exactly even believe in a Smasher namespace. I think the information is equally important.
- You speak about the parsing into namespaces entirely pragmatically. How about, this information has no need to be in a different namespace? How about, it is legitimate content? Let's face it; there are readability problems everywhere, not just on crew pages, so why do crew pages receive special treatment because they lack readability? Honestly, crew edits (excluding the AD and others like it) receive very little attention. In general, the number of legitimate crew pages is quite few, certainly not enough to constitute, logically, their own namespace. If you would reference my guidelines, linked about, and then reference the extant crew pages that would remain after their purging, you would find the number to be far from burdensome.
- I really cannot fathom your idea that deleting bad crew pages would be a 'short-term solution' and moving them to their own namespace would instead be a 'long-term solution.' I'm afraid you have it backwards. See, moving them to their own namespace is like the spot in the Cat in the Hat. Deleting them, of course, is poof, goodbye, gone, done. After that, as with any new article, new crew articles will be evaluated for legitimacy, and dealt with appropriately. Moving them to their own namespace enables their content to be de-legitimized, as something less than worthy of actual mention, and thus more acceptable to create pages that lack both legitimate content AND interest. Of course, because these are viewed far less legitimately, then, they are less policed. Putting them in their own namespace will actually increase the volume of the problem; deleting them will eliminate the problem. Of course, the criteria is per my guidelines and any revision thereto until their adoption. We're having a variant on the 'Police-it-or-decriminalize-it' argument. Unlike with drug trafficking and consumption, we can control the trafficking and creation of our pages with perfect accuracy. So let's keep it criminal, shall we, and at the same time clean up our streets?
- "neither you nor I nor anyone will ever be able to solve is a criteria for notability. It is not our place to determine who is pro enough to have a page and who is not." Oh, but why not? Why can we not, as we do in most matters rely on the discretion of our administration? Why, with strong guidelines, a functional definition, and reasonable thinking, can we not be asked to discriminate what is legitimate and what is not? Honestly, it's not that hard, and for the few that are, we have talk pages to reach a consensus. And I will also contest that it is our place to determine who is pro enough to have a page and who is not. Even if we aren't always 100% accurate, it is entirely and exclusively our place, because we run the Wiki. If we get angry mail from some guy who really cares about his 100 kb bit on SmashWiki, then we'll say sorry and give it to him, or better yet he does it himself. It really isn't that big of a deal. What is a bigger deal is having literally hundreds of pages on illegitimate crews and smashers that we won't delete because we don't think it's our business to run and police our own wiki. Sheesh.
- I think problems with my criteria are best reserved for its own talk page, but while I'm here, I'll address your points. 1) The Smash Back Room is a pretty good place to start. That's essentially the basis for notoriety, the most respected and influential body in the community, and also the proverbial residence of many of the individuals who themselves qualify as legitimate. 2) Then they get a page. If you get last place at EVO, you didn't have a good showing, but you're good. If you get last place at MLG, you didn't have a good showing, but you are darn good still. I don't know what's wrong with that. 3) Here's the great part: most of the work is already done for us. Back when SmashBoards ran this place, they kept track, generally, of who actually placed in what, who deserved pages and who didn't, and if people belonged. SmashBoards is a good place to verify the status of an individual desiring a page on the Wiki. There are threads that keep track of every result, from every tournament, and every player who got whatever placing. If it is not a tournament that is recorded on SmashBoards, then some sort of corroboration of claims will be required, yes. It doesn't always take full disclosure of personal information, Shadowcrest. People can be reasonable.
- Shadowcrest, I would expect you to know better. Slippery slope is only a fallacious argument if the 'slippery claims' are made to things that cannot logically follow from one another. For example, if I say that if we ban smoking cigarettes in public places, then the next thing to go is cigars, that's logical. They are similar in function and manner, and they accomplish the same thing. They are not precisely the same, but the reasons for banning one apply to the other, so to remain logically consistent, I must ban both. But if I ban pot, and somebody claims that the next thing to be banned is cigarettes, that is a fallacious slippery slope, because the reasons are not applicable for both. They are very different in function (though not always in manner). Point is, sometimes slippery slope is not fallacious, and this is one of these times. Don't sanctimoniously link me to an explanation. I know my fallacious arguments, and I know if I can establish that it would be logically inconsistent to parse a crew namespace and not, say, a stage namespace, than it's not a slippery slope. So here goes: here are your given reasons for establishing a crew namespace: it will increase readability, people can filter out crew edits from the recent changes, the random page function will no longer return a random crew that nobody cares about, findability becomes a non issue on standardization, the mainspace should be about the game. Now: creating a stage namespace would increase readability, people would be able to filter out non stage edits from the recent changes, findability would become a non issue. Hurrah. Look similar? It does to me too. Now, for the main namespace being about the game, that's your opinion which I happen to disagree with. This wiki was created and designed to encompass both the game and its players. That was the project that SmashBoards undertook. It is contrary to the spirit under which this wiki was founded to continually parse and exorcise one of its foundational pillars of content.
- I suggest no namespace, and a deletion of all pages which are not in accordance with my guidelines. Again, I would like to present to all parties lame enough to read this that my solution actually solves the problem, and Shadowcrest 's diverts the problem, as he posits it.
I look forward to your response. May you prove to be a worthy foe, unlike many with whom I have sparred on this wiki. Good hunting. Semicolon (talk) 07:15, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
- (ec, so some points may be Semi's as well) "The main namespace should be about the games" — And the games are not played by not-people, are they? I.e., this makes them worthy of note, whether as a group of names in a crew, a list of names of minor smashers from X place, or as individual articles, one and all. For "Nobody really cares what crew I join[...]," there's always someone as a matter of probability. I.e., your appeal to the masses fails as well as "to common sense". Further, to say your opinion cannot be argued with is this fallacy, bright and clear.
"Clear cut and simple" — If it were clear cut, would we be having this argument for the umpteenth time?
"Readability" — How so?; "Can filter" — If they don't need patrolling, then why is this a point of yours? The filter is decidedly inept in general and changing the number of namespaces either way matters not. Besides, they will be "patrolled" either way you look at it. This wiki surely does not have the edit number to overcome the general number of contributors to the project to overwhelm them; filtering to just main space is quite sufficient to tell who did what where.
"Findability" — The masses are stupid. This is a generality that is rarely argued with and I don't think you would do well to argue with it yourself.
"Special pages" — Er... if you're looking to improve a specific category of articles, try doing it from Special:Categories. Or, for example, ShortPages, in the first 100 such articles I would estimate there is only approximately 30% of which are Smasher-related, though that number is at a glance (feel free to do your own numbers). It seems to me that this is a fine compromise either way, given the back-and-forth of the two different philosophies. You should be working to increase the length of these pages anyway, as they are considerably encyclopedic content; contact the main contributors to see if they can contribute more to their pages, or merge the mentions of crews to a list at worst should those people not respond.
As for "purging" — I think these are just offputting the work to a new namespace; the work will still be there, only even less visible for potential contributors as well as being less visible to us for cleanup.
Guess what, we should be the ones to say who gets to stay and who gets to go. We're the ones working the wiki; if the contributors which originally created the content aren't willing to stick around to fix the problems that the articles have, then it's none of their business it remains. Which is the only concern I can see being legitimate, for all that you didn't mention it. As for "proof," SW:AGF. If they say they did it, than they probably did it.
No comment on the slippery slope, though that also came up in the previous conversation we had about Smashers... hmm. Slipper slope is slippery! As for exceptions, there are always exceptions. You remember that I just said that the masses are stupid? Well, guess what?... --Sky (t · c · w) 07:42, 19 January 2009 (UTC)- "This wiki is, actually, very much about the people who play the game. This wiki was established by the SmashBoards (one half of it, anyway) to become a repository of concrete knowledge on Smash Brothers. We have always kept information on the prominent players of the game and their conventions/establishments.... This wiki was created and designed to encompass both the game and its players."
- If I'm understanding this one-half thing correctly, one half of the community intended to keep information about smashers and crews, while the other did not intend to keep any information about the players at all. So there goes that.
- This namespace proposal does not dispose of the current information, it simply relocates it (unless we purge, an idea which I do not support). This wiki does include information about its players, no matter what I or anyone think about whether it should. It appears to me that the general consensus is that it should retain information about players and the crews they form; I support this notion. However, you first state that the wiki is about the people who play the game, but then say "We have always kept information on the prominent players." Incorrect- we have kept information about all the players. (I dropped the "always" from the sentence because I haven't been here very long, but right now it is what it is and the present is the topic at hand.) What are the rest of the non-prominent people? Non-players, as Sky says? Can you tell me anything about $3rv, Aaron B, ???, or any of the other non-prominent smashers that constitute 99%+ of all the smasher pages we have? (See here for a full list. It took 3 clicks to find 3 examples- that ought to tell you something.) If the wiki was (one half) established with documentation of players (note the lack of rank qualifications in that sentence) in mind, why exclude the vast majority of people and force them to exploit the only visible loophole- to make it as a userpage?
- "There is no fault in retaining this knowledge in its original state."
- I still do not see why splitting the information into multiple namespaces is seen as a "loss of information". Everything will be preserved exactly as it was (or improved in terms of formatting, but content will stay unchanged), except that it's at a new title. One half of the principle on which SmashWiki was founded is entirely preserved- moving pages does not remove information about the members of the Smash community. I would like to contest the argument that a crew namespace conflicts with (one half!) the principle this wiki was founded upon- rather, I believe wiping 99% of all crew pages due to lack of notability diminishes the ability of SmashWiki to document the community.
- I agree that there is no "fault" in keeping the information as it is now. But any tangible benefits have yet to be found for keeping it as it is, and fewer for removing the non-notables.
- You speak about the parsing into namespaces entirely pragmatically. How about, this information has no need to be in a different namespace? How about, it is legitimate content? So you agree that there are benefits to separating the crew pages into their separate namespace; your "why should we?" argument lacks actual support, and is simply comprised of a "there's not reason for us to". So, while I list benefits for separating it into a namespace, there have been none provided for keeping it as it is. If we keep it as it is, things will never change. We need change- I'm pretty sure we all agree the way they're set up now is not good enough.
- "it is irrelevant whether the traffic is coming here for Smasher knowledge or game knowledge. "
- It's relevant because the main space ought to be about what people mainly come here for, yes? All the information that most people don't mainly come for is still there, it's just an extra 5 characters to get to. Woo?
- The reason I speak of deleting all the unnotable crews as a short term solution is because if we do nothing to impose restrictions on the way pages are set up, they will just keep being created the way they are. If this is the case, we'll have to do purges every <x> interval- why not just force them to meet certain formatting criteria beforehand? Such as being named properly, including required information, blahblahblah?
- Moving them to their own namespace enables their content to be de-legitimized, as something less than worthy of actual mention, and thus more acceptable to create pages that lack both legitimate content AND interest.
- How does simply moving the page constitute a delegitimization of the content in the pages? The page is the same page, just at a different location. I fail to see how moving a page allows its information to become subpar, not to mention well over half contain subpar bs to start with.
- You may say that I said people would be able to filter it out, etc etc. And that's true- people who don't want to see it don't have to. But, there are some people who are going to watch the changes anyway- so the idea of moving the page correlating to a decrease in acceptable content doesn't make much sense to me.
- "Unlike with drug trafficking and consumption, we can control the trafficking and creation of our pages with perfect accuracy."
- We can do that in a different namespace too? I missed the point.
- "Why can we not, as we do in most matters rely on the discretion of our administration?"
- Admins don't get an extra say in content. We administrate users, not content. As such, why should we (as non-pro players!) decide who is pro?
- "Even if we aren't always 100% accurate, it is entirely and exclusively our place, because we run the Wiki.
- ...you truly wish to give up the high standard of accuracy we have tried to maintain?
- Additionally, you argue that, as maintainers of the wiki, it is our place to judge who is and is not pro- based entirely on the rankings of other sites. wut?
- Slippery slope: They're not logically concluded, because the manner of the Crew: and Stage: namespaces is different, and you didn't include the reason why the Crew: namespace is proposed; calling for a Stage:, Zelda:, or any other such namespace has no grounds. Unlike a Stage: namespace, there is enough content for a Crew: namespace, which is- from what I can tell- the reason that it was even proposed in the first place.
- What a crew namespace would do: Increase readability due to the large number of crew articles, allows people to filter Crew: out of RC, Special:Random sucks less, utility of Special: functions like AllPages increased since there's less crap in main, mainspace becomes about game content.
- What a stage namespace would do: Decrease readability due to the comparatively few articles now comprising a namespace, Special:Random stops returning a part of what it should, utility of Special: functions decreases since Stage is a separate namespace (eg less content), mainspace loses what it's supposed to contain- game content.
- Look similar? No.
- Slippery slope: They're not logically concluded, because the manner of the Crew: and Stage: namespaces is different, and you didn't include the reason why the Crew: namespace is proposed; calling for a Stage:, Zelda:, or any other such namespace has no grounds. Unlike a Stage: namespace, there is enough content for a Crew: namespace, which is- from what I can tell- the reason that it was even proposed in the first place.
- "If we get angry mail from some guy who really cares about his 100 kb bit on SmashWiki, then we'll say sorry and give it to him."
- Do I spy a potentially enormous and extremely exploitable loophole? I think so. No matter what we decide to do, whether it be make a namespace with minimum required info or delete all the "non-notable" pages, allowing people to keep their page if they QQ is a bad idea.
- I didn't say my opinion can't be argued. I said it can't be dismissed; basically, you can't just say "no ur rong, kekeke." My opinion is that most people come here for information about the game- how do you plan to tell me that I am simply wrong, without providing evidence that I'm relatively confident you don't have?
- The argument is not clear-cut and simple; what I want to make them contain is clear-cut and simple.
- Readability- would you prefer I change the word to navigation? I originally meant readibility pertaining to recent changes, but whatever...
- Can filter- Yes, most of them don't need patrolling, and people who don't want to seem them don't have to if there's a filter for them. Those that do won't use the filter.
- Findability- Interestingly enough, you indirectly gave me this argument Sky- I wouldn't have thought of it if not for you. Hm.
- Special pages: And what if articles are improperly categorized? What if there isn't even a category for what I'm looking for? Specials return all the results within the cache, afaik; categories won't.
- Here are some of your "notability" quotes from IRC, that day we talked about smasher pages. It seems to me like you had a complete turnaround in opinion- wtb elaboration like and such as.
- <Shadowcrest> Most have not <Shadowcrest> "competed in a tournament" <Sky2042> subjectively, you say that.
- <Sky2042> That raises a couple of questions <Sky2042> How to know someone competed in a tournament is the first, and secondly, what of Brawl's influence, with online play?
- <Sky2042> but once there, it's a manner of logon, check Rc, etc etc.
- Why should we be the ones deciding who is pro and who is not? That's like taking me and making me decide what team in the NFL is best- I don't even know how to play football, much less judge which team is the best. Just because Damascus beat Paintbranch and Paintbranch beat Magruder doesn't mean Damascus will beat Magruder tomorrow; handing me a bunch of numbers won't help me decide which team is best.
- Masses are stupid: SW:YAV etc
- If a crew namespace is implemented, I want to implement formatting guidelines that must be followed- if that changes anyone's opinions, I apologize for not making that clear in my first post. I have not picked anything out that I find acceptable- once I do, I'll run it past people and we can go from there.
