SmashWiki:Character Project

This page is a project.
Projects guide users to make helpful revisions to pages of a particular type or topic. See this page for an explanation of projects. Projects operate similarly to guidelines, and their advice should be followed accordingly. You may edit a project to help it meet the needs of its articles; however, discuss any important changes on this project's talk page.

The Character Project on SmashWiki is an attempt to improve all character and character match-up articles. Character articles are at the very heart of SmashWiki, so it is important that each of these articles be comprehensive and well-written. Following are some guidelines on how to improve these articles.

Current goals

Here are the goals this project is currently trying to achieve. You may propose new goals by editing this section. We recommend you suggest any big goals on the talk page.

Character Awards

Just an idea. Along with the Pros and Cons, a list of more specific awards given to each character. Examples: Most powerful Nair, Shorest Pose, longest range etc. Try to keep it technical, use http://smashboards.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30064 for reference.

Redirects and links

Try to turn character pages such as "Luigi" into disambiguations, instead of redirects. Most of them right now are redirects to the Melee article.

Eliminate "smasher bias"

While SmashWiki needs to include information useful to competitive players, remember that most of our readers are casual players that don't want to be swamped by technical jargon and advanced strategy. Thus, we need to revise each character page so that it is as accessible as possible. The focus of character articles should be first general aspects about the character, like weight and special attacks, and only afterwards competitive aspects. If there is staple info, try to sum it up as easily as possible. Demonstration clips may help.

Pro/Cons

The pro/con section in each article is useless to casual gamers, who don't understand or agree with most of the points, and don't know that the pro/cons apply only to tournament play. We should attempt to turn each pro/con into a paragraph form, and move it to the back of each article under the heading "Pikachu in tournament play" or something of that ilk.

Match-up pages

Match-up pages have inherent "smasher bias," but at least we can inform the reader that the descriptions of each match-up only apply to tournament play.

Also, most of the information on these pages is taken from various character guides. While the information is excellent, it is almost always written in a way that is inappropriate for SmashWiki. Match-up pages are not guides to beating a particular character, but rather they inform the reader of how the match-up goes. Thus, explain that Marth matches Falco because of his maneuverability and his up throw chain, despite Falco's pressuring lasers and pillars. But don't tell the reader to use these things. In short, we need to vigorously edit every match-up page to meet SmashWiki standards.

Guidelines

Below are some general editing guidelines that can help make character articles as good as they can be.

Character articles are not guides

SmashWiki's character articles are meant to be a source of information about the character - they should discuss the character's moves, attributes, and high-level strategy. They are not, however, guides. Guides directly instruct the reader how to use a character. They freely reflect the author's opinions and include a lot of information inappropriate for a SmashWiki article. When you revise an article, you need to avoid these pitfalls. Always ask yourself "am I writing objectively about the character, or am I infusing my own opinion and directly addressing the reader?" If you lean towards the latter, reconsider your edit.

One way to follow this guideline is to avoid using the word "you." If you use the word "you," it is likely that you are guiding the reader instead of writing an objective article.

With regards to character strategy, never make judgments like "Luigi has the best aerial attacks in the game," or "it is always best to approach by shffl'ing when using Fox." Instead, report pro strategies objectively, and let the reader evaluate.

Write so a novice smasher can understand

Per Kirby King's advice, it is better to gear character articles towards a non-competitive audience, and avoid "smasher bias." While it is a good idea to include some competitive information (how a character ranks on the tier list, advanced strategy), a novice should be able to read and understand every article. Thus, write them to be as accessible to a wide audience as possible, and expand the article beyond information useful to competitive smashers.

Some key "accessible-to-beginners" information to include in character articles:

Special attacks (and any other notable attacks, such as Captain Falcon's knee.
Basic attributes (weight, jump height/number of jumps, running speed)
Basic graphical attributes (Mr. Game and Watch's frame-by-frame movement, Mewtwo's floating)