Smashpedia:Smasher Project

<!-- The Smasher Project on SmashWiki is a communal attempt to improve the overall quality and presentation of smasher and crew articles. The smash community is very expansive and the details are in a perpetual state of change, therefore the information will not likely ever be wholly complete or accurate. However, due to the size of the global community, the only way to streamline a somewhat accurate maintenance of information is through a Project with other contributors around the world.

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.

Article Format - Standardization
When news of this SmashWiki leaked out on to the forums, there was an inevitable flood of people who created an article for themselves and their smash-related adventures. This is not unexpected or discouraged in any way, however we've all seen the kinds of results that can produce. Like this one, for example, or Willie Billy Ba Dillie here, or ones that should just be straight up deleted like Chopingboard.

The majority of the existing articles do not follow a specific format and I applaud Omnigamer for tirelessly going through and adding Category:Smasher to each and every one of them. But now they they're all sorted, they're going to need a cleanup.

Template:Smasherbeta
This is a tweaked version of the original Template:Smasher that I've been using to aesthetically spice up the existing articles. It places a table of information related to the smasher on the right-hand side of the article, including alias, main, crew, location and more.

Most of the existing smasher articles do not have smasher or smasherbeta tables in them. Here's a quick little guide to filling them out for articles that have already been created.


 * name
 * Since there are a lot of smashers whose real names are simply not that widely known, "name" actually refers to the gaming alias they are best known by.
 * Special formatting: none


 * image
 * Even fewer smasher articles have pictures and most of them are not even pictures of the player anyway, but if you happened to have, find or locate a picture of the person you're editing, upload it to SmashWiki and enter the destination filename as your "image" field in the table.
 * Special formatting: none


 * main
 * Most people have a main character; even a good portion of those who claim not to. If you are unable to find out the smasher's main, leave it blank. (this currently causes ugly long brackets (]) to appear in the table thanks to my alpha-grade coding abilities)
 * Special formatting: none


 * 2ndmain
 * This field shouldn't be confused with "secondary character." On occasion, some smashers do actually have two main characters (much to my surprise), which means a little more than "a character I can play well enough for a counterpick."
 * Special formatting: none


 * other
 * Here's the real secondaries. This field should include a character that the smasher plays confidently for fun or for overcoming certain character match-ups in tournaments or whateva.
 * Special formatting: none


 * 2ndother
 * I could've made a 3rdother and 4thother too, but it gets to the point where the information just isn't relevant anymore, so if the smasher in question has two notable secondary characters, put the second one in here.
 * Special formatting: none


 * crew
 * The name of the crew or crews the smasher belongs to.
 * Special formatting:


 * For crews that already have an existing SmashWiki article, brace the name in brackets. (example: Crew Name )
 * For smashers who are in two or more crews, add an asterisk (*) before the crew name. (example: *Crew Name*Other Crew Name)
 * skill
 * Approximate skill level of the player. The terminology you use is still largely up in the air at this point. There's various discussions that aren't going anywhere scattered all over the place trying to define what a "professional" is, but if you'd prefer not to deal with the headache like me, I recommend using "Amateur" for casual smashers, "Professional" for undisputed

Should I create my own smasher article?
For an article to even exist in the first place, there needs to be at least a certain amount of information with which to feed it. Ideally, an encyclopedic mindset would really just prefer to delete the majority of the articles we see that aren't going to be read by anyone but the writer. However, I am a realist and I recognize that we aren't going to be able to stop people from making their own articles, but we can at least try and tell them how to do it right.

For a smasher or crew to have their own article, they should at least (in my opinion anyway) meet one or more of the following requirements:


 * Play or have previously played in a competitive tournament.
 * Have created and/or joined an existing established tournament community.
 * Have written or produced an influential smash tutorial or video.

If you can't come up with at least one of those criterion for your own smasher article, then there really isn't enough information to warrant wasting the webspace on it. Nobody's going to read it; why write it?

That said, however, I would also like to say that "play or have previously played in a competitive tournament" is a pretty loosely defined requirement. Any tournament where people are there specifically for Smash is completely legitimate regardless of the level of competition. For example, say you and three friends decided to run a tournament and managed to convince 2 other people from your town to come along. Only one of you knows how to wavedash because you're all just learning, but it's still a tournament and it will still have results (not to mention two byes). Congratulations, you've just created a new microcosm of the Smash community in your hometown; make yourself an article if you want, why not? Spread the love and all that.

The tournaments that do not count are the ones that are generally held at a toy store, fair ground, exhibition, etc. by some company who picks the competitors out of the crowd and in the end they give away a Nintendo T-shirt to the winner of a free-for-all bracket with items on. --!>