Forum:Smasher namespace

This is kind of a continuation of the "Merging Problems" Help Desk topic. First I'd like to say I'm pleased with the main page merge and the count down timer on it. It looks like people are merging templates too so thats good. But still my biggest concern is the Smasher articles. It is evident that these aren't going to be merged with user pages or become redirects. So I'd like to have a vote to decide whether we make a Smasher namespace to separate these pages from the rest of our content.

In defense of this idea the casual gamers and Wikia users will benefit by viewing articles about the smash bros. games when they click the random page button. Our article count will no longer be misleading since over 1300 articles are about Smashers. In some rare instances Smasher names take up the namespace for things in the games. For example: SmashWiki:Merge/Wario Bros. compare to Wario Bros. And lastly it was never the SSB Wiki's intent to document players at all so this would be a good compromise. Bonko24 23:33, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

For

 * 1) Bonko24 23:33, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 2) Richard 00:05, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 3) Logan 00:24, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 4) Erik Jensen (Appreciate me here!) 20:26, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 5) Charitwo 21:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 6) Wildfire393 22:49, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 7) Dig Dug 16:58, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 8) Marth117 22:07, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 9) Kaz (Talk • Contributions ) 16:10, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 10) – EP (Talk &bull; Edits) 22:40, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 11) Earthere 21:34, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 12) Madd74 04:02, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 00:06, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) Alexander Vince 00:13, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * 2) Dogman15 00:13, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * 3) FyreNWater - (Talk • Contributions ) 07:55, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * 4) Tino768 08:05, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * 5) Oxico 10:23, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Against

 * 1) Randall00 21:11, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
 * 2) ~Crystal_Lucario 13:41, 16 March 2008 (UTC) It is fine lets leave it.
 * 3) ElbridgeGerry 22:09, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Comments
Yeah I'd like to see the Smasher articles in their own namespace. That way they won't get in the way of content and they can still keep their category.--Richard 00:05, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

If this happens, I intend to remove my contributions, as they were written for a Smash Bros. encyclopedia, which (btw) encompasses the game, the people who play it and therefore the sporting community that the combination of those two factors makes. I imagine I'm going to have to do this anyway so the internet doesn't lose a proper repository of info about the smash community, but amidst the "competitively disconnected" players of the Wikia community, I felt it was worthwhile to have at least one comment from the opposition. It's clearer than ever that it won't make much of a difference, even coming from the guy who wrote practically half the articles in Category:Smashers. Sigh. --Randall00 21:11, 6 March 2008 (UTC)


 * For related discussion which should be linked, see SmashWiki:Pool Room, Forum:Merging problems, and User talk:Charitwo.


 * I note the wordage "never SSB Wiki's intent to document players at all". Guess what: it was SmashWiki's. This is a merge; don't turn it into a hostile takeover by saying they shouldn't be considered at all. SmashWiki's brought the content, and it obviously needs cleaning, but you need to be nice (I'm not assuming bad faith, but this annoys me that this discussion has been strewn about without links to appropriate places.). I find it strange now after being convinced by Randall that these pages have a place here that article count is being considered; it is content, whether you want it or not, and thus can not be considered misleading with regard to the page. As well, assuming Wikia users don't want to view random smasher articles is a rather convenient assumption for your argument. I could make much the same against it.


 * As for your specific instance, the in-game term should take precedence of course. Any such need for disambiguation should always default to the in-game term.


 * I cannot make a case against a separate namespace, as it does have merit. However, I would rather see something like a merge of all the lesser known into a List of smashers with a small blurb on the items in T:Smasherbeta, as well as other information such as how they've done at tournaments. Obviously, 1300 would be a great deal to merge into one list, so disambig every 3 letters of the alphabet as needed. --Sky (t | c | w) 22:07, 6 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I can't see what Randall00 is so concerned about. It's not as if the pages will be gone. However the great majority of the smasher articles I've seen do not qualify as Smasher articles at all according to the "Professionals" article "A professional gamer is one who regularly makes money off of the game and/or one who is recruited and sponsored by a notable organization, such as MLG." Now can you say that even 1/5 of those articles meet those qualifications or can be verified in any way? I can see that Randall00 is upset since you wrote many of these pages but the existence of these pages is an easy door for spammers to leave their mark permanently. Browsing through Smashers here are two examples of why I consider the article count misleading: LIBF LuisP. One is a 13 year old and another is well, LIBF. Kiddies and Crews aren't pros and ff you want me to find more examples I will. That's a real good 1300 pages, isn't it. So something must be done. Sky made a good suggestion. The point is it can't be left the way it is now so tell us what to do. Bonko24 04:37, 7 March 2008 (UTC)


 * This merge happened well before the articles relating to the competitive community were up to a standard that I was proud of and am well aware of how many of the articles still need a lot of work (for instance, it was my intention to delete the absolutely atrocious Professionals article, so that's about the worst basis of comparison). Not my fault. There's a misconception that I'm upset because I wrote a lot of the articles which although true, is not the basis of my protest. My contributions are and always have been done in the best interest of the community at large. --Randall00 18:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I'd first draft up a policy (I know just what to steal from =) before starting any of this. All wikis need a strong backbone of policy to enforce decisions; that is another issue which should be settled with SmashWiki, but not right now.


 * Bonko, all smashers are listed here that have taken the time to add a page, not just of professionals. A "smasher" by definition is just somebody who plays the game, like you and me (you do play, right? :). This misunderstanding may be part of your concern =). As to 13 year olds, it's a game that all ages can play, and a lot of those at young age get good at it (they usually have a lot of time on their hands...). Of course, your point is who are these people? Which I'll respond with a rather generalized statement: Smashers. Randall does have a legit concern in that he's done a lot of work, and we don't really want to see that shoved under the table, if we can avoid it. Again, I stress the need for a policy regarding all of this, if not a guideline.


 * I think I might collate what has been said for and against in conversations prior. --Sky (t | c | w) 05:41, 7 March 2008 (UTC)


 * You are industrious, what can I say... --Randall00 18:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I guess for information's sake I should post an example of a prolific Wikia wiki that has tons of pages that are like our own Smasher articles: The Warcraft wiki. Just click this link to see that it fully gives in-game guilds of players of World of Warcraft their full article-namespace treatments, and it must not be a problem for them to have it like that. So maybe it actually doesn't matter much if we do the same by having Smasher articles in article mainspace. Erik Jensen (Appreciate me here!) 06:05, 7 March 2008 (UTC)


 * It's ridiculous that egomaniac player articles have the same if not more priority than Masahiro Sakuria. The smasher articles indeed have more priority than game articles because they must be constantly monitored and fixed to fit standards. Articles that normally would be deleted are just slapped with a cleanup template and rot until someone like Randal00 fixes it. I can understand your obsession considering you guys have wrote many of them and you originate from Smashworld which hosts tournaments but your closing out the casual player. Randal007 calls us the "competitively disconnected" for making all the articles readable to casual players. However concentrating on the competitive community is shunning the casual players and more importantly content on the actual games. Back when we were rivals I noticed that some of our pages on game content were beefier than yours which was absurd since your wiki had been around years longer. But smasher articles eat up your edits. Once again it can't be left the way it is or you'll lose the casual audience which is going to be our largest audience in 2 days. Bonko24 18:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Hmmm, that definitely's a message that makes a lot of sense to me. The casual audience is exactly what we'd be catering to and should be catering to, which makes me think that if SmashWiki was a wikia wiki from the start, articles on players of the game below Ken Hoang in fame would probably have never existed/been started (and perhaps rightfully so). Having Smasher pages separate from game articles seems an excellent compromise compared to outright deleting all the Smasher pages. (Or you could have a separate wiki that focuses strictly on smashers and link that wiki to the Forums... but that's just a wild thought.) Erik Jensen (Appreciate me here!) 22:27, 7 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Why is there such an intense focus on a target audience here? I'm not calling you guys "competitively disconnected for making all the articles readable to casual players." I'm calling you competitively disconnected because you shun the competitive community intentionally to make the articles readable to a select audience. Well....wtf? Is this a smash encyclopedia or not? Are you telling the complete story or not? Isn't this supposed to be a vast repository of smash information? Or is it? I don't know, that was the goal at SmashWiki, but I haven't even begun to wade through the policies here. The notion that we'll "lose the casual audience" based on smasher articles in the main namespace and users being frustrated with the relevance of the Random Page button is giving the casual user far too much credit in quality control. --Randall00 18:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Why are you fighting this? The articles will still be there, just in a different namespace, they'll have their own tab. It's not like we're petitioning to delete them all. --Charitwo 18:34, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm going to weigh in and say that Smasher (and "Crew") pages should be in their own namespace. It is IMPOSSIBLE to use the Random Page function to browse items/techniques/other random things of interest, because 95% of the pages you get are smashers and crews, generally ones with ZERO actual rep. Players like Ken, M2K, Isai, Bombsoldier, etc, that have actual notoriety might be justifiable here, but your average run-of-the-mill smahsers should be separate.--Wildfire393 22:49, 7 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm done talking. We'll let the community decide whether to move the pages or not. Keep in mind too that Smash Wiki's community was monumentally larger than the SSB Wiki's user base at the point of the merge. I hope you will reconsider reverting yoour contributions Randell00. Bonko24 01:23, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * SmashWiki was kept something of a secret to the entire Smash World Forums community only up until recently so we would have the opportunity to establish some sort of structure before opening up to the entire Smash World user base. When the floodgates were open, users began trickling in and that side of the community began to take on a life of its own. Even now, there are thousands of registered SmashBoards members who don't know about SmashWiki, so SWF (such that it is) won't be properly represented on these discussion pages. I must stress how incredibly poor the timing of this merge is. I still can't believe that just as we were getting on our feet and getting news about SmashWiki out to the rest of Smash World's members, that they would go and do something like this. --Randall00 18:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Erik: Actually, Guild: is a true namespace, and we disallow even redirects out of the main space and into the Guild / Server namespaces.

Bonko: I will draft up a policy regarding this. Unlike WoWWiki, I believe smashers here should have redirects, wherever they end up (whether on lists or in a separate namespace). I will, however, pull directly from WoWWiki... I do have some experience there. ;) --Sky (t | c | w) 04:13, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Get them out of the main namespace. Wikia is not the place for vanity pages that have next to nothing to do with the game. The vast majority of users who visit the wiki are here for actual information, not subculture cruft written by egotistical self promoters and/or fanboys. I would prefer if these were moved to userspace, but a separate mainspace would be okay (though not preferable). Just get them away from the main focus of our project. Dtm142 18:14, 15 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Bear in mind that it's no longer your project and that's neither the fault of the competitive community or Wikia. --Randall00 20:29, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * It never was "my project", nor was it "your project". I said "our project".  However, the project is currently a mess and is in desperate need of a manual of style. Dtm142 20:44, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Hehe, yep, that part is certainly true. --Randall00 21:35, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Policy draft
User:Sky2042/Sandbox has a draft of a policy regarding this. Thoughts? I especially welcome yours Randall, as you essentially represent the minority view. I deliberately did not address crew pages, as I feel there is less a need for those to be relocated. The draft was essentially copied from the Guild policy there, with what I thought were acceptable changes in context. Of course, this can also be written as if there is no smasher namespace, which I will be happy to accommodate for if needed. --Sky (t | c | w) 02:45, 9 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Well nothing will convince me that it's a good idea to move smasher articles out of the main namespace. As you know, I'm more about buildling a strong front end presentation than I am about creating even more restrictions on what can and cannot be created in the back end. Especially when it comes to telling someone who is interested in the competitive game that their interest doesn't deserve a place among other tournament-goers. I don't know why something like this would be put in place that essentially discourages people from participating in the side of a community that really needs all the help it can get in garnering interest from casual gamers. --Randall00 04:16, 9 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, ok, we get that. Again, it can be written from a non-namespace PoV if need be; is there anything other than that which you disagree with in the body of the text? --Sky (t | c | w) 04:34, 9 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I'd merge some of the useful info from Smasher Project into it as they seem to serve a similar purpose in the context of not taking them out of the main namespace but it's fine otherwise. --Randall00 04:50, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Consensus
So it seems like most people agree on adding a Smasher namespace to the wiki. This is everyone's last chance to voice their opinion on it, as I plan on asking for the namespace within the next few days (I could even do it now if you guys want).--Richard 16:30, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I just thought of a new idea: What about a separate wiki?  Several of Wikia's gaming communities, such as Halopedia, have a separate fanon Wiki.  I think that this could be a good thing for the Super Smash Bros. Wiki.  Not only could it have information on competitive gamers, but it could also include custom stages, etc.  Just some food for thought. Dtm142 21:18, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Werd, dawg. --Randall00 03:56, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I am a bit hesitant to create a new namespace for several reasons. Firstly, we only get three custom namespaces and as far as I know, their creation cannot be reversed.  If we ever decide to reverse this decision, it might be impossible.  Secondly, the pages attract the wrong type of attention for the wiki.  They encourage people to make vanity pages as opposed to actual content.  Our aim should be to create a reliable, professional wiki that is written from a neutral point of view.  We had similar discussions on the RuneScape Wiki a while back about forum usage and personal images.  The forums then were largely used for personal clan recruitment and trades as opposed to discussions on actually improving the site.  Clearly that is what the forums are meant to be.


 * If you look at Special:Webtools, you'll see a list of the most common keywords that are searched for on our wiki. Not one of them is a smasher article.  Very few readers visit our wiki for that type of material.  Special:Top/most_visited will tell you the same thing.  Overall, our community should be attempting to create articles that will actually interest the readers.  Wikia should be a professional, collaborative effort.  It should not be for pages that will only interest a very limited number of readers. Dtm142 23:27, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

The 3 custom namespace limit is just so people don't request several, pointless namespaces. Uncyclopedia somehow got away with having 5. I'm all for having the smasher articles in there own namespace. --Charitwo 23:43, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Uncyclopedia is on a separate domain and has separate user accounts. Physically, it is about as affiliated with us as Wikipedia is.  It is one of Wikia's sista projects, but the rules there seem to be slightly different... Dtm142 23:49, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
 * i cant think of any more off the top of my head, but only because i havent looked, but the best example of a Wikia wiki having more then 3 is yugioh --Uberfuzzy 23:53, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Just a note from the sidelines: if it would make reaching consensus any easier, just assume that the Smasher namespace would not count against your three namespace limit. The three additional namespace restriction is a policy restriction rather than a technical one, and because the need for the Smasher namespace would have arisen because of a merge, we wouldn't hold that against you if it ever became an issue. --KyleH (talk) 03:41, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I think they should go. I used to prefer the old SSB Wikia simply because it didn't have articles on random people, and I'm sure there are others who agree. You guys have to remember, this was a MERGE. Not moving Smashwiki here. Besides, it creates to many problems. When you search pages on events, moves and such, occasionaly they have to have (move) behind 'em so the "smashers" get there glory. Look at Wario Bros.! And that page is linked by the events template! I hope I've made my point to everybody.
 * I've completely replaced that article with a redirect to the event match. That type of ambiguity is completely unacceptable. Dtm142 03:41, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Any idea when we're getting the namespace created? Btw, we only need Smasher:. Smasher talk: isn't needed I wouldn't think. --Charitwo 22:14, 5 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I've just contacted Wikia about it now. Smasher talk will automatically come with the namespace, and it'd be nice to keep in case people want to talk about that article. So the namespace should be in place within the next 3 days. I'll be sure to help out with the page moves to the namespace.--Richard 04:12, 6 April 2008 (UTC)