Let's further cut down on our Super Smash Bros. content.

Dr. Mario said:
I noticed that Smash Bros. entries can rank really high on search results, probably just right after SmashWiki. What do we take from this?
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We take that our wiki's Smash content is popular. But just because Wikipedia pages for games rank high on search results doesn't mean that Wikipedia should create articles of every single minor part of the game like we do, as they are not a Mario Wiki, just a general one. In this case we are a Mario Wiki, not a SMash one.
 
Duskull said:
Having additional search traffic is not really a bad thing, and it is relevant at the end of the day. And I do think the arguments in favour of keeping them are stronger than the ones against; and I do firmly believe it is a crossover in our coverage, not a guest appearance.

But one thing I am fundamentally opposed to is removing all reference to non-Mario parts of the Smash series on the wiki. To take the point of the Smart Bomb, someone may not come to the website specifically for that item, but if I came here looking for the Super Smash Bros. Brawl page, and didn't see it listed in any way, I would assume the page incomplete, look for a better website and it would be unlikely that I would return.
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The headers for the sections in the Smash page will clarify that we only cover Mario content on the page, saying stuff like "List of Mario items". You could say similar things about, the say, Punch-Out (Wii) page. You could assume that page incomplete because it does not list every single fighter in the game.
 
But it's obvious that Punch-Out is just simply a guest appearance, with DK being the only Mario-related part of that game. Meanwhile over here, Mario makes up quite a bit of Smash, with several fighters, stages, enemies etc.
 
What do you expect from a series that's a crossover between a ton of Nintendo franchises? Mario is always going to have a ton of content in those games because it's the biggest Nintendo series, but there's still a large amount of content from other franchises because Smash isn't a Mario game, it's a crossover game and so we should treat it as such.
 
I feel like there are more Smash-related subjects that we can merge, but I disagree merging the playable characters, and I strongly disagree with completely removing all non-Mario related content. This is a major crossover series with a mixture of both Mario and non-Mario content, so I do not really see how this is considered a "minor crossover".
 
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Is there a current consensus on this? My main issue isn't really that MarioWiki has all this Smash content, but that other wikis don't. It gives the impression that it's a Mario spinoff in particular and that it presides/dominates over all other franchises within Smash (when that's not Sakurai's intention), and I just feel like the NIWA wikis should be in lockstep.
 
Duskull said:
Having additional search traffic is not really a bad thing, and it is relevant at the end of the day. And I do think the arguments in favour of keeping them are stronger than the ones against; and I do firmly believe it is a crossover in our coverage, not a guest appearance.

But one thing I am fundamentally opposed to is removing all reference to non-Mario parts of the Smash series on the wiki. To take the point of the Smart Bomb, someone may not come to the website specifically for that item, but if I came here looking for the Super Smash Bros. Brawl page, and didn't see it listed in any way, I would assume the page incomplete, look for a better website and it would be unlikely that I would return.
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There can always be a Wikipedia-style list article for "List of Super Smash Bros. fighters"?
 
Xgouki said:
Is there a current consensus on this? My main issue isn't really that MarioWiki has all this Smash content, but that other wikis don't. It gives the impression that it's a Mario spinoff in particular and that it presides/dominates over all other franchises within Smash (when that's not Sakurai's intention), and I just feel like the NIWA wikis should be in lockstep.
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The latest proposal about it from back in March ended in favor of keeping our current coverage. "Other wikis do/don't do this" has never really been an argument that works well around here, and honestly the NIWA isn't really as connected as you think it is, so we're not going to be making changes to our policies or content coverage to match any of them, just like they won't be doing that to match us. Basically it's just a bunch of wikis that agree to link to each other. (And they're not even all independent either, Zelda Wiki definitely isn't anymore and others like Bulbapedia arguably aren't depending on what you consider an independent wiki)
 
Shmaluigi said:
The latest proposal about it from back in March ended in favor of keeping our current coverage. "Other wikis do/don't do this" has never really been an argument that works well around here, and honestly the NIWA isn't really as connected as you think it is, so we're not going to be making changes to our policies or content coverage to match any of them, just like they won't be doing that to match us. Basically it's just a bunch of wikis that agree to link to each other. (And they're not even all independent either, Zelda Wiki definitely isn't anymore and others like Bulbapedia arguably aren't depending on what you consider an independent wiki)
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That's a good point, I was under the impression that they were a bunch of wikis trying to synergize and cover most Nintendo content.

It does give the impression that the wiki does treat it as a Mario spinoff though. I know there are already measures in place to make it clear this isn't the case (such as explicitly stating as much on the series page and referring to it as "Mario-related media" rather than "Mario series"), but what else can be done? The wiki did indeed once fully treat Smash as a Mario spinoff iirc (calling it the "arguable host series" and such), but maybe we can have an entire category for "crossover characters" that has Smash fighters as a subcategory? Or a category for "external crossovers" that covers any crossovers that aren't explicitly part of the Mario franchise, such as Smash but also things like Tetris DS?
 
Xgouki said:
That's a good point, I was under the impression that they were a bunch of wikis trying to synergize and cover most Nintendo content.

It does give the impression that the wiki does treat it as a Mario spinoff though. I know there are already measures in place to make it clear this isn't the case (such as explicitly stating as much on the series page and referring to it as "Mario-related media" rather than "Mario series"), but what else can be done? The wiki did indeed once fully treat Smash as a Mario spinoff iirc (calling it the "arguable host series" and such), but maybe we can have an entire category for "crossover characters" that has Smash fighters as a subcategory? Or a category for "external crossovers" that covers any crossovers that aren't explicitly part of the Mario franchise, such as Smash but also things like Tetris DS?
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Yeah, the NIWA as a concept is a little misleading. We do already have Category:Characters from other Nintendo games and Category:3rd Party Characters for any non-Mario characters relevant to the series including the Smash fighters, nothing for "external crossovers" though. As far as categorization is concerned, a crossover is a crossover.
 
Shmaluigi said:
Yeah, the NIWA as a concept is a little misleading. We do already have Category:Characters from other Nintendo games and Category:3rd Party Characters for any non-Mario characters relevant to the series including the Smash fighters, nothing for "external crossovers" though. As far as categorization is concerned, a crossover is a crossover.
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True, I've gone through a lot of the content and they do make it pretty explicit. What's weird and hilarious is that the wiki goes so far as to have articles for individual episodes of the memetastic DKC cartoon, and you could make an argument that each of those has as much to do with Mario as Sephiroth does (at least Sephiroth met, and pretended to kill, Mario). But yeah. I remember the time when boomers would always refer to Smash as a "Mey-rio" game and I think Sakurai is deliberately trying to distance the series from that image.

The question now is whether Encyclopedia Spongebobia will follow this wiki's example of The Artifact and add pages for all the fighters appearing in Nick All-Star Brawl...
 
Xgouki said:
What's weird and hilarious is that the wiki goes so far as to have articles for individual episodes of the memetastic DKC cartoon, and you could make an argument that each of those has as much to do with Mario as Sephiroth does
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i mean dk is literally just. part of the mario series and exists in the mario universe, i severely doubt its like a character from a series thats crossed over with mario in like 3 games and none of those had said character in them
 
zelen !! said:
i mean dk is literally just. part of the mario series and exists in the mario universe, i severely doubt its like a character from a series thats crossed over with mario in like 3 games and none of those had said character in them
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I mean, what part of Eddie the Mean Old Yeti screams "Mario character"? Just meant it as a joke anyway
 
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