General Discussion

Well, disambiguation pages are for listing articles that share the same name, not "things that could be confused with subject [X]"

you could add {{articleabout|enemies literally named "bats"|the most recurring bat enemy|[[Swoop]]}} at the top of the disambig, though.
 
I actually feel like putting a note at the bottom linking to category:Bats, like on Fish would be less obtrusive. But in all honesty, just Googling "Mario bat enemy" comes back with our Swoop article as the top hit, so it's really not that difficult to find the page. And for me, when Googling like that doesn't work, I just do what you did and go to a related article I do know the name of and get the link that way, which, again, doesn't take terribly long most of the time. I just worry about coverage creep of disambig pages, as well as the overuse of templates like {{articleabout}} or {{distinguish}}: sometimes it gets a bit silly (not necessarily in this bat example, mind you - just speaking in general at this point).
 
My biggest fear when it comes to stuff like this is the slippery slope; if we include Swoopers in the bat disambig page, what would be the limit as to what other bats not called "bat" are included, and what would that mean for other disambig pages like [[King]] or [[Fly]]? There are a couple of disambig pages out there like [[Eel]] that throw the most notable (which is dependent on who created the page at the time) examples of the species or job onto the page, so it'd be good to have a definitive statement on what to do for the pages for consistency's sake.
 
Mijzelffan said:
I spent 15 minutes looking for the swooper article yesterday because I only remembered that they were bats, not their actual name. But the bat page doesn't list swoops in there. So in the end I had to find by going to the wario's goldmine article and seeing there that they are called swoops. So I decided, let's help people with a similar problem in the future and add Swooper to the disambiguation page but then someone removed it because it doesn't specifically have bat in the title. Why is this? I'm pretty sure that most people searching for bat in the wiki mean to find swoopers. This is just making the wiki less accessable for the sake of some petty consistency.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that was me. The problem is that disambiguation pages aren't intended for this; check the history of the page: entries similar to the one you added were removed. I thought we had a discussion earlier in this thread, and it was agreed to remove enemies that resemble bats, but aren't called bats.
 
Time Turner said:
My biggest fear when it comes to stuff like this is the slippery slope; if we include Swoopers in the bat disambig page, what would be the limit as to what other bats not called "bat" are included, and what would that mean for other disambig pages like [[King]] or [[Fly]]? There are a couple of disambig pages out there like [[Eel]] that throw the most notable (which is dependent on who created the page at the time) examples of the species or job onto the page, so it'd be good to have a definitive statement on what to do for the pages for consistency's sake.
Click to expand...
Yeah, hence I said use a link to the bats category rather than Swooper, if we must link at all, so then there is no single bat being singled out, paving the way for more exceptions down the road. In fact, thinking about it some more, one could argue that someone searching "bat" is hoping for an overall bat "species" page, like how we have a plain Dog page, Dinosaur page, etc., so having a link to the "bat" category isn't an unreasonable extension. Even your King example has a link to the corresponding category, but like Fish, it's as a footer rather than one of the bullets, which I think is the best solution.

Also, things like Cat should lead to Category:Cats for similar reasons. We already have some redirects like that, like Kirby Series leading to Category:Kirby Series - it makes sense.

As for things from earlier that I didn't have time to respond to while I was at work this morning:

Baby Luigi said:
Oh hahaha, I don't like it. You're so busy and all so I think it would lift some labor if the process is automated and relieve some stress from you.
Click to expand...
And I say again, this kind of maintenance work itself is stress relief: just simple editing, no pressing deadlines, no fear of edit conflicts or snipes, no arguments, no coding puzzles. It's as good as down time - but productive.

Pi said:
So I kind of hate it when articles have =={{conjecturaltext|text}}== since it's very inconsistent and it looks very, very ugly. I think formatting in headers should be minimised to italics only, so I propose we fix this. For the Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 Galaxy levels, I propose we mention that "all names of planets are conjectural", and for glitch pages we should say "all names of these glitches are conjectural" in the introduction paragraph. What does everyone say about this?
Click to expand...
Mario Party Δ said:
Wouldn't this text be easily overlooked? Once the conjectural text titles are removed, it becomes way less apparent. I don't think they look that ugly since they're pretty subtle in the text.
Click to expand...
The conjecture's not that bad, but it's not great either. Perhaps a variant of Template:Conjecture could go at the tops of the list pages and planets to say the subjects therein are all conjecture - that'd be more noticeable than merely stating it, and a lot easier and cleaner than pasting the conjecture tags everywhere. The only downside would be cases where there's a planet or whatever that actually is officially named, but I guess in those cases, the relevant section could say "oh, btw this one's really named", maybe with a refnote or something. I guess people who section-link in might miss the note up top, but really, we don't worry about that for conjecturally-named articles, so w/e, seems like a non-issue here too.
 
Walkazo said:
And I say again, this kind of maintenance work itself is stress relief: just simple editing, no pressing deadlines, no fear of edit conflicts or snipes, no arguments, no coding puzzles. It's as good as down time - but productive.
Click to expand...
I myself find it exhausting and tedious, although I get so immersed in the work that I sometimes miss meals and remain planted in the seat all afternoon, but I suppose it's a fault on my part. Oh well, different strokes for different folks. I don't see it as really productive (at least my parents don't).
 
It doesn't look good to have a construction template on a pivotal wiki policy page (Help:Template) since 2011
 
That should probably go into the "edits for locked pages" thing.
 
Help:Template

Look at what other people do with templates and copy them, that's how everyone learns, no one reads these pages anyway, the end.
Click to expand...

There, fixed.

(But actually, I did get rid of the banner and tweaked a couple bits, so it should be okay now.)
 
If the template has inputs, type <tt><nowiki>{{Name of template|write here to change the fist parameter of a template|write here to change the second one}}</nowiki></tt>
Click to expand...
Just one more teensy edit, please :)
 
I have a question, should we install a wiki plugin that let's you see the transparency in the image file page when you hover your cursor over the image? I know many other wikis that do this, namely Nookipedia, Bulbapedia, WiKirby, and many more. I know we should contact Steve to do this, but I'd like thoughts first. Personally, I think it would be beneficial to image uploaders, people who catch bad transparency since the checkerboards cover it up, and people who use CSS to see transparency. Also, it's easier to distinguish whether smaller images have transparency or not.
 
I support this, it doesn't require a plugin though, it's a simple edit to MediaWiki:common.css

EDIT: doesn't the wiki natively support this right now, whenever the image is transparent, there is this checker background. Maybe it could be darker though.
 
Yeah, it already has the checker background, and I think the current shading is fine. I'd rather have the images always show the checkers instead of a white background by default anyway - not everyone would know to hover, and mobile users couldn't even if they wanted to.
 
I'm not sure if mobile users even find a use for transparency anyway. I don't know if they use image editing programs.
 
my only complain is that the checkers are too light, other than that, hovering or being checkered by default does not make much of a difference.


On a separate note, this should be somewhere in the wiki guidelines, but I can't seem to find it. Is there a specific order that the categories in a image page should be? Like the game followed by the game sprite category, or the opposite?

Basically where should I put the "Category:[Game] Images" in a file, before or after the license?
 
Order matters less for images than articles, but when you upload files, you should be putting the game category in the Summary section (after the aboutfile), which would mean it comes before the screenshot/sprite/etc. category, which is built into the license. But if someone goes around adding game categories and puts them at the bottom, under the license, that's not the end of the world or anything.
 
Yup, this is how I do it, but the order isn't that important.

Walkazo said:
Yeah, it already has the checker background, and I think the current shading is fine. I'd rather have the images always show the checkers instead of a white background by default anyway - not everyone would know to hover, and mobile users couldn't even if they wanted to.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure if the "not everyone would know how to hover" argument has a lot of ground, but I think the entire issue is really just an aesthetic part of the wiki, a pretty minor one.
 
Seeing that my talk page proposal for Mario is going very smoothly, would it be okay to revamp the "nicknames" section for Luigi's article as well, citing the Mario one as a parallel? I'm not sure which articles also have a "nicknames" section as well. I mean, Bowser has one, but it's composed mainly of silly, cute titles Bowser's loyal followers give him. I think it's not as dumb (except for actual insults by Toad and Peach).

The "Portrayals" section for Bowser's article is not... that... great.
 
The article seems to mostly exist as a compromise between giving articles to all of the actors and not covering them at all, in a manner akin to Banjo and Conker. To that end, I don't think it's worth it; some of the people here could reasonably benefit from full articles, but when all that you have is "this guy voiced that guy on this show" for a dozen sections, it really doesn't look good.
 
I asked if related information is better off in the credits section in the respective articles. But in the end, I really don't like that article.
 
Just as we have an article on both Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS / Wii U, shouldn't we also have articles on both versions of the Mario & Sonic games? Yeah, I know Mario & Sonic-related articles tend to be of lower quality, but that's not the point.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back