Not in love with the Smash Bros lists

LeftyGreenMario

LeftyGreenMario

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Looks like we might need to eventually spill some blood coins from these bloated piñata lists.

Mario_Hit_By_Razor_SSB3DSWiiU.jpg


For context, we used to be a wiki that offered full Smash coverage since its heydays on the notion that since Mario has a significant piece of the pie of this large crossover, the rest of the game should be covered on the wiki. Over time, the Smash Bros content had more trouble justifying itself to a newer editor base especially when SmashWiki is part of NIWA and offers better, more in-depth content, so multitudes of proposals were passed to scale back. Our most radical change, however, is changing articles of playable fighters to have them redirect to pages of Smash Bros games they first appeared playable in. It seemed like a compromise at the time, because there were still some people who liked the Smash Bros. content and it satisfied users that wanted a more scorched-earth approach to this.

MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive/61

www.mariowiki.com www.mariowiki.com

MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive/61

www.mariowiki.com www.mariowiki.com

So, we got these resulting lists.

No offense... these lists... they kind of suck? For starters, they're HUGE. Unwieldy as hell. Every fighter has some brief overview with a names in other languages table that just adds up. Most of the information is tucked away into history sections; it always surprises me on how much content explodes on you like a cheeky Party Ball when you click to uncollapse. It's already bad enough to have these overviews IMO but the collapsed content is what set it over the edge. But also they serve to underscore how little a page on Mart H. the Noodle Stick Boy Wonder would contribute to the wiki. Why do we need these? Why can't we just link them to SmashWiki rather than concern ourselves with these lists and inform readers that, yes, this nonMario character appeared in THAT Smash Bros first? Our navigation templates are miserable too, with a huge fraction of the links just going to these colossal things that would make Great Cave Offensive blush. There are near entire navigation templates that end up linking to these lists, like Template:SSB moves (the category containing standalone articles is pathetically paltry, with one page, meteor smash, pending deletion, with the subcategories being mostly just links to these list pages, almost defeating the point of these categories) To be fair, this might just all be WIP and we end up deleting them, maybe it was in a proposal somewhere, but it's hard to tell.

I believe MOST entires in our current Super Smash Bros. Brawl nav template, for instance, link to a list page. It's pretty dire.

In a way, these pages heavily remind me of the life-support state of these previous horrific list pages from Conker and Banjo before he coverage on these series got destroyed. Keep in mind, the coverage on these two series ALSO started as individual pages before getting merged into one list. The series pages were also these humongous list pages with not only a lot of elements on them but contain entire articles in them. Conceptually, it's the same thing, except I guess the Conker and Banjo pages didn't have a collapsed history section.

There is a countermeasure to resplit these pages but IMO the genie is out of the bottle. I think there's a writing on the wall here concerning Smash Bros. coverage. I don't think people are really in the mood to go back to the time we had individual pages. The opposers in the proposal may have been correct that we're prioritizing incorrectly but imo these pages are probably gonna get smushed anyway. I used to be one of the people who didn't mind the Smash Bros coverage for years but I have a change of heart and I think we need to remain focused on being a Mario Wiki rather than try to be both Mario and Smash Bros.

Also those pages on Assist Trophy, and Subspace Army. Nope. Don't need 'em. We got a horrible Pokeball list tucked in our list of items page. Trim our in-game music lists too (like this one) to be more like the trophy lists. I guess the list DID help me mod the game especially when file name like "R14" corresponded quite beautifully to what crap music I was gonna replace, but I could just easily find the list elsewhere in dedicated modding communities or just hunt and find the music and make it a bit more inconvenient to mod Smash Bros.
 
i think there is a place for the character pages because the justification has always been "oh it's covered on smashwiki" but it's... not really equivalent? smashwiki is super technical and fighting game terminology stuff that's really hard to parse for a basic overview, it's not at all the quick concise overview the mariowiki pages were. if porple made simple.smashwiki.com though that would be equivalent to what i'm thinking of here

burn all the other lists. they have no reason to be and should simply be eradicated
 
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But also they serve to underscore how little a page on Mart H. the Noodle Stick Boy Wonder would contribute to the wiki. Why do we need these? Why can't we just link them to SmashWiki rather than concern ourselves with these lists and inform readers that, yes, this nonMario character appeared in THAT Smash Bros first?
Click to expand...

There is some other cross-promotion through things like Super Mario Maker 1's costumes, WarioWare microgames, amiibo extras (even if that's dead now), etc etc. So there are instances where for example, Mother Brain appears on Captain N and interacts with Donkey Kong in one episode, appears in Smash Bros, is in multiple WarioWare microgames and none of those individually warrant Mother Brain her own page based on our coverage policies, but I think there's value in having a spot where you can list "Mother Brain appears in all of these Mario things", all in one place.

on the discord Waluigi Time suggested we could instead have a "List of crossover characters" page. I think it would be a great solution for cases like Mother Brain. It could also become a convenient dumping ground if the popular sentiment becomes "Well if we can't have a page on Lucina, do we really need pages for Slime Dragon Quest and Vector the Crocodile?" At the same, it doesn't fix the bloatedness of those sections so IDK.
 
barring a few kinks, i'm perfectly fine with how these smash bros things are set up.

they interact with mario characters (in a series where every represented franchise is considered to be on equal footing by wiki policy) and may even cameo in other mario media, which makes them coverage worthy. at the same time, giving them the same amount of focus as any other mario element was kinda strange and misplaced in the context of the wiki's rules. list coverage is a nice middle-of-the-road option to satisfy both needs.

i was expecting someone to draw a comparison with the extinct banjo and conker lists; to which my response is, they're not really crossing that line. in their naive bid to summarise an entire multi-game series, these two lists ended up having an excessively diverse scope, causing bloat and whatnot, not to mention that the relevance they had to the mario franchise to begin with was negligible. the smash lists, on the other hand, strictly abide by a singular type of subject (item, character, stage) and build themselves from there, with respect to focus and organisation. if this somewhat reduces the visibility of their individual subjects, well… it's the Mario wiki, no? you don't normally expect info on Palutena's up special on this website.

if you want to change something, the best way to go around this would be to strike the root of this discord and address the coverage policy directly—namely, whether Smash Bros should be considered the special case it's currently enforced as, or reinterpreted as one of the two main crossover types laid out by the wiki: dual IP representation (Mario Sports Mix, Mario Kart Arcade) or guest appearance (Densetsu no Starfy). I'm not 100% sure if I'd support a change like this, though, but agreeing on one or the other would finally set a more discrete and less controversial coverage to these subjects.
 
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I'm chiming in here saying that I don't quite think that SmashWiki's more technical focus is off-putting to readers who want to specifically view Smash Bros. content. Of course I am putting this in a perspective of a regular Smash player, but like, SmashWiki's article on the Fake Smash Ball isn't all quite that difficult to understand. I also don't think the average reader will be off-put by SmashWiki telling in great detail about what the Wario Waft does. Hell, we have our own overly technical pages with the data-mined kart stat part page and our Mario Kart Wii vehicle page that's segregated from the more general info, and that's something SmashWiki already kinda does too (Wario's article talks about his moveset, but if readers want a more detailed description of the Wario Waft, then it's listed fine in Wario's article). Something like Wario also has a not-to-difficult to understand summary of his general playstyle and dives into technical details further down the article.

As for "interacting with Mario characters" idk if that's worthy enough and I don't think that's a very strong argument on its own. We don't have a list of NBA players from NBA street or a list of music from SSX On Tour, and unlike say the Nintendo Land attractions, those directly interact with the Mario content as well even though they aren't crossovers per se. I don't think Mario qualifies as a guest appearance in Smash so Smash does have a bit more merit than random EA published titles that Mario just so happens to be playable in, though but at the same time I also really think there's little use for a Corrin page on MarioWiki.

If you want my argument summed up, I just want external links to their page on SmashWiki in the Smash game article. I don't think the huge list is good for organization at all and it's a chore to navigate and parse through; I honestly preferred the separate articles before this.
 
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