Is the way we're currently covering marketing material overkill?

Glowsquid

Glowsquid

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Fan wikis are expected to be comprehensive. And the Super Mario Wiki, certainly, is comprehensive. We have pages about the games, tv, shows, etc as well as their characters, items, gameplay mechanics and so on! That's great and how it should be! Recently that exhaustivity has extended to more esoteric material: advergames, quizzes on Nintendo's kids website, commercial press releases, "commercial characters" (and I don't mean like the McDonalds characters, but things like "Kid in an Atari 2600 commercial" and "Fat man who explodes in grotesque viscera after eating too much in a Yoshi's Island commercial") and so on. I'm not necessarily opposed to most of that thing, but looking at how it's presented makes me wonder jesus christ on a bike, do we need all of that? And isn't there a better way to present it?

To quote another member of staff :


I really think there should be an actual solid distinction between "product games" and "advertisement games". This isn't just about adding what's official or not. It broadens up our categorization and coverage so much to the point of making it harder to find actual information. I am abstaining from voting in this proposal because I believe this is the result of a wider issue that should be treated in another time, but these are not the same type of thing.
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Recently there's been a lot of movement toward listing random advergames and kiddie quizs alongside capital g-Games. Yes, I know about that "What is a mainline Mario game" video but I also don't think it's controversial to say that the notion of Donkey Kong 64 Lore Quiz being a whole-assed Video Game like Donkey Kong 64 is completely absurd and that listing in categories such as ...
is misleading and makes it harder to find things. A lot of game templates now have their "Miscellaneous" sections (especially for recent releases where that stuff is more readily archiveable) cluttered with random marketing material from the game's official website and tie-in promotions. It's starting to be a lot of effort and data spent mirroring frivolous and disposable content, and sometimes it makes me wonder about editor priorities : how come Mario & Rabbids (a multi-million selling game that spawned a sequel) still doesn't have a proper game play section" but something like Match-Up_Mario is not only immediately archived, but has dozen of uploads made essentially mirroring it in every language it's ever been posted in, just to source its NIOL section?

You noticed I said "most of that thing" and may ask about the implied "some". Well there's this page Super Mario Odyssey Review Round-up that's just a screenshot of a page on NoE website's quoting review blurbs from Mario Odyssey. This seriously has no value at all.


I remember having an argument in the proposals about it, but I remain convinced that a good encyclopedia is curated and selective. It's not "elitist", "gatekeeping" or negligent to say that we're not photographing Mario's model in Super Mario Galaxy in every lightning condition and camera angle it be under, rip every Super Mario 64 textures. In that respect, I also think it's not "unencyclopedic" to not treat literal advergames and ad campaigns like they're fully realized work of fictions. I truly feel that there is a point where we should be able to say ""the Super Mario Wiki is not an archive and our job is not to mirror anything and everything that's had Mario mug on it"
 
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I've felt for a while that we've been going increasingly overboard with how we cover what I'd consider "promotional games" in particular. It should go without saying that a commercially released AAA game like Super Mario Galaxy is inherently different from a five-question quiz on a promotional website. I don't think we need to get all philosophical about "what is a game" to be able to acknowledge that distinction. Obviously, there's merit to covering this stuff, but the wiki ought to be more judicious with how it's actually organizing and presenting this information to readers. If I want to find out which Mario games released in 2020, I don't think this is really what I'm looking for!

I've said it before, but there's a distinction between Super Mario as a video game franchise, and interactive promotional material that uses the Super Mario IP. We shouldn't be treating a Super Show DVD as if it holds the same weight in the grand scheme of things as a Nintendo Switch game just because it happens to have a trivia game as a bonus feature on it.
 
The more of these advergames get found, the more we do agree that making a separate list for them would do wonders for organization. Not to downplay the relevance of these promotional tidbits, but it makes it, ironically, harder to find them out of every other game if we just clump them all up indiscriminately with the other actual console games, and even some of the few Flash Games that aren't just pure marketing. Single webpages, especially, probably shouldn't get individual pages, but would be far more coherent under a page about the whole website.
 
I don't think we should be getting into debate of the real difference between Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy Flash game but if we were to define them, it's a good start to define something like Super Mario Galaxy as a video game installment, a product, and the flash game as an internet activity that is a component, is advertising material of the video game installment, and is dependent on this installment. On top of this, we need to maintain that we're a wiki that covers entertainment products that is largely video games. We define these as standalone installments, with standalone meaning it is a product with significant resources invested in it to sell to a market and its existence isn't mostly dependent on promoting an existing product or brand; i.e. it has less structure and resources a full on video game would have; compare novels vs flyers of books / events / products promoting books). With that definition we should hopefully exclude the likes of Match-Up Mario and the promotional quiz in the DVD of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros 3 collection, but if we were to define Match-Up Mario, it is a promotional activity meant to supplement the marketing of the installment. Adaptations like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie will also be included as a standalone installment due to requiring significant resources and is its own product that isn't dependent on promoting Super Mario Galaxy.

We should also consider the audience for the wiki: who is likely to browse these pages? This should factor into the design of our wiki.

What do I mean by this? Here's an example: at the time of this writing, the gallery page for the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, is lumped in the navigational template for The Super Mario Galaxy movie in the miscellaneous section with Discover Your Out-of-This-World Snack, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie - Gedächtnisspiel, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Official Activity Book and more. Compared to these pages, the gallery is a desirable page on the wiki containing assets about the product itself (the gallery is content ABOUT the product and not PERTAINING to the product), and readers will probably visit this page more than the others, and it's not doing anyone a service by being located inside a swath of advert collabs. One might suggest this is just the design of the template and it can be reworked so the gallery section is more visible, but this leaves the issue of the sheer amount of adverts and promotional supplemental material that overwhelms the gallery. The problem of the overwhelming amount of articles is much more obvious looking at the Template:Computer, with the Other section, ideally, one of the smallest parts of a navigational template that comes after the most important bits, vastly outnumbering the rest of the template, the actual video games in them being a small bit at the top.

I'm not saying all these advert articles and side content should be deleted but we should exercise more discretion on what we should cover here and keep our priorities in check. This content should not overtake our focus of being a Mario encyclopedia, not being part of Illumination's marketing branch that merely acknowledges the existence of advert collabs and materials. This will probably go into debating about what's notable or not, but I just want people to view our wiki's content prioritization as an inverted pyramid where all the important information is at top, and the more minor supplemental material is at the bottom and the most minor of them such as The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Activity Kit be a single sentence on the promotional campaign Ilumination/Nintendo have collab'd on to promote The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Even something like Old Spice and Pillbury accidentally leaking content for the movie would be a bullet point at the end of the article: what's what our Notes section is for, don't be scared of single-line interesting content.

With these definitions in mind, as well as our goals on the wiki, our articles should reflect these priorities. This means Match Up Mario should at least not be covered alongside Super Mario Galaxy as video games. We could restructure the categories in the mean time, but I'm still questioning the need for many of these pages. I really don't think Super Mario Odyssey Review Round-up is worth even a passing glance; it just pads our article count on the wiki. What use is our headline on the main page promoting "34,605 pages!!!!!" if most of them are pages that exist to notify of an existence of assets on the internet that has Nintendo's brand, and nothing more? It's not a good look when this page is made and not, like, a character from Princess Peach Showtime, which has lacking coverage on the wiki (as of this post, there's plenty of red links for Sour Bunch).

We should fix that, and this thread is a good starting point to initiate the discussion. Hope we get something out of this, but it'll take time. What should be the next course of action? I like to hear recommendations. I've made one recommendation already at least related to Super Mario Galaxy Movie content, just for a sake of example.
 
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I expressed my gripes with the current coverage of those promotional Nintendo.com articles and reviews here. In short, I echo the OP that, when a subject's maximum coverage potential amounts to repackaging copy-pasted material in dedicated wiki pages, the actual informational value of the site dilutes, and its credibility (dare I say, 𝓅𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒾𝑔𝑒) suffers in consequence thereof. Even so, I think there's definitely merit in indexing these things on the basis of certain criteria (i.e. by source or nature of the promotional material) and linking directly to their source; it could serve a useful and handy referential purpose.

Regarding the advergames, it would probably be of interest to link to the proposal that was in favor of listing them alongside proper titles at "List of games by date". Though whatever consensus the community adopts on all those neat Flash or HTML minigames from here on out, so long as it isn't to completely wipe them out, I'm all for it.

Edit:

Glowsquid said:
but something like Match-Up_Mario [...] has dozen of uploads made essentially mirroring it in every language it's ever been posted in, just to source its NIOL section?
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Those sources used to be archive.today links, but I had to compromise.
 
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Something I had noticed is that a lot of these problematic articles are already intrinsically tied to the game they are promoting and thus could potentially be candidates for an overarching merge, and I also think it's ridiculous to have something like Baby Mario's A-Maze-ing Game, some web-browser flash game made specifically to promote Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3, the same entity as the game itself. Whereas, back then, I did write up a small Pennzoil x Mario Kart 8 collab, and that was a note on the Promotion and advertising section in the Mario Kart 8 article than its own thing. In a way, I do suggest we follow what my sister said and explicitly defined in terms of organization: make them its own category and distinct from the standalone entries.

IMO, playing devil's advocate here, I do think that some of the Flash promotional browser games *are* worth noting, however. For some people, they might have nostalgic experiences with them and would be interested in remembering them. I've had memories of browser-based Flash games based off cartoon IPs like Cartoon Network and I wouldn't be the only person who wouldn't mind reading about them again or seeing images of them. The existence of Waluigi's Foot Fault makes for a fantastic trivia point. I do agree that others, especially that stupid Super Mario Odyssey jack-off article, is more disposable and can easily be merged into the Odyssey page as a single, sourced sentence in the reception section.

By the way, related point, but I remember a very long time ago, when I was working on the Mario Kart 64 article, I did recall a sentence that treated the Mario Kart 64 slot machine as its own standalone game and I thought that was pretty ridiculous. I think it's removed now but idk, I think that ties into the overarching point made here.
 
I personally think we should follow Bulbapedia's example and just have the advergames be their own list articles. They're exetremely short, have very little replay value, and don't really add much to the wiki in terms of content. I'm thinking we should have one article for games on Nintendo's own website, and one for games they hosted in partnership with other companies like Neopets, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Candystand, etc. As for other stuff, I personally think all commercial-exclusive character pages should be deleted, and same goes for websites that have no real content.
 
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I'm iffy on aggregating information on promotional materials and advergames into lists, or otherwise tie it to a parent article, because these can quickly become unwieldily large. The contents of the SMBPlumbing.com article used to be hosted in the "Promotion" section for The Mario Movie article. It didn't look amazing.

I would suggest that we keep articles for websites and advergames because it lends to cleaner and more focused coverage; setting aside that not all advergames are published to promote a specific product (example: Match-Up Mario, which is tied to the franchise as a whole). But I'm fine with whether the wiki stops pretending like they're the primary marketed products. I already noticed a step in this direction when the browser games were split into their own nav template.
 
I'm anti-merge the browser games. I'm sure there's at least a few with real nuance. They're games, there's always some kind of trick, or quirk, or glitch. If even one has enough to grant it a page, then we really should put up with all of them. I very much disagree with the Bulbapedia take on this.
 
Salmancer said:
I'm anti-merge the browser games. I'm sure there's at least a few with real nuance. They're games, there's always some kind of trick, or quirk, or glitch. If even one has enough to grant it a page, then we really should put up with all of them. I very much disagree with the Bulbapedia take on this.
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oh shoot when'd you sign up for the boards? hey there!
Ahem. Seconding this. Merging the browser advergames to the pages for the games they're promoting would be... Catastrophic for readability's sake, practically a tumor on the page's pacing. We would far prefer splitting off lists of browser games (advergame or otherwise) to their own lists. (e.g. something like "List of browser games by year")
 
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