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")
 
I have been encouraged to relay my thoughts.

I personally do not think there is intrinsic value in documenting every bit of promotional tie-in material for any piece of Super Mario media (and by media, I am referring to video games, movies, television, books, comics, and other forms of entertainment media). I think it would contribute to a much better reading and curatorial experience to limit in-depth coverage to notable ones.

In addition to marketing material that I think most folks would appreciate coverage on (like toys, live events, tie-in flash games, statues, celebrity endorsements, prominent commercials), every piece of media produced by Nintendo sees marketing windows that include cheaply-produced buttons, pins, toothpaste tubes and other toiletries, soup cans, food packaging, sunglasses, and similar disposable material with Mario's face dispassionately printed on them. There are a 1,000+1 inexpensive trinkets like this produced to promote essentially every piece of Nintendo media. I do not think it is notable, important, or essential to understanding the media we strive to cover to document all of these in granular detail. This is simply an element of how large corporations promote their entertainment media. If our coverage truly expends to every piece of Mario merchandise or commercial with official licensing, than we truly are an archive. I fail to see a scenario where we would not be. I do not want us to document every sprite from Super Mario Bros. 3, but I would understand that before documenting every individual toothpaste tube sold with Mario's face on the cover. The former is tied to "the thing itself", that being a core video game in the video game franchise that it as the heart of what Mario is. The latter is not.

I like that our wiki appeals to people with a wide diversity of interests. I like that folks feel like they can cover what they want. However, the Super Mario franchise is fundamentally a media franchise. It's about creative works. Is anything gained from documenting every tube of toothpaste? Every cereal box? Every pin? Soup can? Single-use plate? Every piece of plastic or cardboard with Mario's face on it? While it is has been raised that no one else seems to be cataloging this type of material online, perhaps we should consider the fact that there is a good reason. Maybe it's because the totality of documenting such info is not very valuable. I say this as someone who is very nerdy. I like media and science, and reading about such things. I have never seen the level of encapsulation and documentation that is exercised on Super Mario Wiki for disposable consumer products in any other comparable site or book for other gaming franchises, movies, or literatures. I have not even seen things like this in wildlife and taxonomic resources which have greater real-life utility and are extremely complex. We are asking ourselves to comb through and archive a greater amount of material than people whose careers for comparable work would never do because its excessive and takes their attention away from the most important elements of what they are covering, which, in my view, is what has been happening here. Super Mario is a media franchise of creative works first and foremost. There are video games, television episodes, movies, manga, and individual real people involved with Mario that still need articles or have articles that are poorly written. And yet we strive to cover toothpaste in greater detail than any of that stuff. Consider our article on the toothpaste manufacturer Unilever, and how much more robust it is than our article on Shiho Fujii, who has been composing music for Super Mario games since 2009. This is reflective of very uneven coverage and shows misplaced priorities, in my opinion. I apologize if that is harsh.

TLDR; I really think we should exercise editorial discretion on how deeply we cover promotional tie-in material. Not all merchandise and promotions are as notable as others, and focusing on all of it as if it is, is a misplacement of priorities.
 
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Hard disagree. Huge emphasis on hard.

Being exhaustive involves documenting the more boring, minuscule parts of a subject's history. Those promo collaborations, while trivial in isolation, represent an important part of how the franchise has been marketed and experienced historically. Choosing to wholeheartedly ignore it is willingly obfuscating that history because it doesn't meet an imagined threshold of "notability". This wiki isn't a scientific or academic field. It doesn't abide by hardline, established institutional conventions and rules, and it doesn't need to. It's almost its own thing. It covers and serves information in a manner dictated by its own community's consensus. Even something like our citation policy is only loosely based on existing style guides, but really built-upon by us, editors.

As someone who has written a good share of merchandise and consumable-related articles, including the Unilever page, the claim that "the wiki is misplacing priorities" strongly reads to me that you'd rather I expanded Shiho Fujii's page than seek to improve the subject I have some insight into. I'm not implying you meant it personally at all or that you even thought of me in saying this, but it is the natural subtext of your claim which I cannot brush off. I wrote about Unilever because I saw the promotion in my country, checked its geographic breadth, and decided to pour a couple hours into documenting the campaign from a multiregional perspective, contending with translations and interpretations, sometimes going into surrounding events and activities, iterating and fact-checking, and meticulously providing sources and back-ups of those sources. I didn't just throw around some copy-pasted text and called it a day.

I speak mostly for myself here and can admit that maybe the amount of hours I spend on this endeavor just comes down to me being inefficient, which is why I'm not appealing to that aspect of this work per se, but I argue the productivity is nevertheless to be acknowledged. So I think you can imagine how constructive it would be to just... completely wipe out gigabytes of information and files, and invalidates the efforts of several editors, not because these efforts have been truly misguided or in any way out of the wiki's scope--but because "how about you write about this instead".

Documenting promotional tie-ins doesn't prevent coverage of more "important" media and involved people. Editors work where their interest and knowledge are; trying to reallocate topics won't reallocate contributors.

It is not a zero-sum game. The sheer breadth (and relative quality!) of the wiki speak for that. Some of the current all-time best articles on the site cover Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, two major tentpoles of the franchise. There's tens of thousands of undeniably well-documented pages on various elements and aspects of the games, and the gaps we have, while regrettable, are statistically a small minority. You can easily avoid the Unilever article if you don't like it.
 
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Koopa con Carne said:
Hard disagree. Huge emphasis on hard.

Being exhaustive involves documenting the more boring, minuscule parts of a subject's history. Those promo collaborations, while trivial in isolation, represent an important part of how the franchise has been marketed and experienced historically. Choosing to wholeheartedly ignore it is willingly obfuscating that history because it doesn't meet an imagined threshold of "notability". This wiki isn't a scientific or academic field. It doesn't abide by hardline, established institutional conventions and rules, and it doesn't need to. It's almost its own thing. It covers and serves information in a manner dictated by its own community's consensus. Even something like our citation policy is only loosely based on existing style guides, but really built-upon by us, editors.

As someone who has written a good share of merchandise and consumable-related articles, including the Unilever page, the claim that "the wiki is misplacing priorities" strongly reads to me that you'd rather I expanded Shiho Fujii's page than seek to improve the subject I have some insight into. I'm not implying you meant it personally at all or that you even thought of me in saying this, but it is the natural subtext of your claim which I cannot brush off. I wrote about Unilever because I saw the promotion in my country, checked its geographic breadth, and decided to pour a couple hours into documenting the campaign from a multiregional perspective, contending with translations and interpretations, sometimes going into surrounding events and activities, iterating and fact-checking, and meticulously providing sources and back-ups of those sources. I didn't just throw around some copy-pasted text and called it a day.

I speak mostly for myself here and can admit that maybe the amount of hours I spend on this endeavor just comes down to me being inefficient, which is why I'm not appealing to that aspect of this work per se, but I argue the productivity is nevertheless to be acknowledged. So I think you can imagine how constructive it would be to just... completely wipe out gigabytes of information and files, and invalidates the efforts of several editors, not because these efforts have been truly misguided or in any way out of the wiki's scope--but because "how about you write about this instead".

Documenting promotional tie-ins doesn't prevent coverage of more "important" media and involved people. Editors work where their interest and knowledge are; trying to reallocate topics won't reallocate contributors.

It is not a zero-sum game. The sheer breadth (and relative quality!) of the wiki speak for that. Some of the current all-time best articles on the site cover Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, two major tentpoles of the franchise. There's tens of thousands of undeniably well-documented pages on various elements and aspects of the games, and the gaps we have, while regrettable, are statistically a small minority. You can easily avoid the Unilever article if you don't like it.
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From my view, the idea of setting any curatorial or editorial standards for what things warrant extensive coverage on the wiki is wholly justified, healthy, and normal for a project of our scale, and I think it is a little silly that some well-intentioned folks seem to be of the perspective it is an objective wrong, especially considering there is over a decade of similar precedents on the wiki itself. (We have policies against creating articles for nameless NPCs, for example, and we have systemically been shifting away from in-depth coverage of the Smash Bros. titles.) There are good, substantive reasons why Wookipedia does not document shampoo bottles, or why Memory Alpha does catalog the type of cheap disposable cardboard sold at party stores. Similarly, what I would say constitutes as "notable" is not referring to an innate absolute standard - rather a standard we as a community decide on. It's not substantive to suggest this is some sort of absurd idea.

I would also like to clarify three things.
  1. Perhaps I did not explain it well, but I was arguing Super Mario Wiki was pursuing a level of granular coverage that exceeds the type you would find in any reference material for scientific topics, and does so needlessly. From my perspective, the the only ones seeking to advocating for something like a robust biology textbook are the very ones arguing to cover cheap ephemerea with the same robustness as video games, films, and toys.
  2. The Unilever article is a well-written, technically competent article. My opinion was not shaped by how well it is written. It is the impression that writing in-depth, dedicated articles about corporate brands who are simply printing Mario's face on the product they were already producing is not a good use of wiki resources and hurts the general impression of our wiki in a way an article on grapes never would.
  3. With regards to the "needless" and "hurts the general impression" comments in the previous points, as well as my general reason for sharing my thoughts, I say this: I like that the wiki appeals to a lot of people of different interests, and as long as coverage isn't infringing upon more essential coverage, I would ignore it. However, in this case, I do think this type of coverage is eroding the quality of our shared site. For example, if one were to look at the article for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie at the time of writing, it is dominated by an in-depth list of corporate tie-ins on the basis that they put Mario's face on it. Actual details on the title film of the article is diluted by attention to cardboard and single-use plastics. Having a single sentence documenting what business partners were involved with the film's promotion is one thing - but this? It's actually hurting the film's article, and I suspect it is because people feel motivated to go out of their way to dig up all of this information themselves rather than focus on details about its production, planned distribution, or things of that nature that are essential to understanding the thing itself, as even those are available in the prerelease period for a piece of media. It reduces the actual movie to just one component of a promotional blitz for Mario as a brand that just so happens to be called "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie", and I firmly believe this is a disservice to a readerbase who would seek out this article and the movie itself. In an attempt to be all encompassing, we have created abstraction when we should be bringing clarity, like any wiki or book would try to do for its readerbase and topic. My concern is that this is a reflection on the userbase's general priorities, and that even after release, is to reflect the majority of all our coverage on the film. I easily can see a future where this is the case with video games, films, television, and other pieces of entertainment media that are ostensibly the heart of what Mario is and is the type of coverage our readerbase would expect to be robust first and foremost, yet is taking a backseat to corporate tie-ins. And this is in conjunction with the fact that - contrary to what many people seem to think - the majority of articles on the Super Mario Wiki are poorly written, poorly researched, and scant on details. I am not referring to personal preferences on what to write on. I am referring to articles on important subjects in the Mario franchise that people would at base level expect us to have done well, including ones for main characters, recurring NPCs like the Yoshis, enemies like Koopa Troopas, creative people involved in their production like Takashi Tezuka, major video games like the original Super Mario Bros. and Super Princess Peach, and even presently featured articles.

I appreciate the labor and time people put into covering things on the site, but I remain of the opinion that we should set an editorial standard on what type of merchandise and promotional material should receive extensive granular coverage, as we already presently do with other topics. I do not think giving them all this type of focus is sustainable or healthy for the site, and dilutes coverage of what is (without a doubt) more essential to the general readerbase of a site titled "Super Mario Wiki".
 
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