Updating the wiki and its future
Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2014-05-24 19:23:45
When I was a regular contributor to the wiki, although I expanded it to a good degree, I made three big mistakes:
First, I added in at least one 'theory' about the causes of glitches without understanding what I was talking about and these were unverified and hard to read. Now I think if you're in doubt about something, it's best to leave it out, even though I'm not a deletionist. I think that a piece of information is better than nothing no matter how small it is, but not when you have no solid reason to support it.
Secondly, I was verifying glitches I hadn't even tried just because they had videos or were documented before. I think it is bad to do that when working on a wiki, especially a research focused one like Glitch City. When it is possible it is good to try something yourself, you may spot something important that was missed, such as, for lack of a good example, the glitch only working in certain circumstances or game revisions. Plus, there's always a low possibility that the glitch could be fake, even though I think that's unlikely.
Thirdly, I feel that my grammar and choice of words wasn't particularly good. Now that I've learned to be more clear in my writing, I will work on improving the articles that read poorly.
Also, I avoided taking my own screenshots, resulting in unnecessarily large/low quality screenshots taken from videos.
I will personally go through every glitch page we have except for the Dex pages, and clean them up/update them when I have the time. When that is done (I expect this will take a while), I will work on adding pages for new glitches. This shouldn't be too bad for certain glitches that I have video descriptions for.
A problem that needs fixing:
Using 'Search' on "Search Wiki" or 'Go' when there is no exact page match does not work. It simply leads to a blank page. I know this has been reported before, but I thought it was worth pointing it out again. It is significantly harder to navigate the wiki without a search option.
Future of the wiki: Should we form a glitch alliance?:
There is a highly successful Legend of Zelda glitch wiki called Zelda Chaos. When our wiki is up to standard (when it covers the most recently found glitches we have verified and is functional), I think it would be a good idea to become affiliates with them, and form a glitch wiki alliance, maybe called the "Independent Glitch Wiki Alliance" (IGWA)? All both wikis would have to do is add an "Independent Glitch Wiki Alliance (IGWA)" section to the sidebar, create a logo, and a template to add at the bottom of the main page.
I think this would definitely promote the wiki, attract new visitors and maybe new members.
New feature proposal, and about the page review system
The new feature I'm thinking of is having template(s) like this. We would need permission from Zelda Chaos if we wanted to just base our template on that, but this would be great to have; it would allow us to show which versions a glitch occurs more clearly than just writing e.g. "select buttons work in the Japanese Generation I games except for Pocket Monsters Pikachu". Thoughts on this?
I don't know whether page review system is worth it personally. Our wiki isn't very active, and having this feature discourages growth. Since a wiki can easily be updated, any errors can be removed. On the other hand, a page review system means that when the admins are inactive, a new potentially false statement won't be visible.
I think we should remove it, I'd like to think that most of our users have a good knowledge about glitches and won't add stuff like "Missingno. will erase your save file, don't catch it." What do other people think about this?
Also, I feel the "accuracy", "depth" and "readability" fields for the review system aren't necessary. Was that a MediaWiki default? I'm not sure.
Updating the GlitchDex/Should the GlitchDex pages be 'wikified'?
I'm not going to focus on this right now, but it would be good to update GlitchDex pages some time with these TM/HM learnsets and these level up moves/evolutions. Also valuable are the available Johto guard glitch moves and more available front/back sprites (with a note to say if any of them are random).
This would be a lot of work, but to make things easier it would be a good idea to actually wikify the GlitchDex to add new information without Abwayax having the update the HTML. I admittedly am no good at making templates, so I'd need some help in that respect.
Completing Project "Palette Town"
It'd be good to finish this project, if it never got finished. Project "Palette Town"'s goal is to replace all grey scale images on the wiki with Super Game Boy ones. It wouldn't be too much to do compared to some of the other stuff.