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Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Direct

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Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

I just have to say again that I really think the aim should be to be a professional reliable news source that does its best to give us true facts. There is absolutely no place for jokes...
If someone wants a joke, they wouldn't go on a news source, they'd search for a forum/blog/whatever that is dedicated to that kind of thing... (which can be done on bulbagarden if there's really such a demand for the idea of not-really-funny fake articles...)
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

There are also those news stories that manage to be both funny *and* true at the same time.

For example I think most of Bulbanews' readers would get a good chuckle out of reading about the dude who jumped the fence of the White House Friday afternoon while wearing a Pikachu hat and carrying a stuffed Pikachu with him. It's a ridiculous WTF? story that has the added bonus of not confusing readers because it's something that actually happened in real life.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Dogasu said:
Maverick Nate said:
Why is Bulbanews focusing on writing fake news when there are so many real news stories that aren't published.
Click to expand...

Off the top of my head:

  • Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire OST announced, to be released November 29th
  • The pilot for a second season of the Team Rocket radio show is currently in development, according to Mima Masafumi's Twitter
  • The Indigo League's being re-released on DVD in the U.S.
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1) What?! :D
2) The TRio had a radio show?!
3) After I spent almost $200 on two boxsets not even a year ago, and they're releasing it as one set? -.-

But I agree with both you and Evil Figment. If the person who wrote this doesn't write the normal news stories, it doesn't take any resources away from the regular news and should therefore remain. But at the same time, if there's stuff that's not being reported, then it should be reported on. In fact, I'm a little surprised that there isn't a subforum here in Pokémon news where members can submit news that's absent from the main page and then (if legitimate sources are provided) the staff can add them into the official news.

I personally don't mind Oddishnews. I think it's cute. But I think it should have its own section on the Bulbanews page instead of being listed with the regular news.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Why not have like a separate wiki for the Oddish news stuff? Doll it up and make it look exactly like Bulbanews with fake everything including fake events (Pokemon being distributed in certain regions/towns) and maybe OddishNewsNow twitter feed. For April Fools you guys can have them overlap like it usually does.

In short it's a great and cute idea, but it should be kept separate from the actual news outside of April Fools.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Dogasu: the problem remain that these are two unrelated facts. Not publishign this article wouldn't have gotten more news published. ThatS' the end of that part of the story.

We're aware that there are issues with how the news should be run and how they are actually run. We're looking at addressing them; but we won't put everything else on hold until we find those solutions. That just isn't an option.

So while you have a valid point on the lack of stories, it's especially irrelevant to this article.

I just have to say again that I really think the aim should be to be a professional reliable news source that does its best to give us true facts. There is absolutely no place for jokes...
Click to expand...

If we took ourselves THAT seriously, we wouldn't have any business being part of a fandom. Fandoms should always be fun first, serious later - they're supposed to be fun. If we were obsessed about fandom to the point of not having fun, then what would even be the point?

Making the separation between Oddishnews and real news clearer is a one lesson we've taken from this first test and will try to improve on, but there are other issues with setting up a separate site (for example, that it requires being able to produce enough content to justify a separate site), ,so that's not really an option just yet. If the project proves successful and content-ful, then we may consider establishing a separate wiki (or othher support media) for it.

Running it as a blog or as forum post are not options; the forum and blogs are no place to put official Bulbagarden content on.
 
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Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Evil Figment said:
So while you have a valid point on the lack of stories, it's especially irrelevant to this article.
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We were asked to give feedback on this new feature and my feedback is "you guys need to fill in the gaping holes in your news coverage first before posting these joke articles." That's extremely relevant to this article no matter how much you insist otherwise.

But also the joke is unfunny (hey what if the guy who helped make Pokemon suffered a terrible injury and had to be hospitalized WOULDN'T THAT BE HILARIOUS!?!?!?) and the article should have been posted when the Ice Bucket Challenge was still a thing that people cared about and not weeks after the fact.

If we were obsessed about fandom to the point of not having fun, then what would even be the point?
Click to expand...

It might surprise you to learn that people actually like knowing about upcoming releases and projects and the other things like that.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

It might surprise you to learn that people actually like knowing about upcoming releases and projects and the other things like that.
Click to expand...

It might surprise you that our ability to do the one thign and the other are not related. If you somehow missed it the last two times I said it.

"you guys need to fill in the gaping holes in your news coverage first before posting these joke articles."
Click to expand...

So we shouldn't innovate, shouldn't greenlight anything new, until News is fixed?

That's a bad way of running a fansite the size of Bulbagarden. It might have some validity for glorified proto-blogs and other relics of the Geocities era (Where there is only one guy, so he can only ever do new things at the cost of not spending time on other things), but on a collective project on the scale of Bulba involving well over a hundred staff, it would be a criminally stupid way to do things.

If we tried to force people with no interest in writing merchandise News to write them, what *would* happen is that they'd get bored, go do their thing elsewhere, and so instead of having no merchandise news and some jokes we'd have no merchandise news and no jokes.

So how we deal with the lack of people writing merchandise news is look for someone interested in doing that, and in the meantime let other people do the things they are interested in, and see if and how those project works.
 
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Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Evil Figment said:
If we took ourselves THAT seriously, we wouldn't have any business being part of a fandom. Fandoms should always be fun first, serious later - they're supposed to be fun. If we were obsessed about fandom to the point of not having fun, then what would even be the point?
Click to expand...

Bulbagarden isn't "the fandom" though. That's why I said that can be done on forums/blogs which are obviously fans' opinions, reviews, creations, and any sort of made-up and/or fun stuff.
Bulbagarden/news/pedia are a mostly a news and information source, and as such, should take itself seriously...

Running it as a blog or as forum post are not options; the forum and blogs are no place to put official Bulbagarden content on.
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I find it quite sad if fake articles are "official bulbagarden content" material... I mean, no offense or anything, just expressing my opinion on the matter... I guess it's your call to decide whatever you find right to do, but I just really don't think that's the place for it... blogs/forum would make much more sense

Also I'd rather not get into throwing names and comparing to other sites, but I can think of one of the other major Pokémon fansites and, while they're far from being perfect, I'd never imagine them doing anything like that and I think they can earn some more respect for keeping the more serious/professional attitude
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Bulbagarden is part of the fansite and fandom, and it will not now, or ever, limit itself to a single aspect of the fandom.

We want to get information and news out. We want to facilitate communication and discussion between fans. We also want to amuse and entertain. Both have always and will always be part of Bulbagarden's mission statement.

If you're only interested in part of this, well, not all our content is for you. That's all right. You're allowed to only like part of what we do.

As for how other fansites are run, I've adressed that in my last post. These other fansites are largely one-men show. Their webmasters do everything, and they do what they're good at and what they want to focus on. There's only so many hours in the day, and those webmaster (like anyone else) have things they're good at and bad at. If they're bad at something, they're not going to focus on it.

Bulbagarden is a massive collective project (contrary to popular myth in some parts of the internet, Archaic usually is NOT the one creating content, posting it, or interacting with you on the social medias. He's coordinating all these people). We can have someone who's good at writing articles and someone who's good at writing jokes working together.

That gives us a great deal more freedom to explore things the other sites wouldn't be able to, because we aren't doing these things at the expanse of other things we could do.
 
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Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Evil Figment said:
So we shouldn't innovate, shouldn't greenlight anything new, until News is fixed?
Click to expand...

When there are large holes in the news coverage on a site called BulbaNews that promotes itself as "your community Pokémon newspaper" then yeah, probably.

But then again what do I know?
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Dogasu said:
Evil Figment said:
So we shouldn't innovate, shouldn't greenlight anything new, until News is fixed?
Click to expand...

When there are large holes in the news coverage on a site called BulbaNews that promotes itself as "your community Pokémon newspaper" then yeah, probably.

But then again what do I know?
Click to expand...

By that same logic, Bulbagarden should have gardening tips.

(Also - and you know this as well as I do - Bulbanews, Bulbapedia and BMGF are not separate sites. They're sections of bulbagarden). Bulbagarden is not going to stop innovating just because one sub-section of Bulbagarden is having trouble addressing some of these issues. And we're going to put those innovations on the section of Bulbagarden that's best suited for it.

Of the existing sections, News is, was and remain the best suited for columns, including humor columns. They may need more clearly distinguished, and it may be that in the future we'll need to give humor its own section.

But suggesting all Bulbagarden should grind to a halt until News issues that are unrelated to the rest of Bulbagarden are fixed does indeed demonstrate what you know.
 
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Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Evil Figment said:
Dogasu said:
Evil Figment said:
So we shouldn't innovate, shouldn't greenlight anything new, until News is fixed?
Click to expand...

When there are large holes in the news coverage on a site called BulbaNews that promotes itself as "your community Pokémon newspaper" then yeah, probably.

But then again what do I know?
Click to expand...

By that same logic, Bulbagarden should have gardening tips.

(Also - and you know this as well as I do - Bulbanews, Bulbapedia and BMGF are not separate sites. They're sections of bulbagarden). Bulbagarden is not going to stop innovating just because one sub-section of Bulbagarden is having trouble addressing some of these issues. And we're going to put those innovations on the section of Bulbagarden that's best suited for it.

Of the existing sections, News is, was and remain the best suited for columns, including humor columns. They may need more clearly distinguished, and it may be that in the future we'll need to give humor its own section.

But suggesting all Bulbagarden should grind to a halt until News issues that are unrelated to the rest of Bulbagarden are fixed does indeed demonstrate what you know.
Click to expand...

While I don't exactly agree with Dogasu here, he's got a point. You mentioned that there is no place for this satire on the forum or on blogs. Then that means that it is certainly no place for a news site (sorry for calling it a site, didn't know what else to call it). While I did find it somewhat funny, leave the jokes for April Fools and start paying more attention on actual news stories.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

While I don't exactly agree with Dogasu here, he's got a point. You mentioned that there is no place for this satire on the forum or on blogs. Then that means that it is certainly no place for a news site (sorry for calling it a site, didn't know what else to call it). While I did find it somewhat funny, leave the jokes for April Fools and start paying more attention on actual news stories.
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(We tend to refer to them - News, Pedia, etc - as projects, internally)

I didn't say there's no place for jokes on a forum or blog.

I said forum or blog were not a way to deliver official bulbagarden content. They're not. Forums or blogs are places for users (and staff) to share their opinions and discuss their views. Bulbagarden content belongs on a part of the site that distinguish it from the user discussion and chatter. That's simple.

Ideally, we'd have a dedicated project that would be able to post content like humor, fanworks and the rest. The problem is, we don't have enough fan creations to justify the effort that would be required to create such a project. We don't have enough content of that sort, because we have nowhere to put it (so we always turn it down). We have nowhere to put it becauswe we don't have enough. Which we don't because we have nowhere to put it, etc, etc.

So yes, we are going to use News (because it's a better fit than pedia) for columns exploring different kind of content besides pure news.

"But you're a newspapers?". Yes, that project is. And newspapers have a logn and proud tradition of publishing humor and creative content that nobody would mistake for news. Comic strips are a common features of newspapers the world over, as are caricatures, as are crosswords puzzles and other similar games. There is also a long history of serializing fiction in newspapers. The same applies to a variety of columns that have little to do with news, but range from opinion to presenting recipes, down to and including astrology (we're not going to do that last one). My local newspaper still has a "thought of the day" section which usually consist in a satirical comment on recent news. It used to have a column that parodied and satirized suburban life.

There is, most certainly, a place for humor and creative content in newspapers, far more so than in Encyclopedias. While we should certainly improve the distinction between the news and creative content published on bulbanews, the argument that "It's a newspaper therefore should only have news" simply ignores what newspapers have been for centuries.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

To add my 2 cents: I really like this, and I think it's good to have a humour section on the site. I think it is important to make very clear what is the satire section and what is not, but if we do that, I think it's a nice addition. People that like it can read it, people that don't like it can skip it alltogether. This way, more people might find something they like on the site, while people that don't like it can just not read it, resulting in a more diverse website. The "it's a newspaper we can only bring serious news" argument is a tad weak I think; many serious newspapers are having a satire section where I live (the Netherlands), and it's very popular here. I would like to stress again how important it is to make 100% clear what is serious and what is not, as confusion on this subject is killing for the site as a whole.
 
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Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

But suggesting all Bulbagarden should grind to a halt until News issues that are unrelated to the rest of Bulbagarden are fixed does indeed demonstrate what you know.
Click to expand...

Well it's a good thing I didn't suggest that then.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

So we aren't going to grind to a halt until the News issues are fixed (we're aware of them, we'Re working on them, but unless you happen to know someone who's into writing news AND who's interested in merchandise news, chances are it will take a while to get there).

We are going to keep working on new projects. If these new projects are best released on the news platform, we will release them on the news platform.

That's all there is to it.
 
Re: Oddishnews:Junichi Masuda frozen after Ice Bucket Challenge mishap: Game Freak Di

Evil Figment said:
So we aren't going to grind to a halt until the News issues are fixed (we're aware of them, we'Re working on them, but unless you happen to know someone who's into writing news AND who's interested in merchandise news, chances are it will take a while to get there).

We are going to keep working on new projects. If these new projects are best released on the news platform, we will release them on the news platform.

That's all there is to it.
Click to expand...

But if these new projects aren't worth releasing on the news platform, which they aren't, then they aren't worth spending time on, especially when there's real news that isn't covered.
 
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