The dark lord trombonator
Yes, that's really my neck
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2008
- Messages
- 2,067
- Reaction score
- 2
Hi everyone,
The fansite articles on Bulbapedia certainly aren't the highest priority articles we have, but they are often of low quality. This has possibly come through by lack of direction on the staff's part, or maybe because you guys love Bulbagarden so much you don't go elsewhere (nawww shucks). Whatever the case, these articles need a bit of love.
History sections
A lot of the sites are lacking a history section. Every fansite began somewhere: if you're interested in helping out and learning something new, pick a site and do a bit of digging. Those with history sections can definitely get a decent rewrite: rather than listing announcements and changes to the sites sentence by sentence, let's make some decent prose. Bulbapedia is written by the community, after all, so it's important that we feature a bit of the wider community, too. If you were around at the dawn of the Pokémon online era, we'd love to know what you know.
Staff listings
Bulbapedia is not a place for you to give every website's entire site's staff a shoutout. Sorry. If we listed every single moderator of every single site, we'd have some very long pages, especially when we get around to BMGf. These are not vanity pages. This is up for debate, but I'd like to propose that only staff in official, named capacity are listed (i.e. we would list SaturnYoshi as BMGf's Head Administrator, but wouldn't mention John Q. Moderator as an anime mod). This is akin to listing the CEOs of a company on a Wikipedia article, but not listing every receptionist or toilet cleaner; this way we can have some sort of manageable list of staff for all sites which doesn't outbalance the page.
Site features
And of course we're not an advertising service either. If a fansite page is going into depth about every single subforum or feature, then some pruning may be required. Keep it simple, Shirley.
Notability
This is the tricky turkey (inventive metaphors FTW). We don't have articles on many defunct sites because, well, they're defunct. Unless a now-closed site was super hugely important and you can write five decent paragraphs about it, it probably isn't worth an article. Similarly, we generally don't have articles on some of the newer sites. But again, Bulbapedia isn't an advertising agency. Only create a new article if the site has done something fantastically standout or is a major player that we've somehow missed thus far.
Any questions?
I started this thread with one purpose in mind, but thought about a few more (somewhat) important things as I wrote it. Hopefully it's clear. If you're interested in helping edit this section, but need something more to go on, edit this section and a staffy will get back to you.
Cheers guys. As always, thanks for your help.
P.S. I'm not just looking at articles like [bp]Bulbagarden[/bp] and [bp]Pokébeach[/bp]. I'm also thinking about NIWA and EP articles. Quite a few of those are barren or out-of-date or both.
The fansite articles on Bulbapedia certainly aren't the highest priority articles we have, but they are often of low quality. This has possibly come through by lack of direction on the staff's part, or maybe because you guys love Bulbagarden so much you don't go elsewhere (nawww shucks). Whatever the case, these articles need a bit of love.
History sections
A lot of the sites are lacking a history section. Every fansite began somewhere: if you're interested in helping out and learning something new, pick a site and do a bit of digging. Those with history sections can definitely get a decent rewrite: rather than listing announcements and changes to the sites sentence by sentence, let's make some decent prose. Bulbapedia is written by the community, after all, so it's important that we feature a bit of the wider community, too. If you were around at the dawn of the Pokémon online era, we'd love to know what you know.
Staff listings
Bulbapedia is not a place for you to give every website's entire site's staff a shoutout. Sorry. If we listed every single moderator of every single site, we'd have some very long pages, especially when we get around to BMGf. These are not vanity pages. This is up for debate, but I'd like to propose that only staff in official, named capacity are listed (i.e. we would list SaturnYoshi as BMGf's Head Administrator, but wouldn't mention John Q. Moderator as an anime mod). This is akin to listing the CEOs of a company on a Wikipedia article, but not listing every receptionist or toilet cleaner; this way we can have some sort of manageable list of staff for all sites which doesn't outbalance the page.
Site features
And of course we're not an advertising service either. If a fansite page is going into depth about every single subforum or feature, then some pruning may be required. Keep it simple, Shirley.
Notability
This is the tricky turkey (inventive metaphors FTW). We don't have articles on many defunct sites because, well, they're defunct. Unless a now-closed site was super hugely important and you can write five decent paragraphs about it, it probably isn't worth an article. Similarly, we generally don't have articles on some of the newer sites. But again, Bulbapedia isn't an advertising agency. Only create a new article if the site has done something fantastically standout or is a major player that we've somehow missed thus far.
Any questions?
I started this thread with one purpose in mind, but thought about a few more (somewhat) important things as I wrote it. Hopefully it's clear. If you're interested in helping edit this section, but need something more to go on, edit this section and a staffy will get back to you.
Cheers guys. As always, thanks for your help.
P.S. I'm not just looking at articles like [bp]Bulbagarden[/bp] and [bp]Pokébeach[/bp]. I'm also thinking about NIWA and EP articles. Quite a few of those are barren or out-of-date or both.
roject Fandom/To-do list[/bp]. Since these still haven't been created, despite being redlinked for some time, I don't know how notable they actually are. Also, speaking of fansite pages we don't have, we don't have a page for Veekun, which I think we should (especially since it's an affiliate of ours).
