International content on Bulbapedia

[electAbuzzzz]

OK, so I had this idea, and I ran it by DETH and he thought it's good... So I figured I'll toss it here and see what the rest of the community thinks about it.

I'll start with some background: it started from Project VA. Some of you might've noticed how many [bp=Category:Voice actors]international voice actor articles[/bp] we have. I created some of them myself, even. Still, a while ago I talked to Kenji-girl (who's pretty much in charge of that project, even if not officially) about these articles going out of hand. We had entire pages for some international (=not Japanese or American) voice actors who had only very minor roles. We're an English wiki and it was pointless. After KG, myself, and some other admins had a chat about it, we decided to keep stricter notability rules for international VAs, and that's what we did. However, I still got the impression during that chat that many of them felt like international VAs are not notable at all. At the time, I disagreed.

However, with time to think, I realized they have a point. Currently we have nearly a hundred articles about international voice actors, and let's face it - even if it's someone who dubbed Ash or 3 other main characters, those articles are usually kinda crappy. Not all of them, some of them are OK, but still - I started wondering whether or not we really want to flood ourselves with these pages.

Then another area came to my attention - [bp=Category:TV]TV articles[/bp]. For those of you not familiar with Project TV, its articles contain information about channels and broadcasting stations that air the Pokémon anime. Now, for the sake of this thread, I'll ignore the English and Japanese ones again and focus only on the international ones. [bp]Italia 1[/bp], for example, is an article (and even a pretty good one) about an Italian channel. [bp]SIC[/bp] is an article (not as good) about a Portuguese channel. Potentially, by those notability standards, every tiny little children channel around the world gets its own article.

Then it hit me - a way to turn these articles into fewer, big, interesting ones, while keeping all the info. Instead of having an article about a Portuguese channel and another 15 articles about Portuguese voice actors... why not have one big article called "Pokémon in Portugal"? That page could contain every possible piece of info about the franchise in that country. Instead of an Italian channel and 17 Italian voice actors, "Pokémon in Italy". "Pokémon in Israel". "Pokémon in Korea". Of course, there's no point in "Pokémon in Argentina" and "Pokémon in Peru" and "Pokémon in Bolivia" - they all get the same dub and games, so "Pokémon in Latin America" would suffice. Wynaut?

I wouldn't mind starting and leading a project about this myself. Project Globe, we can call it, for lack of a better title. Each of these articles can be huge and interesting, and replace many many current stubs.

Thoughts? Ideas?

 

[Naya Rivera]

That's a really good idea. Mergeing them into "Pokémon in *Insert country here*" seems good instead of having many stubs and gets rid of them and putting them in one article by area.

 

[TTEchidna]

Hmm... you know, we could even use it to discuss the franchise as it is in Japan, considering we don't really do that.

 

[The dark lord trombonator]

Sure. I'd help out as far as I can.

 

[Soulweaver]

That sounds reasonable as long as no information is lost in the merging process.

 

[Jioruji Derako]

I think we may have mentioned the subject before, but we could also shunt some of those smaller articles off to other wikis within the EP. As it is, a bunch of the other EP wikis link to Bulbapedia for various reasons, but there's not a lot of return links; with the advent of "Pokémon in X" articles, if there's a corresponding EP wiki in that language, perhaps we could also link off to there for articles like VAs and channels.

As an English wiki, we really don't need to list off Spanish voice actors. But the Spanish wiki would have a need to do so, as well as a much better userbase for it.
All we need is a list of VAs on a "Pokémon in Spain" article. And it's a simple matter to link each of their names to the correct pages on the Spanish wiki (if they're there).

On that note, if the so-called "Project Globe" wanted to be, well, global, it probably wouldn't be tough to get some users on board from the other EP wikis and spread this effort to all of the EP. (i.e., other wikis could have "Pokémon in X" articles of their own, each linking off to the correct EP wikis.)

...okay, and now I'm going to figure out what the fuck all these ants are so interested in on my desk.

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

 

[TTEchidna]

Let's do it. Speakers of the EP languages, get your butts on the other wikis and talk to them!

 

[Naya Rivera]

Let's do it. Speakers of the EP languages, get your butts on the other wikis and talk to them!

I can get some of the Spanish admins (>>.

 

[Archaic]

We're going to have to make sure the names of all those actors and TV stations redirect to the correct merged article, so that visitors from the foreign language wiki's who click to see the alternative language versions of those articles will get redirected to our merged article.

I'd avoid calling it "Pokemon in (country)" though. The idea of those sort of articles is good, but that should be for the whole franchise with a name like that. "Pokemon Anime in (country)" however...

 

[TTEchidna]

Good point... "The Pokémon anime in X" is good... though what's to say we can't make the whole franchise fit on the page?

 

[Archaic]

Nothing, it's just so much easier to categorize things this way.

 

[electAbuzzzz]

But then the articles can't include relevant non-anime information, such as games releases, manga releases, TCG tournaments, even something about the local fandom community. These articles can contain much more than anime stuff.

 

[RavenKingSage]

Good idea.

 

[Archaic]

But then the articles can't include relevant non-anime information, such as games releases, manga releases, TCG tournaments, even something about the local fandom community. These articles can contain much more than anime stuff.

Which is why we would have separate articles for each. I would rather every country had a few smaller articles for individual segments of the fandom than a few more important ones (which would logically be the most trafficked in this group) being overly bloated.

 

[electAbuzzzz]

Which is why we would have separate articles for each. I would rather every country had a few smaller articles for individual segments of the fandom than a few more important ones (which would logically be the most trafficked in this group) being overly bloated.

Aha. So, in theory, we could have "Pokemon anime in France", "Pokemon manga in France", "Pokemon TCG in France"...? We'll have to keep very strict quality standards, then. As in, "no stubs allowed. if you can't write a full good article, don't bother."

The thing is, while the anime ones will be pretty huge, the others won't... So I thought we could just toss it all together. That way, the anime section would take up most of the article, while the other sections would probably remain single paragraphs.

 

[Jioruji Derako]

We could start with "Pokémon in X" articles, and have the larger sections (such as Anime) link to the full "Pokémon Anime in X" articles. Because yeah, depending on the subject, some might fill up nothing more than a section of an article, while others would require full articles of their own.

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

 

[MAGNEDETH]

i agree with Buzz and Geo, in fact separating them based on their media is borderline the same as it is now, which doesnt make a lot of sense.

 

[electAbuzzzz]

So here's what I'll do: I'll start by writing up full articles about the franchise in a few countries (I'll probably start with Italy and Portugal, since I can base those on information already on the pedia, and then Israel, which is where I live). It probably won't be today, but sometime soon.

If at some point we'll the decide that these articles are big enough to split up, we will. If no one objects, I'll start up the project soon (I even designed a logo already).