Pokémon encyclopedia project in Portuguese!!

[PalletGym]

Hello guys!

I'm a big fan of Pokémon born and raised in Brazil. I always went to Bulbapedia for information and used to visit the deceased LANDpedia in the 2010s.

But I see that today there is no longer a great Pokémon encyclopedia in the Portuguese language, which is a shame, given the large number of fans who speak this language!

I even contributed to some Brazilian Portuguese Pokémon Wikias, but they were always teams of one or two administrators who never seemed interested in getting out of their comfort zone and taking a site of this kind to the general public. They are always despondent, hoping for a miracle that will suddenly bring in hundreds of publishers and visitors.

So, I come here to ask, is there any current Pokémon encyclopedia project in Portuguese? I mean something where managers want to achieve Bulbapedia's level of quality, engagement and influence for speakers of our language.

If there is no such project currently in progress, are there Portuguese speakers attending this forum who would like to participate and contribute to a project of this size? (Brazilians, Portuguese, Angolans, Mozambicans, from all over the world).

I feel that a lot of Pokémon history in Brazil (especially from the early 2000s) has been lost. We can't let this keep happening!

We need to unite, Portuguese speaking Pokémon fans!

 

[Inari_Kitsune]

I support it.

 

[Archaic]

There's no current Portuguese project to our knowledge. Sadly, I do not believe LANDpedia ever exported any backups prior to it closing, so anyone wanting to try and take some of that existing info to start a new one would need to laboriously copy it from Archive.org backups, and you'll likely be missing many page histories there.

If there was a concerted effort to get a new one set up, we'd be happy to assist in that long term, however it's not something we'd be able to get off the ground ourselves. Generally, we recommend that these sorts of things should be born out of existing communities in that language. So if there's a Portuguese fansite or community out there who could provide that first push, that's who you should really try to engage with.

As a side note... our Bulbanews Submissions Box is open to Pokémon news from around the world. If you know of something that's of interest to Brazilian Pokémon fans, like with the info on the McDonalds Happy Meal Toys that we published last year, please feel free to submit that as either a tip, or a full blown story. We're also open to longer form articles, if you had something more like a short essay about Pokémon history in Brazil that you wanted to get out there.

 

[PalletGym]

I support it.

Nice! I've be thinking about it and will try to make this happen asap... also, maybe i have already choose a name to this project! Won't tell it here while it's no published yet, but i think it sound nice in portuguese (and latin derivated languages) and english!

There's no current Portuguese project to our knowledge. Sadly, I do not believe LANDpedia ever exported any backups prior to it closing, so anyone wanting to try and take some of that existing info to start a new one would need to laboriously copy it from Archive.org backups, and you'll likely be missing many page histories there.

That's right. Also I have done some research and couldn't find even the old LANDpedia admins Anyway, my idea is to start right from scratch! It won't be easy, but I think the brazillian community can make that.

I think the biggest problem is to make the community engaged with it after the launch hype.

Other thing I've been concerned about is: how to make a good team, with admins and staff members? Is there a "good" way on how to choose those people?

 

[Archaic]

Other thing I've been concerned about is: how to make a good team, with admins and staff members? Is there a "good" way on how to choose those people?

Typically, we've seen new wiki communities do best when they're born out of existing fan communities, and can draw on people who already have well established reputations and relevant experience within the community. Having a few people with forum moderation experience in particular can be highly valuable to a beginning wiki, to assist in spam cleanup.

Mind you, that's only an issue once you open the floodgates to new members. Bulbapedia officially launched to the public on Valentines Day, but the wiki itself was actually set up months before that, giving staff time to add content to it before the public launch.If you've got enough staff, it may well be worth having an initial phase where it's just trusted people adding in your initial content, with no editing from non-staff, just so you can focus on getting the initial skeleton up. For that matter, it'll also help if you can find some way to automate the initial creation of some of the more basic pages, like Pokémon move lists.

 

[PalletGym]

Having a few people with forum moderation experience in particular can be highly valuable to a beginning wiki, to assist in spam cleanup.

Interesting. I've never been a forum user (actually this is the first time I post something on a forum lol), but I know that many Brazilian fans use it. Pokémon Mythology still has a large number of active Pokémon fans today in Brazil.

I kind of tried to get in touch with some fans in the Facebook groups, but I wasn't successful (okay, thinking about it now and... not a good idea at all).

I will present my ideas to the fans in Brazilian forums and try to assemble a team of initial members like you mentioned, before opening the wiki to the public.

I have (a little) experience building templates on wikis, so I'll try to find some temporary hosting so I can present some demo pages and hopefully get people's attention (with something palpable and accessible I believe make it easier to call attention to this).

Do you think this is a good idea or should I just express my willingness to build a collective wiki project before worrying about this sort of thing?

I found some MediaWiki manual pages about bots that can be used, among other things, for page creation. Is this what you mean by automation?

 

[Archaic]

Having something up so people can get a feel for what you'd like to do might assist, yes. Especially since otherwise you'll have potential volunteers sitting around without anything to do, who'll likely lose motivation quickly while waiting. Typically, we'd suggest Miraheze for wikis needing a host to get started. Long term, once you're better established, then we could potentially discuss the possibility of Bulba hosting it directly.

Yes, bots for page creation are basically essential for getting started, when you've got a bunch of existing content from a database that you just need to be slotted in to templates.

 

[PalletGym]

Oh! Thank you! You have been very kind and helped me a lot.

I didn't know about Miraheze, so now I don't have to worry about hosting or registering the domain haha

I will start creating the first templates and pages as soon as possible to present this project to other people.

As for bots, this is a very interesting idea! Unfortunately I'm not sure how it would work because not all Pokémon content is localized in Portuguese yet (and the idea of this project is to use the localizations for our language that already exist).

But using bots to import content from some characters or even the list of existing Pokémon (the overwhelming majority use the same name as the English version) already helps a lot. Anyway, this will help, but we will need to think about the best way to use it (obviously).

Again, thank you so much for your answers! I really hope that this endeavor of mine works out.

I also hope that my next thread here will be to announce the release of the encyclopedia to the general public of Pokémon fans!