"Dead" Wikis

[embyr_75]

Ok, so maybe Dead is a bit dramatic, but I know that right now Metroid Wiki has pretty much no activity. There haven't been any real content edits or new articles created since... I don't even remember. And there are TONS of articles that still need creating. The first page of our "new files" gallery goes back to late 2013, and even back then it was mostly just me. I guess I'm technically still here, but it's really hard to get motivated to edit when you're by yourself. I've taken to drifting between SMWiki and ZW in the interim. I'm sure other Wikis are in the same boat.

So what I'm getting at is, do we have any kind of provision for reinvigorating dead wikis? Ok, so let me rephrase that. I'm pretty sure there's no provision, but I thought I'd post a "wanted ad" here anyways. I've been using Facebook to attract attention but it's really only attracted foot traffic, not editors. I know we've discussed "cross/inter-wiki" editors before but it's never really gotten off the ground. Any ideas? Or volunteers?

[SUGauthor]

You could try heading over to Reddit and enlisting the help of the Metroid Subreddit, they might be a little more interested.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Metroid/

[embyr_75]

Thanks, I'll try that.

[Torchickens]

I hope some editors came to Metroid Wiki. But even if there are not so many, it's good that you do not seem to be the only editor.

Ok, so maybe Dead is a bit dramatic, but I know that right now Metroid Wiki has pretty much no activity. There haven't been any real content edits or new articles created since... I don't even remember. And there are TONS of articles that still need creating. The first page of our "new files" gallery goes back to late 2013, and even back then it was mostly just me. I guess I'm technically still here, but it's really hard to get motivated to edit when you're by yourself. I've taken to drifting between SMWiki and ZW in the interim. I'm sure other Wikis are in the same boat.

I can relate to this. I edit the Starfy Wiki and it has almost no activity except from me, now. I am currently the only person who adds game information or creates new articles.

I miss when it wasn't just me. However, we were a small community to begin with. The main 'bulk' editors before I joined were The Forgotten Beast, Star_Light and Kagegamer12 and there were a few other editors like MBArceus on the Wikia version, and perhaps less on starfywiki.org after it was hosted. (I do not know because I didn't join the Wikia version early). They worked very hard to develop the wiki by themselves after BattleFranky202 founded it. I feel we are close, and that makes me happy but I think I should keep in touch with the other staff more. (I took over as editor in chief from The Forgotten Beast as I am the sole contributor now).

There became a point when they stopped submitting game content, and then from then on I was the only person doing those kinds of edits. I don't know why, I have some thoughts as to why if it's not just real life factors (i, ii). But it should never be an obligation to edit a wiki, just a hobby.

i) I think the amount of stuff left to cover on Starfy Wiki has become much lower. If you compare the amount of articles on Starfy Wikia (603), you can see that Starfywiki.org has over double (1341).

When starfywiki.org was started, we didn't have articles about every character/enemy, item and tune yet. Now we do, and surprisingly there are very little things we can start new articles about (which puts us in a different position to you if that isn't the case with Metroid Wiki). I do think that the detail on some articles can be improved; i.e. the Japanese game characters, stages and enemies, however. Myself and Star Light know some Japanese, but we don't know enough to make detailed character descriptions.

I became really fanatical about the Legendary Starfy series, much more than I thought I'd get into it when I joined Starfy Wikia. On starfywiki.org, together with Star Light I completed articles about every character and enemy in the Legendary Starfy series, and we even did some manga synopses together (and I have finished the rest of the manga except chapters in an obscure (as if the tankoubon manga wasn't obscure) non-tankoubon series/in magazine manga).

I covered totally new topics as well. These include merchandise, events, glitches, prerelease information, unused content and more.

I get a feeling that the Legendary Starfy series may be 'too obscure', but that is wrong. I know it has a fan-base, although it is fragmented. There are many fans on Youtube and DeviantArt, just not in a dedicated community. Many people liked the only English game in the series, The Legendary Starfy. But there seems to be no dedicated website other than Starfy Wiki, and I think it's disappointing that I have seen almost no edits from non-staff (with a few exceptions) on the independent wiki.

There used to be a Legendary Starfy website called Saltwater Stafi but I don't know how popular it became, it was before I became a fan. I don't even know of a dedicated Japanese website that updates regularly, other than an art blog called imasara that we are affiliates with.

ii) It doesn't help there has been no new Legendary Starfy game for getting on to 6 years, because if there was; I could try to get in touch with the other staff and team up to cover the game together and a new game may invite newcomers to the series. Golden Sun Universe is in a similar situation in this respect.

Regardless of being the only editor, I enjoy editing Starfy Wiki and have a drive to improve it when I can. It just has become more boring. My number of edits have dwarfed all the other staff's during the periods where I am the only contributor (21808 compared to 9000 something for all the other staff combined).

[Greenpickle]

Pikipedia was pretty much the same until Pikmin 3 came along.  Everything was there, pretty much - plenty of reorganisation, rewording, restructuring to be done, but no new content.  In a way, that's a good thing, but it's got to be harmful when the community kind of disbands - maybe there's something such wikis can do to retain a community even though there's no editing to be done.  Maybe try getting into unused/prototype game content, or ROM editing or something?

[Torchickens]

I see. I have actually tried that re:unused content (I have always been fanatical about unused Pokémon things and glitches so that helped), and I've dug into glitches as well, but no new face wants to edit on the wiki/no old face has come back for long-time editing.

The Densetsu no Starfy 4 unused content page is the 22nd most popular page on the wiki, list of glitches in the Nintendo DS games is the 14th, so people are definitely interested. However, I feel that (and glitches to a lesser extent) are subjects that are specialized and that people are maybe less likely to contribute about them. Though maybe the same could be said about the Japanese content to a lesser degree.

An open question: what do you think are factors that contribute interest in contributing to a wiki?

I think
*Series popularity/whether a new game has come out
*Nice site design, accessible, colourful with little bugs (I am really thankful to The Forgotten Beast and Tappy for this)
*Things to do (and perhaps obvious things to do)
*Depth  (often hard unless you're good at Japanese)
*Breadth (the wiki is very broad)
*Maybe having not just the wiki but a place where people can talk about the series (there is a Legendary Starfy forum on these boards but it doesn't get used much)
*Content that will make the wiki useful for playthroughs (there are a few articles like this such as our Zukan and Rare Enemy pages and the Answers Card page)
*The ease of finding new information and people's interest to do so.

The wiki has a lot of things right with it, but I can't see anything completely new we can write about; but things to do include expanding character biographies and adding sections about character's roles in the manga (the information is (mainly) already there thanks to the manga articles).

I guess we need more knowledgeable Legendary Starfy fans. I have seen a few on GameFAQs, but they are rare (outside of Japan) and some may no longer be interested in researching about the series. Some day I would love to see someone with an excellent knowledge in Japanese who has played every Legendary Starfy game (or at least is in the process of playing them) and would like to contribute.

I found out how to translate the Densetsu no Stary text in the ROM (and it is a little harder because there is no English font except in the credits and a debug menu but somebody did make an English VWF hack for it). I am not experienced enough yet (by far) in both Japanese and a hacking respect, but I'm currently translating what I can.

Thanks for your reply.

[Greenpickle]

*Things to do (and perhaps obvious things to do)

I think this is rather important for some people, but not others.  Pikipedia split from Wikia, and the old wiki still gets editors from time to time; recently, one started editing at Wikia and refuses to stop, because there's not much to do at Pikipedia (and because if people see the Wikia site first, he doesn't want them to think badly of the Pikmin community).

At Pikipedia we have a page for 'current projects', but I don't think it's really helped with newer editors finding things to do - instead, they'll just look around the articles and determine from that whether they think there's something they could help with.  Maybe it's just not easy enough to get to the current projects page.

*Maybe having not just the wiki but a place where people can talk about the series (there is a Legendary Starfy forum on these boards but it doesn't get used much)

I think this is very important, again speaking from experience with Pikipedia.  I think I would've stopped editing and left the community ages ago if we hadn't had the chatroom (IRC channel).  I don't think it helps a great deal with getting visitors to stay, but it does help with getting frequent editors not to leave, or at least to kind of hang around even if they stop editing.  For a small wiki, all you need is a couple of people in the chatroom every day and it feels much more like a community and less like 'just an encyclopaedia'.

A fair amount of our recent (last year or so) activity has been from people doing ROM stuff and coming to discuss it in the chatroom (we had some test levels discovered, music/sound file reverse engineering, that kind of stuff).  Even if these people don't make edits, just being there definitely adds something.

--

I asked around and got this:

Code Select Expand


[16:57:20] @Espyo tips for popularity...
[16:57:32] @Espyo well, I want to say that the mistakes page [1] I made is pretty awesome and interesting
[16:57:41] @Espyo but there's no factuality about it
[16:58:01] @Espyo other than that, the front page I say would be a good place to keep clean
[16:58:11] @Espyo that change in the news style [2] was a good one, I think
[16:58:34] @Espyo I guess being very accepting of newcomers is also good
[16:58:41] @Espyo I made the quick start page [3] with that in mind
[16:58:52] @Espyo the number of people that don't even understand the concept of editing is huge
[16:59:02] @Espyo so I'm hoping that page is a real game-changer

[17:06:02] @Espyo I think some more "real world" pages would help
[17:06:11] @Espyo like glitches
[17:06:17] @Espyo people are pretty up and about glitches
[17:06:22] @Espyo I think I factually checked that at some point
[17:06:27] @Espyo or maybe it's just a "feeling" thing
[17:06:33] @Espyo I mean, there ARE a lot of glitch videos out there
[17:07:03] @Espyo but yeah, if the Starfy Wiki's got the basics down
[17:07:19] @Espyo I strongly suggest they approach the technical side of the series
[17:07:30] @Espyo numeric values, figuring out how some game mechanics work

[17:08:09] @Espyo oh, and topics that help speedrunners
[17:08:19] @Espyo if they really expand on that, that can be a "market" they can conquer


[1] http://www.pikminwiki.com/index.php?title=Mistakes_in_the_Pikmin_series
[2] http://www.pikminwiki.com/Main_Page
[3] http://www.pikminwiki.com/index.php?title=Help:Quick_start_guide

[Torchickens]

Thank you for asking around. I will post more on our Starfy board too.

Speedrunning articles. Sounds like a good idea. I have a friend who is a Pokémon speedrunner who was actually thinking about doing a Starfy speedrun at one point but he is not familiar with the series, so I could give him the information he might want.

Densetsu no Starfy has a major glitch that lets you take control of the game's attract demo, and another (frame specific) Suspend Save corruption glitch where you have to reset the game exactly 36 frames after pressing Start (though that one hasn't been confirmed on console, only emulator). The fastest TAS on TASVideos beats the game in 3:28.

Routing for Densetsu no Starfy any% would be a start.

In Densetsu no Starfy 2 there is a sequence break in the Large Tree's Forest stage involving taking enemy damage to give you a boost to let you get to a door, but I haven't documented it on the wiki yet though.

When routing games that do not make much use of glitches, it may serve as a sort of mini-walkthrough that could appeal to not just speedrunners.

[embyr_75]

I hope some editors came to Metroid Wiki.

Not really. It's still pretty much just me. 

When starfywiki.org was started, we didn't have articles about every character/enemy, item and tune yet. Now we do, and surprisingly there are very little things we can start new articles about (which puts us in a different position to you if that isn't the case with Metroid Wiki).

Very different. Metroid Wiki still hasn't covered the basics. Lots of room articles to be written, and gobs missing from classics like Super Metroid. I suspect one of the big contributors to our lack of editors is competition from the Metroid Wikia, which is much larger and has more staff members. I did create some exclusive content that I don't think they've gotten around to yet (like text dumps from Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime Echoes). But it hasn't created much traffic. I've also been trying to be more active on our social media channels to get exposure. Buuut exposure /= editors. 

Regardless of being the only editor, I enjoy editing Starfy Wiki and have a drive to improve it when I can. It just has become more boring.

^ This exactly. It's not as fun as it used to be. But it's my wiki and I luffs it! 

[KidIcarus]

Maybe we should advertise in Game Informer or something? What is our budget?