NIWA Community Forums
NIWA Community => NintendoWiki discussion => Topic started by: IceScream on March 05, 2013, 05:55:55 AM
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Who was in charge of NintendoWiki? I checked the Recent changes of last 30 days and the only useful edits were 3 minor edits by ToastUltimatum and Superfiremario. Even the German wiki was more active than the English wiki.
Offtopic, what happened to WikiBound? It give me a 403 Forbidden error whatever I view that site.
New thread: http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0 (http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0)
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I think it's because people aren't really sure what to do there. No-one ever came to any reasonable conclusion about the wiki's scope, which at present almost seems to change on a case by case basis. I'm not even sure what's supposed to go there. I think part of it was to cover any and all games published by Nintendo, but why would people go to NintendoWiki for, say, Pokémon info, when Bulbapedia has better, more in-depth info?
Also, Wikibound, and other sites hosted by Tacopill, are currently down due to server errors. He's hoping to have them back up by the weekend.
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What Moydow said, basically... the fact that even beyond the scope, very few of the policies and standards were ever properly fleshed out doesn't help either, nor does the general "early work-in-progress" feel that the site has had ever since its debut and never got past. It's an inconsistent jumble of unfinished things that's not sure what it's about, and at present doesn't really have anything of interest apart from some back-of-the-box blurbs.
Offtopic, what happened to WikiBound? It give me a 403 Forbidden error whatever I view that site.
Tacopill reinstalled stuff on his server a while ago and most of the sites on it (also including Fire Emblem Wiki and Lylat Wiki) have been experiencing all kinds of wacky problems ever since. There's a skype convo going on dedicated to fixing it, with limited success so far; if you have experience and would like to help, please contact tacopill before he loses the last tiny remainder of his sanity over this :p
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Another problem is that those who were dedicated to NintendoWiki kinda vanished.
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another problem is that those who were dedicated to NintendoWiki kinda vanished.
Yeah, things got busy on my end. Moving house, getting ill, making Let's Plays, and most of my time on wikis has been dedicated to Robot Wars Wiki. I might suddenly explode one day and make some articles, but no promises.
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How about let NintendoWiki focus only in NIWA related articles, and link the game / hardware pages to other members of NIWA? Maybe also rename NintendoWiki to NIWA Wiki?
Edit: I deleted my other post. I forgot Wikibound is now temporarily down. Just ignore it.
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"Is NintendoWiki dead?"
I think the better question is: "Was NintendoWiki ever alive?" While I never looked for one, I have never seen an edit by someone who wasn't a staff member on some NIWA wiki. If a wiki never gets edits from non-staff, it's at least "stale" and at most "desperately pushed for a reason to exist".
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To my knowledge, the staff that primarily called NintendoWiki their wiki were RAP and Tacopill (among a few others who have now retired I think)
RAP hasn't been seen in a while, and Taco has been busy dealing with hosting websites and the issues around that.
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There is a lot of loose terminology being tossed around here. Wikis are not "dead" simply because no one is editing them. Some articles might be getting stale and new articles might be missing but those factors do not mean a wiki is dead. A wiki is only truly dead when it is not visited by anyone on the web or it is taken offline.
Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AncientPages) is the Wikipedia page for dormant articles. Many of these articles have not been edited for over 7 years. Are these articles dead? No, they just might be in need of updates. I'm sure lots of them have been used millions of times in those 7 years by those searching the web.
With that said, I still think the Nintendo Wiki has a strong reason for existence. There is plenty of information about Nintendo which is not series related.
Nintendo and its corporate history
Important Nintendo executives, Shigeru Miyamoto, lots of others
Nintendo hardware and peripherals, where else do articles about the Power Glove, Super Scope, and Virtual Boy go?
Development studios which Nintendo controls and their history
Games which do not merit their own standalone wiki (Wii Sports/Play/Party/Music, Game and Watch, other Nintendo ventures which were Japan only)
The Nintendo Store in New York
Channels on the Wii and Wii U
Nintendo Power magazine history info, etc
Nintendo @ E3 (I think it would be awesome to have articles detailing what Nintendo unveiled each year, reaction, etc)
Nintendo is identified by the products it makes, which is why the Nintendo wiki is really a "support" wiki to the game series wikis. I don't believe it is dead or useless though.
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There are very few articles that were ever created on NintendoWiki though. It has a large amount of dead links, with no one creating them. And it honestly doesn't even have a staff that is dedicated to it, let alone a user base.
I'm not saying it doesn't have a purpose, just that it's purpose isn't being fulfilled.
Related: Wars Wiki has been dead for a long time now. It was left to spammers a long time ago and no one wanted to contact them.
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Related: Wars Wiki has been dead for a long time now. It was left to spammers a long time ago and no one wanted to contact them.
http://warswiki.warscentral.com/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=500
Disheartening, really. Why didn't anyone want to contact the admins?
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Disheartening, really. Why didn't anyone want to contact the admins?
Well, I asked people if they could contact them when I made the Check in thread, because I had no way to. No one responded to that post.
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Yeah, the Wars wiki has/had more of an uphill battle than the Nintendo wiki really. Since it was not a well established long-term series, the overall interest declines greatly for both editors and visitors when there are no new titles released. The 2 are very connected. A long-running series will most likely have more titles, and the fact that it already has many existing titles only boosts its hits from search engines, etc.
Nintendo wiki is underdeveloped, but has potential. Wars wiki is facing more dire circumstances.
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If Wii Series Games don't deserve a wiki, maybe existing articles from another
dead wiki (The last edit was from 2 January), http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1284.0 (http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1284.0) could merge with NintendoWiki?
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we should just take the articles from other niwa wikis and put them in the niwa wiki
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we should just take the articles from other niwa wikis and put them in the niwa wiki
Nope. Besides, Wii Wiki is still not a official NIWA wiki with only 8 articles.
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y not?
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Wii Wiki does not meet the requirements to join NIWA.
http://www.niwanetwork.org/join.php
However, so long as you give credit where credit is due, there is nothing wrong with using content.
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y dont we take articles from bulbapedia and mariowiki that are relevant. i know they have generic articles about nintendo employees and history because i've seen them b4
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(Pardon I using the "dead" word, I'm not a english speaker and I running out of words to use)
Since the other thread is going off-topic, this is the new thread to discuss how to fix any dead NIWA wikis like Wars Wiki and NintendoWiki.
Old thread here: http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1322.0 (http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1322.0)
(KidIcarus, if you want to post please post in the old thread. Thank you.)
I think maybe we should take the n-wiki and put articles from other wikis onto that wiki. also about wars wiki we should put it on probation until they are functional again.
P.s. this will be confusing. maybe we should just merge these threads?
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New thread: http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0 (http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0)
Edit: If KidIcarus can make good posts in the new thread, just close this. Moreover, this thread's discussion already extended from not only NintendoWiki but other NIWA wikis as well.
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I think maybe we should take the n-wiki and put articles from other wikis onto that wiki.
Or maybe not. NintendoWiki is not going to plagiarise from our member wikis (nor any other wikis). Wiki articles were contributed by many individual users for that particular wiki, and besides, there's no point in having duplicate articles and potentially directing traffic away from the proper wiki, not to mention incompatibilities in templates, style, interlinks, just about everything. No.
New thread: http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0 (http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0)
What's the point of making a new thread on the same thing? If KidIcarus's flooding this one with bad ideas is the cause, they can flood the other one just as much :\
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I think maybe we should take the n-wiki and put articles from other wikis onto that wiki.
No. Vellidragon explained that well enough.
also about wars wiki we should put it on probation until they are functional again.
How is that going to help them?
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to vellidragon: but creating wikis should not be about glorifying editors nor should it be about acquiring traffic. it should be about providing fans with information. if such a wiki provides users with another OPTION to obtain that information, I see it as a valuable resource. After all, it's only an option. those who choose not to acquire information in said manner need not acquire information that way
moydow: if being part of an alliance brings exposure (and in turn benefits the wars community) than it is somewhat of a reward. as with any reward, this can be a motivator for editors
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Regarding N-wiki: Stealing content from another wiki is not the best thing to do. This is for a few reasons. The articles on games from another member wiki would likely go beyond the scope of N-wiki. That is a problem its self. As Vellidragon stated, It would be better not to have a super wiki that generalizes on it's focus, only to take away from the details provided by the specialized wikis. I'm sorry KidIcarus, but that idea has not been taken favorably by any of the staff members really, so it won't be happening.
Regarding Wars Wiki (and final post on the topic here please, I didn't intend to derail conversation that much): NIWA isn't exactly known by most people in the world. So imposing a temporary ban from the alliance isn't going to mean anything to them. Especially if, which seems true, they don't care about the wiki anymore.
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Hello, my name's Craig and I'm an active member on the WarsCentral forums. For those not in the know, that's the site that plays host to WarsWiki.
Before I say anything else, I'm going to make it absolutely certain that I am not a spokeman for the site. I am not representing the site, the forums, the wiki, or anything else. I'm simply here stating my take on this whole shebang.
(As a tangent, if you do wish to speak to someone who can represent our community, head over to http://forums.warscentral.com/ and get in contact with the new admin team - Sammieo and/or PanicAttack. But anyway.)
As far as I can remember, WarsWiki joined NIWA fairly soon after it was conceived. At the time, I think it's fair to say that as a site we very much still considered ourselves a contender in the ever-shrinking Advance Wars fansite race, and as such an active wiki as part of a growing, if somewhat specialist, wiki alliance was quite a boon. If we'd had benefitted at all.
Sure, we got some new articles and our wiki was standardised and tidied up a lot. Like a whole lot. But our community didn't see any new active members join us. Hell, the aforementioned PanicAttack started a TVtropes article that can't have taken more than half 30 minutes to make and we still occasionally get new members from there. But not one from the wider NIWA pool.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming NIWA for 'not pulling your weight' or some other ridiculous blame game type thing with stuff. Like I said, our wiki very much benefitted (despite it's current dead status), but our community never saw any of these benefits because, pardon the generalisation, but 99% of our current active users never really gave a s*** that we had a wiki anyway.
So, what happened to make us stop caring? I guess we evolved as a website and a community. We quickly realised we weren't really a contender when facing the likes of AWN, so we changed and found our niche; we have a very active Advance Wars RP that's been going strong for over four years now (in fact, I encourage anyone interested to take a looksie (http://forums.warscentral.com/index.php?showforum=27).)
Again, just wanna stress I'm not speaking for the community, I'm merely stating what I feel is the prevailing mood over there.
So, tl;dr. We as a community changed, and as a result we no longer really consider ourselves an 'infosite', for lack of a better descriptor.
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moydow: if being part of an alliance brings exposure (and in turn benefits the wars community) than it is somewhat of a reward. as with any reward, this can be a motivator for editors
I was pointed to this thread by a fellow member of the Wars Central community, and let me just clarify why a probation from the alliance would not make people of our community more active on Wars Wiki. There are a few reasons, but let's start with one that concerns the entire community.
There simply are too few people around who actually care about the games, let alone the wiki. Our community is one that is- at least superficially- centered around a relatively niche game series that hasn't seen a new release in over 5 years by now. People grow up, they start new periods in their life, lose interest, leave the forums, and by now, the number of actual active members is reduced to a minimum. Just look at the Advance Wars sections of the actual forums; among the last 20 active topics there are those that haven't been posted in since 2011. There are those of us who still love the games, but after 5 years, well... You've probably discussed just about everything there is to be discussed as a community, you won't attract many new members based on the Wars games themselves and you need to adapt as a community to survive. We've done so, and even then we're barely holding on.
I've written a fair amount of Wars Wiki articles in the past, but I ran out of steam in no small part due to the fact it was simply an excercise in futility, for me. If people want to have support on the games, and knowledge, I am happy to share it, but I refuse to spend my time on writing articles that might very well never get read.
Secondly, the idea that a probation from NIWA would be detrimental to us is based on a false premise. Ever since we joined NIWA, the support we have received was extremely limited and that which we did gain was only focused on some Wiki articles. We've not had a single member who remained active for a period of, say, a month and join the actual community. And with that, I don't include those who joined and never left the Wars Wiki subforum. As a community, we've not benefited from this alliance at all, and it's safe to say probation would have zero impact on us as it simply doesn't garner any additional traffic or activity. Or, to put it simply; there is no tangible reward for us in being part of the alliance at the moment, so taking that away temporarily/permanently would have very little effect.
I am no webmaster or admin on the site, so do not take my words to be official policy or anything of the kind; I am simply portraying the situation as it is from our end. The one thing that could help us and increase interest in both the games and the wiki would be, well, a new game, but like many of my fellow Wars Central members I've lost faith in that ever happening again.
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Secondly, the mere idea that a probation from NIWA would get us active on the Wiki again is based on a false premise. Ever since we joined NIWA, the support we have received was extremely limited and that which we did gain was only focused on some Wiki articles. We've not had a single member who remained active for a period of, say, a month and join the actual community. And with that, I don't include those who joined and never left the Wars Wiki subforum. As a community, we've not benefited from this alliance at all, and it's safe to say probation would have zero impact on us as it simply doesn't garner any additional traffic or activity. Or, to put it simply; there is no tangible reward for us in being part of the alliance at the moment, so taking that away temporarily/permanently would have very little effect.
Ok, honestly, The Wars wiki community was never involved in NIWA either. So you can't blame niwa for not paying as much attention to Wars Wiki as it has to other members.
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Secondly, the mere idea that a probation from NIWA would get us active on the Wiki again is based on a false premise. Ever since we joined NIWA, the support we have received was extremely limited and that which we did gain was only focused on some Wiki articles. We've not had a single member who remained active for a period of, say, a month and join the actual community. And with that, I don't include those who joined and never left the Wars Wiki subforum. As a community, we've not benefited from this alliance at all, and it's safe to say probation would have zero impact on us as it simply doesn't garner any additional traffic or activity. Or, to put it simply; there is no tangible reward for us in being part of the alliance at the moment, so taking that away temporarily/permanently would have very little effect.
Ok, honestly, The Wars wiki community was never involved in NIWA either. So you can't blame niwa for not paying as much attention to Wars Wiki as it has to other members.
It's a fair enough point, and I am not blaming you in the least for not getting too involved; it's just the way things are, if said rather straight-forwardly. We've got difficulty enough to keep up with the bit of the site that does remain active now; even back when NIWA started and we became part of it, while we were more plentiful, we had trouble getting our own excited for Wars Wiki, and it always lacked in content for that reason.
My apologies if I my previous post gave the wrong impression (which might in part be due to my attitude in that post which I've been told is rather defensive, and on re-reading I have to agree with that :x); I am grateful for the help we did receive for the wiki, especially as I myself took something away from that experience (I know a lot more about the workings of a wiki now than I did before). It simply wasn't enough for the project to ever really take off. Whether any amount of support would have gotten it off the ground is something else...
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It's a fair enough point, and I am not blaming you in the least for not getting too involved; it's just the way things are, if said rather straight-forwardly. We've got difficulty enough to keep up with the bit of the site that does remain active now; even back when NIWA started and we became part of it, while we were more plentiful, we had trouble getting our own excited for Wars Wiki, and it always lacked in content for that reason.
My apologies if I my previous post gave the wrong impression (which might in part be due to my attitude in that post which I've been told is rather defensive, and on re-reading I have to agree with that :x); I am grateful for the help we did receive for the wiki, especially as I myself took something away from that experience (I know a lot more about the workings of a wiki now than I did before). It simply wasn't enough for the project to ever really take off. Whether any amount of support would have gotten it off the ground is something else...
It did seem a bit defensive. As my posts earlier said, I completely agree that banning from the alliance wouldn't mean anything honestly... I have more to say but completely wrong place. Moving discussion to the Dead Wiki's thread.
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Hello, this is RAP, owner of NintendoWiki:
For the lack of progress for the development of the wiki, I have quite a lot of things tied to my hands. Right now, I'm attending college right now: studying and doing homework; aiming for an traditional art/graphic art degree. I'm also focused on being with my family and also been trying to not sit at the computer too much by doing activities outside of it such as walking, doing chores, and crafting. As for the stuff that I'm supposed to implement for the wiki: I still have some of the papers written down for the plans of the wiki; it's more trickier to handle because there are supposed to be a couple of sub-wikis similar to how Bulbapedia operates (and to tell you the truth, the stuff had been further fleshed out since the wiki had launched). However, the main draw is that there's tons of info I've been punching entries in and stored it up in Google Drive and Dropbox that hasn't been pulled out for 2 years; stuff that's supposed to be utilized for the wiki as info but didn't.
I'm trying to figure out how to distribute the workload to other people who are willing to help me, but I only asked for people at other wikis if they're willing to lend a hand. Nope. I haven't repeated the thing ever since. Anyway, I don't have much time to go around at this moment. I'm still optimizing my schedule as I go. Development will be moving slowly, since I still hold much of the content and currently the only staff member of the wiki (NintendoWiki only per say).
Anyway, time to snooze for college.
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post
*cough*
http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0 (http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0)
Maybe I can make a new thread only for NintendoWiki if the staff approves it. Since this thread been derailed pretty badly.
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*cough*
http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0 (http://www.niwanetwork.org/forums/index.php?topic=1328.0)
Maybe I can make a new thread only for NintendoWiki if the staff approves it. Since this thread been derailed pretty badly.
This thread is about NintendoWiki and RAP's post was perfectly on-topic, so I don't see your problem here.
@RAP: I recall all the stuff you had been compiling & writing up for the wiki, but I still don't understand what the point is of doing so in semi-secret over the course of several years instead of just releasing it to the general public as it is being worked on. A wiki tends to be a community project, and N Wiki certainly would have profitted from something that the community in general can actually help with (and more importantly provide feedback on) during those years that it has been dead and without direction now. It's great that you are spending time on planning things out, but such things should be worked on with the community imo; I am aware that there isn't one at this moment, but that's because all potential development/ideas have been limited to "authorised personnel" instead of attempting to involve users in anything or even keeping them updated; to my knowledge, everyone but a select few staff members is currently in the dark of what the plans for N Wiki are even supposed to be, and I just don't think that is how a wiki, especially one in need of community growth, is supposed to operate.
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Agreed, but I wasn't really aware this was the case, and what RAP said here doesn't read quite like that to me. Where have you got this impression from?
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Agreed, but I wasn't really aware this was the case, and what RAP said here doesn't read quite like that to me. Where have you got this impression from?
His random pop ins on Skype. For a long time RAP has been saying that he is gathering information and cataloging it, and yet we haven't really ever seen him use it on the wiki (which kinda is the entire point)
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Ever since we joined NIWA, the support we have received was extremely limited and that which we did gain was only focused on some Wiki articles. We've not had a single member who remained active for a period of, say, a month and join the actual community. And with that, I don't include those who joined and never left the Wars Wiki subforum. As a community, we've not benefited from this alliance at all, and it's safe to say probation would have zero impact on us as it simply doesn't garner any additional traffic or activity. Or, to put it simply; there is no tangible reward for us in being part of the alliance at the moment.
then i guess da better question for niwa is wut is da point of it? all it does is write sum articles but then it leaves wit no lasting impact. da articles it writes dont even get read. maybe da better option is 2 intagrate dis data in2 1 website so all da communities dat r dying will b 1 big community dat isnt dying.
sry 4 da acronyms; was in rush