After looking through some of the articles that already exist on this wiki, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of information compared to the preexisting resources that are found on Wikipedia.
To be honest, it seems like the info on Wikipedia is much more complete and cited, and therefore more reliable than some of the articles that can be found here. To point out a glaring example, the Tales of Destiny page on this wiki showed that there was some port for the Sega system, which I know does not exist for certain, yet the Tales of Destiny Director's Cut which was recently released (five weeks ago in fact) was not listed. I have already removed the Sega entry, and added in the Director's Cut entry, with a one-line summary to fit the style of the current entries, though I feel this does not help much or at all for anyone who wishes to learn about the different versions of the game. As for the Sega entry, judging by a quick comparison of versions in the page history, it seems that the entry continues to be added in after removal, without any comment or explanation. It is wrong, there is no Sega version in existance, and I can look for sources to support myself if I have to, but my next suggestion might be easier.
I would like the opinion of the administrators and everyone else about the use of the current articles that are already publically available on Wikipedia for the equivalent articles on this wiki. I don't know about Wikia's policies regarding information ported directly from Wikipedia itself, so I would like to learn about this and any other courses of action that might be taken before anything is done.
Supposing any problem prevents this suggestion from being practical or legal, we can always try to improve the articles at least by summarizing or expanding upon what already exists on the Wikipedia articles. This will take more effort and time of course, but the articles on our wiki, in their current state, they hardly help anyone with their lack of in-depth information. Even I was reluctant to start my little project to compile all of the skills of the series on this wiki due to its seemingly small userbase and incomplete existing articles, but I want to help change things for the better, and maybe we can increase user traffic here. (^-^)b
Also, whether we copy the existing Wikipedia articles or not, I think we should try to follow Wikipedia's style guidelines. As I understand it, there is no official format for standards on this wiki community.[1] I'd simply prefer the articles here to follow the same format that is accepted on Wikipedia, for continuancy's sake. It is a decent format for readability and indexing, and I have already applied this format to the new articles I have created earlier today.
Although if we do decide to follow Wikipedia's style formats, I would prefer all Japanese romanizations to be written without macrons, such as ō and ū, maintaining the character transliteration of Japanese words. This is the primary issue I want to address regarding romanization, since it greatly bothers me to see Japanese words like (奥義 ougi?) or (鳳凰 houou?) to be romanized like ōgi or hō-ō [2], which is far less intuitive to understand when the other form is seen practically everywhere else we see Japanese-specific information, which in itself is influenced by the way Japanese keyboard inputs work. Yes this is just my personal preference, but I think it might be better to maintain the popularly accepted format that the Tales communities use, rather than what is mandated by Wikipedia.
In any case, I want to wait for what the administrators think about this before fixing up the articles here. I hope I'm not prying too much into the workings of this community, but I think this needs to be addressed at least.
I hope no one minds, I'm just experimenting with some MediaWiki code in this article.
Mayu Miyuki 07:28, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
- Gah, wikia ate my response! (I tried to say something earlier, to no avail)
- Anywho, I expressed my extreme discontent at how the Sega port was put back up. Honestly...
- A problem this wikia faces is the number of people who contribute. There aren't even a lot of regular people, really. I stick around to try and catch vandalism when it comes around though. From that, I've learned that most just make a minor correction, or start a new section at the most, and leave. Or maybe they'll stick around for a few days =/ And even these people are infrequent. Basically, it means there are less people to do the diry work, make new arcticles, include citations, etc.
- Also, see the Tales of Destiny 2 article if you want to see how wikipedia content is used on this site. It's fine to use because of the GNU free licensing, or at least that's what I gather from it.
- As for the wikipedia standards on style suggestions, I wholeheartedly agree.
- Drache 17:30, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
- Thank you for bringing up your concerns. First, Directly importing/copying/using/modifying Wikipedia articles/content is perfectly fine and legal. Aselia and Wikipedia are both under the same license (the GNU Free Documentation License). As for the repeated recreation of pages, I will try to handle that as soon as possible. I know I haven't been quite as transparent as I was when I first started editing here, but I still keep tabs on what's going on.
- It's true that a number of the article on Wikipedia are better structured, cited, etc than those that exist here (if they exist at all). My hope would be to use those articles as starting points, and eventually the community could develop them further. We currently do not have a set of standards (or at least a very detailed set of standards) for writing, copy editing, and inclusion of article topics. If you're interested in developing these, I suggest starting a proposal (you can make sub pages of your user page and link to it from the main page and/or community portal as well as write to the mailing list). I'll take a look at whatever you have and help you draft it as well if you want.
- Imaginationac (talk) (requests) (email) 22:36, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
- Ah, thank you for the responses. Eventually, I may try to copy some pages from Wikipedia to replace the pages that need it here, but I think I want to continue with my personal project with the skills database before paying attention to the other articles here. It's easier for me to focus on what I want to complete first. But it is nice to know that there is a notice box available to show that a page has content that has been copied from Wikipedia, so thanks for showing that ToD2 page to me as an example.
- As for the creation of standards for this wiki community, I don't think I have time to work on something like that, and again I would prefer to focus on my self-appointed tasks here. I'm still new to the wiki editing process, and I am experimenting with how to format certain things within the articles I have been making. But this has been a great experience for myself so far, and I hope to continue to contribute often here. (^-^)
- Mayu Miyuki 01:33, 17 March 2008 (UTC)