Forum:Rankings categories

Forums: Index → Proposals → Rankings categories

This discussion is in regards to a proposed change on SmashWiki. The discussion must first meet with a consensus before it is implemented.

Back in 2015, a user named Dinodomain (talk•contribs•logs) started creating categories for each iteration of SSBMRank on their own imperative, and outside of mild questioning on his talk page, other users just started following suit with creating categories for the other annual/biannual global rankings whenever those rankings got made, with no one really challenging their existence. Me and several other users however, have expressed in the Discord server for the past couple years how these categories should be purged. There are two main problems with these categories:

1: For the purpose of cataloging the players that made each ranking, they're useless; you can simply just go on the actual article for the ranking to see the players who were on that particular ranking, and not only will it be more neatly organized, you'll also get additional important information that won't be displayed on the category page, such as the player's ranking and the character(s) they used for that ranking period.

2: These categories just serve to cause massive category bloat; top level and near top level players will often make several iterations of these rankings, so such players will often have their categories bloat to eyesore levels, the majority of that bloat being these mostly redundant categories. For example, Dabuz currently has 25 categories, yet 11 of these categories are for specific iterations of these rankings. Or Mango, who has a whopping 33 categories, yet these make up 14 of those categories.

A single category for each type of ranking (e.g. one for SSBMRank, one for PGR, one for UltRank, etc.) would suffice, showing all the players that once made that ranking, providing useful cataloging information that isn't immediately accessible elsewhere without bloating each player's categories with several redundant ones. The only other type of useful categories with these rankings would be for players that once surpassed a certain threshold on the respective rankings (e.g. "SSBMRank Top 10", "UltRank top 50", etc.), since it could be useful to catalog players who were once "Top X in the world according to this ranking", and would be of clear interest to readers, while also not necessarily being immediately accessible information elsewhere. If those ranking threshold categories are added, they would carry the caveat of "on smasher articles, only include the category of the highest threshold the player has surpassed on that ranking" (so for example if a player was once top 10, don't include any of the other lower threshold ranking categories for them, as it would be redundant).

The only benefit I see of the current setup with the specific iterations ranking categories is that they do let you know what iterations the player made that particular ranking on, when you would otherwise need to manually check each ranking to see if they were ranked that specific iteration. However, this information would be much more effectively shown by creating a new "Rankings" section on smasher articles, which would show each ranking the player ever made. This would be immensely better than the current setup with the categories for the following reasons:

1: It would be much neater than a big blob of categories at the bottom of the page.

2: It would show the player's actual placing on that ranking, instead of requiring you to go to the ranking's article to see it.

3: It would display other information that would not be shown in the categories, such as the time range the ranking covered and the characters used by the player to make that ranking.

4: It can cover all other sorts of rankings instead of just global rankings.

Here is a very partially complete example table for Dabuz showing what it could look like, using just the Smash 4 PGR:

Ranking	Time period	Rank	Character(s)
PGR v1	January 2015 - May 2016	3rd
PGR v2	May 2016 - December 2016	4th
PGR v3	January 2017 = June 2017	4th
PGR v4	June 2017 - December 2017	6th
PGR v5	January 2018 - July 2018	3rd
PGR 100	January 2015 - November 2018	4th

Like with results, you can make subsections for each game in this new rankings section, and I can iron out later how to organize multiple different rankings within a single game subsection, but I think we can all agree this looks way better than having categories for each of these individual rankings and throwing them on Dabuz's page.

So with that all said, here are the following options for what we'll do going forward. Omega Tyrant 06:53, April 3, 2023 (EDT)

Keep the status quo

1. ...

Have a single category for each global ranking and nothing more

1. Support. The rankings section will be a more useful replacement. --Meester Tweester (talk) 14:50, April 3, 2023 (EDT)

Remove specific iteration categories and add the respective threshold-based categories

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Get rid of any sort of ranking-based category

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Add a rankings section to smasher articles

"Vote" on this separately from the category issue, I don't see a reason to not do this regardless of what we do with the categories, but I should open it up to a formal proposal anyway since we never done it on smasher articles before. Omega Tyrant 06:53, April 3, 2023 (EDT)

Support

1. Support. --Meester Tweester (talk) 14:50, April 3, 2023 (EDT)

Oppose

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