Forum:Making this wiki more appealing to competitive players

Forums: Index → Watercooler → Making this wiki more appealing to competitive players

As Omega Tyrant has pointed out several times recently, our scope on competitive Smash could definitely use some improvement. There's countless Smasher and tournament articles that need updating, not to mention the incompleteness of our SSB 64 and Melee character articles in this regard. I have created this forum in order to discuss ways of attracting more competitive players, as well as a hub for targetting specific areas for improvement. Mr. Anontalk 18:12, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

We could ask SWF or AiB users who are more knowledgeable about competitive Smash to edit the wiki, or encourage existing users who do know more about the competitive scene to be more active. Air Conditioner Clever text goes here. 18:16, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

Or you could just read and search the internet for the SSB 64 and Melee characters while going through SWF and AiB for info on tournaments. MegaTron1XD 18:23, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

The attribute sections for pretty much all our character pages(except for maybe Wolf) needs revamping, including the brawl page. Another change I've yet to see is incorporating the changes OT suggested here. I'm currently drafting on a major rewrite for the Marth article in Microsoft Word as soon as I finish that, I'll do Falco. Also I'd like to propose we find new data regarding the matchups (both melee and brawl). Both tables are sorely outdated. Hardly anyone believes the matchup between Pikachu and Meta Knight is truly even, and also, the matchup between Jigglypuff and Young Link is now said to be in YL's favor.--Brian^{Don't try me!} 19:14, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

That is part of what I tried to do yesterday. Unfortunately, Smashboards has very little competitive info on SSB 64, as the character forums are pretty much inactive. Furthermore, most internet guides seem to be outdated. Mr. Anontalk 19:52, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

The matchups aren't outdated (those are what are on the SBR's official matchup charts). Just some of the matchups (like Pika/MK) are heavily disputed. Omega Tyrant 19:54, 5 September 2012 (EDT)

From my experience, I can pinpoint two reasons why competitive players don't come here; many are simply not interested in contributing, and to the majority, the Wiki is a joke. Why do they see the Wiki as a joke? Here are some reasons I suspect:

• The character articles (what are pretty much our most important articles) are atrociously poor. They pretty much all suffer from a combination of the following problems: lacking information, containing outdated information, containing flat out false information, containing excessive irrelevant information, having walls of text with no sense of paragraph breaking, attributes sections that read like a random throwing together of traits information with no sense of flow, and just being poorly written in general.

• The notoriously poor smasher space. While having poor coverage of lower level or even mid level players could be forgivable, having such terrible coverage of even the top smashers hurts our respectability among the competitive community so so much. We still lack articles on top smashers like Nick Riddle and Kain, had an article on Atomsk created just three months ago (despite Atomsk being one of the best players since the beginning of Brawl), and have articles on top players that simply lack any information (such as the aforementioned Atomsk and Anti), or are just grossly outdated (such as Ally and the Mew2King). Granted, we have made some improvement in this area, though we're still missing too much, and the majority existing are both poorly written and/or bare bones.

• Miles, our most prominent user on AllisBrawl (being a super moderator on there), insists on being our ambassador (most notably, having "of SmashWiki" in his name), while doing a piss poor job at it. Miles is notorious there for being a pretty terrible moderator that is disliked by the majority, and because of his name and being our de facto ambassador, they link him to us, thus sullying our reputation.

• The fact SmashWiki consists nearly entirely of and is run by casuals, quasi-competitive wifi players, and users who don't even play the game. The latter is especially bad among the admins here, where I'm the only one who actively plays the game competitively, and Toomai is the only other admin who plays to some degree. The majority of the admins can't even claim to be a part of the Smash community. I know it's general consensus among the users here that whether you play the game or not is irrelevant, but the fact is it does matter (your Wiki won't be looked on as a respectable source if the ones running it don't even know the subject the Wiki covers). Look at the comments of this blog Miles wrote on AiB where he's boasting about being a mod that doesn't play the game. The comments there are pretty hostile towards him for it, and this comment by our Koro particularly stands out: "Why did I laugh. On a serious note. Go play a match. I mean you f***ing mod smash-wiki so play the game."

These our the problems that must be fixed if the Wiki is to gain respectability among the competitive community (and in turn, attract competitive players to contribute). Omega Tyrant 13:30, 6 September 2012 (EDT)

The sad thing is, that's basically all correct. What's even worse is that not all of this can be fixed. This discussion would imply that Miles isn't going to be changing his AllisBrawl username any time soon. Other parts of this can be fixed with a bit of work. Eventually the character pages should all be revamped, it's a slow process, but I reckon it will happen in the end. The Smasher space needs a lot more work, but with a bit of time, it can be fixed. It won't necessarily happen, but the possibility is there. The part regarding Miles is the only one which really sticks out as an issue, because as the matter is technically property of AllisBrawl, I would think it's beyond our control, especially if the discussion I linked to is anything to go by. Toast ltimatum 13:53, 6 September 2012 (EDT)