General Discussion

Ninelevendo said:
What's the current reasoning on the guideline on which form of English to use? From my knowledge the wiki allows both forms, and I've been thinking, if the wiki uses the American names of games as standard, why not normal sentences? While some users will out of habit write the Brittish version of English(myself included), having American English as a standard will keep consistency throughout the wiki, I've seen articles say "color" in one sentence and "colour" in the next, and it looks unprofessional. Is this too much of a minor issue to bother changing?
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This is something I've thought about too. I support standardizing to American English in articles for the same reasons we standardize to American game titles, and for consistency across the wiki.

Traffic is majority American, so most of the wiki is already this way. A user who adds new text with a different spelling hasn't done anything wrong, but if someone changes it to American spelling, there's no reason to change it back after that.
 
I heavily support what Porplemontage just said. The Warning Policy and the Manual of Style should be updated accordingly.
 
Brought up this argument before, so it's pretty clear what my stance was. "First come first served" wasn't a really satisfying response, but I suppose it served to prevent conflicts between British/American spellings, but it had problems of its own.
 
Canceled is the American way of spelling cancelled?

I agree with what porple said. If someone writes Brittish spelling, that's likely because that's the only way that they've ever spelt, so it's not like they are deliberately disobeying wiki standards, just as with someone who doesn't have very good grammar.

If we standardise American spelling, should we change every instance of Brittish spelling to American on sight or should we just disallow changing of American spelling into Brittish spelling? Personally I'm with the first option, as this allows for more consistency whenever possible.

Would this warrant a proposal, any major changes, etc.?
 
This probably does warrant a proposal rather than forum consensus, as it's a pretty major change to the wiki.

If we standardize American spelling, then yes, every instance of British spelling aside from British bios, British quotes, and British names should be changed on site. That's what standardizing means.
 
I would agree that American spellings should be preferred, but yes, I believe that does warrant a proposal.
 
I feel good about this and if the proposal didn't pass I would force it to pass, so it's not that necessary. ;)

If someone wants to go around and update spelling to American, they can. But basically, the rule needs to be that the only allowed spelling change is from British to American. This protects people who add British text and don't know any better, but if a word gets updated to American, it's only against the rule to change it back. Then everything trends toward that consistent spelling goal.
 
Yep, a failed proposal can be veto'd by an admin decision anyway. We'll skip that middle-man, and the relavant policy pages will soon be updated.
 
I would start fixing that if I was on my laptop, but I'm not. However, is there a way I could set up a bot or something like that from my phone?
 
I wouldn't use bots tbh. What if the bot changed a quote from a bio? Those are one of the few exceptions to the rule.
 
porplemontage said:
I feel good about this and if the proposal didn't pass I would force it to pass, so it's not that necessary. ;)
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Hahaha, that's the great thing of a dictatorship. :D

Anyway, it's more of a "change as you go" kind of thing, similar to header titles.
 
Mario's Time Machine for the NES and SNES are completely different games. Beyond the name, the time travelling theme, and the basic plot of Bowser stealing artifacts and Mario going back in time to return them, everything else is different: the gameplay, which includes the method of travelling through time, the visual style, the large majority of the time periods, and the vast majority of the stolen artifacts. The article even states, "the NES release is virtually a different game with little resemblance to its previous incarnations," so lumping the two together just seems odd. I'm well aware that this barely matters, but to hell with it, it's already popped up in my mind.
 
They should certainly be split. Even ports should get separate articles, and this is more than a port.
 
http://www.mariowiki.com/index.php?title=Giga_Bowser_Transformation&redirect=no

Is this redirect necessary
 
Time Turner said:
Mario's Time Machine for the NES and SNES are completely different games. Beyond the name, the time travelling theme, and the basic plot of Bowser stealing artifacts and Mario going back in time to return them, everything else is different: the gameplay, which includes the method of travelling through time, the visual style, the large majority of the time periods, and the vast majority of the stolen artifacts. The article even states, "the NES release is virtually a different game with little resemblance to its previous incarnations," so lumping the two together just seems odd. I'm well aware that this barely matters, but to hell with it, it's already popped up in my mind.
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I have a feeling we had this conversation before, such as with Mario is Missing possibly getting different pages per version. Just as with Mario is Missing, there ideally should be a split, but it's high in only few of editors' priorities.

Baby Luigi said:
http://www.mariowiki.com/index.php?title=Giga_Bowser_Transformation&redirect=no

Is this redirect necessary
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If only there's an actual term for this. It actually started as a stand-alone page for the Final Smash as distinct from the Giga Bowser you encounter in Melee. My question, is this called "Giga Bowser Transformation" at the time of the reveal in the old Smash Bros. website?
 
Time Turner said:
Mario's Time Machine for the NES and SNES are completely different games. Beyond the name, the time travelling theme, and the basic plot of Bowser stealing artifacts and Mario going back in time to return them, everything else is different: the gameplay, which includes the method of travelling through time, the visual style, the large majority of the time periods, and the vast majority of the stolen artifacts. The article even states, "the NES release is virtually a different game with little resemblance to its previous incarnations," so lumping the two together just seems odd. I'm well aware that this barely matters, but to hell with it, it's already popped up in my mind.
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I said as much on here and the Mario is Missing talk page, but the problem is that nobody wants to experience double (or single, really) dosage of Mario's Time Machine
 
You know, considering the admin board's recent creation, we should probably update the Warning Policy (MarioWiki:Warning Policy) page to accommodate it so we have an explicit rule to NOT make malicious reports towards yourself or another user. It has already been abused by someone, and abusing it should entail a Level X warning (Level 2 or 3 sounds about right in my opinion) in accordance to the policy guideline.

And, update the upper notice template warning users that abusing this will lead to punishments by either warnings or bans.
 
If something like "misusing the admin noticeboard" were to be listed on the warning policy, I think it should be a Level two offense which can only be dealt with by administrators, directly underneath "abusing warning privileges".

But at this time there isn't a pressing need to seek a consensus to update the warning policy. Perhaps if there are further issues with misusing the page by other users in future, it could be worth listing it as a warnable offense by admins (for user reference). But at the moment, the current instructions at the top of the admin noticeboard are very clear is what it should be used for. And the page is being closely watched by most of the admins, we'll spot any misuse very quickly ourselves and deal with it acordingly.
 
https://archive.org/details/nintendopower?sort=titleSorter

this is definitely a keeper, the first several issues are released to the public by nintendo. it could house useful information like reviews or interviews
 
Great find! All in decent quality PDF formats, too.

I can't think where exactly off the top of my head, but I do recall seeing many references on articles which simply state a page number of whichever Nintendo Power issue. It could be an idea to have those references link to a picture of the actual page, safely stored on the MarioWiki using "[[Media:". I've done this with VB Mario Land, and the beta elements of Mario Clash in the past. Now that there is a single handy link with all the Nintendo Power issues, it shouldn't be a lot of work to upload the individual page to actually show the reference. Would this be acceptable as a general recommendation?

Normally I am very conscious of making sure that we can view our referenced sources in the years to come. Often when I see that a MarioWiki article link to an old website or some external forum discussion, I have the instinct to save that webpage as a PDF and then store it. For example, the only source that a Donkey Kong game was being worked on for the CD-i, has only been seen on a developer's Linked-In profile. Should that profile be removed or edited in the future, no worries because I saved a PDF.

I strongly recommend to others on having a webpage-to-PDF extension on your browser, and just remembering to use it whenever you see a MarioWiki article linking to an outdated-looking or unmaintained website. We can't trust the Wayback Archive to capture everything.
 
Time Turner said:
When linking to Wikipedia when it covers a subject in much greater detail than the wiki (such as Joan of Arc or Earth), what's preferred: linking to the page in the intro paragraph, or using Template:Wikipedia at the bottom of the page?
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Both would probably be very nice.

And I do think your idea is great, YoshiKong. I too always worry that sources simply won't be available in the future and we have to take steps for something like that. It's great that, for instance, you did store the KC stuff. And yes, we should upload the individual page instead of using an external link so it's easier to maintain.
 
Striker Mario said:
Time Turner said:
When linking to Wikipedia when it covers a subject in much greater detail than the wiki (such as Joan of Arc or Earth), what's preferred: linking to the page in the intro paragraph, or using Template:Wikipedia at the bottom of the page?
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Both would probably be very nice.
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That seems a bit redundant, especially with smaller articles where the infobox is larger than the text.

Why do we merge every implied entity into giant list articles? For the one-off mentions who still have some merit, like King Mushroomkhamen, I can understand that. However, for the ones who have a notable impact on the plot, like Blumiere's father or Scarlette, or the ones who simply have plenty of mentions, like Squirpina XIV or the Soybean Civilization, it seems counterintuitive to lump them in between a plethora of one-line sections.
 
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