Moviepedia

Recently, we've done several changes to help out this wiki, from deleting empty pages, improving the navigation, adding a rules page, as well as merging film infoboxes.

You can check out the latest overhauls that we have done on this wiki so far, as well as upcoming updates in our announcement post here.

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Moviepedia
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This is the companion to the Account required starting September 1, 2021 blog.


To help see which people would be good candidates to have extra user rights, I have a list of the issues Moviepedia is currently experiencing and what each of us can do to fix them. Those who can tackle these issues will show they’re helping to build the wiki and should be considered to become a Thread moderator for the Discussions area, Content moderator for the main part of the wiki, or Administrator to help with the more advanced parts of maintaining a wiki.

Being able to grant those rights won’t be available until the end of the year, which will give me time to evaluate what’s being done and see who’s ready for more responsibility.

Issues:

  • No one is putting anything in the Edit Summary so we have no way to know why they’re changing something.
  • Most of the editing over the last year has been for Home media and Supplements. Due to the lack of reasons in the Edit Summary, a lot of it can’t be trusted and I’ve seen a lot that has been proven to be wrong. It’s almost to the point they should be deleted and we start over. I've done that in the past
  • Many Home media and Supplement pages were created when a page for the movie didn’t even exist.
  • Pages for movies are being created just before a Home media page is created, often by copying the info from Wikipedia. This tells me the movie page was added just as an excuse for someone to put in the Home media info. This may be in response to when I deleted those pages that didn’t have a movie page to go with them.
  • Everything else about a movie is being neglected: the page for the movie itself, transcript, trailer transcript, galleries, trivia, credits, awards, production info, the actors, directors and the characters.
  • There’s a heavy reliance on Wikipedia beyond what’s listed above. It would be better to not copy from there, but sometimes we will.
  • Antagonist and protagonist labels. This will be covered separately, but the very short answer is those labels create a huge number of problems and they don’t add anything of value for the character.
  • Category spamming (spending a lot of time only adding categories).
  • Infobox stuffing, where more and more gets added to the Infobox while the rest of the page looks empty.
  • Many pages like the one for Daffy Duck are missing an Infobox.


Here’s how we can fix this. These are the things I will be looking for when considering people to receive extra user rights and responsibilities:

  • Get in the habit of filling out the Edit Summary line. Tell us why you’re changing or adding something so we can verify it’s correct. If you leave it blank, then the assumption is what you’re putting in is true. If it turns out not to be and it’s discovered you’ve been doing that a lot, it can lead to being blocked for adding false information. A reason in the Edit Summary can make the difference between it being an honest mistake and deliberate vandalism.
  • We need to shift to focus away from the less-important pages (Home media, Supplements, Trailer transcripts, etc.) and give the pages for the movie, characters, actors, directors, etc., a lot more attention. Many of these have almost nothing in them, and many of them are also missing an Infobox.
  • For the existing Home media and Supplement pages, we need people that can verify that what’s on them is true: are there really that many different versions of VHS tapes, are those the dates each format was released on, etc. To be honest, after seeing the edits to these pages and them being renamed time after time, most of them are probably wrong or have made-up info in them. They may have to be deleted if they can't be fixed. Amazon is a good place to use as a reference for release dates. Use the Edit Summary to provide proof of what’s there when it’s changed.
  • I would love to see galleries being created for movies and characters. I can’t remember the last time I saw one. When uploading a picture or video, please fill out a summary of where the picture is from, select the appropriate licensing, and put at least one category that shows what movie it’s from and maybe a couple of categories for any characters, such as [[Category:Han Solo images]]. Also, give it a name that tells us what it's for. Randomly-named images are harder to figure out what they're for if there's nothing in the description.
    • The Unused Files report is a good place to find pictures and videos for galleries that have already been uploaded. It can only show 1000 at a time, so the more we can move into galleries, the better. If a picture or video has nothing to do with a movie or a video isn't available any more, tag them for deletion with {{Delete|off topic}}} or {{Delete|video no longer available}}}.
  • If people are interested in transcribing the credits of a movie into a /Credits page, templates will be available that help with formatting them to more closely match how they appear in the film.
  • Cut back on copying from Wikipedia. Put together your own information. If you do copy from Wikipedia, put the {{Wikipedia}} template on the page so we know. Otherwise, say in the Edit Summary where you got the info, and leave out as many of the categories as you can so there’s less cleanup to do later.
  • As stated above, there’s a lot of pages that don’t have an Infobox. Add one if you can, but be mindful of how much info is in it. On other wikis, Infobox stuffing occurs and you get situations like there’s 60 different adjectives for the character’s personality, what their goals are and their relatives going back twelve generations. The result is you have to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to get to the bottom of the Infobox. Meanwhile, the main portion of the page is a barren wasteland with one or two sentences. To avoid this, move as much as you can out of the Infobox onto the rest of the page. Fill it out so it’s not a factoid list. If a character’s arrogant, write sentences to show how they’re arrogant. If they’re remorseful, show why they regret what they’ve done.
  • Don’t spend a lot of time adding categories and keep in mind that they’re for organizing the page. Don’t fall into the trap of using them as a substitute for working on the main part of the page. It’s easy to keep clicking on the Add Category button so you never write anything else. Before you add a category, stop to think, “Is this category really needed and will people want to find pages with this category?” For example, do people really want to know which characters have blue eyes or which movies have a Dodge Viper in them? If you can’t honestly say yes, leave it out. If the category is an adjective or something trivial, leave it out.
  • When Infoboxes and Categories get out of control, what you can wind up with is essentially a situation like going to read one of the Harry Potter books, opening it up and then finding out that the Table of Contents takes up 50 pages, the Index takes up another 50, and in between is about one page that has anything to do with the story.
  • When writing a description of a character, don’t put in any kind of antagonist or protagonist label. Example: “Betty Rubble is the secondary deuteragonist of The Flintstones”. Leave it completely out. That sort of thing says how much of an antagonist or a protagonist she is is the most important thing about her, but it actually says nothing about who she is. This example is also contradictory because “secondary” means “less important” and “deuteragonist” also can mean “a less important character”, so that sentence becomes “Betty Rubble is a less important character who is even less important than that.” Again, this says nothing about her. In contrast, “Betty Rubble is the wife of Barney Rubble, the mother of their son Bamm-Bamm, a housewife and a friend of Fred and Wilma Flintstone” lets everyone know who she is.
  • We have duplicate Infoboxes. There’s three for movies, four for characters and two relating to television. We need to get all movies converted to just one Infobox. Same for characters and TV-related pages. I will work on standardizing each kind of Infobox but will need a lot of help going through all the pages using the outdated templates. I can create a page that will track what needs to be changed. As each one is fixed, remove it from the list.
  • On any page, clean out an unnecessary text formatting. On any that have links to Wikipedia, see if they’re really needed. We may not need a link to something like a pickup truck since that’s a commonly-understood item. Change any you can to a page here, even if it hasn’t been created yet. Otherwise, change it to an inter-wiki link like this: [[wikipedia:Newsreel|newsreel]] or [[w:c:tardis:Shada (TV story)|Shada]].


There’s a few other things that need updating that right now only I can work on, but I would appreciate any input you have on them.

  • Is there anything we need to add or change in the menus at the top of each page (Search, Films, Awards, etc.)?
  • Rearrange and condense categories for a standard format. “Films directed by Steven Spielberg” can be shortened to “Directed by Steven Spielberg” because it’s implied it’s a film by being on this wiki.
  • There will be a discussion about obtaining Bureaucrat rights for myself. If there are no objections that can’t be resolved, a request will be sent to Raylan13, the only other Bureaucrat on the wiki. If there’s no answer, then we’ll have to go through the adoption process. As an active admin, I have first shot at putting in the adoption request, but others can submit one if the meet the qualifications and get approval from myself and the rest of our community.
  • Eventually, the Ferbot account I use for maintenance should be given admin rights to handle protected pages and to be able to delete pages. This will have to wait until after I have bureaucrat rights.
  • For anything that can be considered “community business” like this blog, resolving issues or applying for user rights, needs to go into a blog or on a wiki-style forum. They should not be conducted in the Discussions area. The reason for this is Discussions and replies to them are not recorded like a standard edit. Once they’ve been deleted, they are unrecoverable. Community business needs to be recorded so they are publicly viewable and if necessary, recovered if they had been deleted in the past.


That’s where we stand and I hope to see us come together to help get this wiki in better shape for when movies start being released more regularly in the future.

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