User:Lord Grammaticus/Userspace/The Great Mario RPG Rewrite of 2019
TL;DR
The Mario (& Luigi) RPG pages have majorly outdated writing, and I'm bringing them up to standard.
Too Short, More Text
As an editor, I normally concern myself nowadays with the technical side of editing - in the sense of grammar checks and spelling, as well as sentence structure, tense, stylistic changes... all that good stuff. I haven't played very many games in general lately, so I can't contribute as much first hand stuff as I'd like to, and it isn't strictly necessary anyway considering there's no end of playthrough material I can cross reference. In the same month I returned (July 2019), I decided to start a run through some of the many pages then-currently tagged for rewriting after poking through Wiki Maintenance, and I've gotten into the habit ever since.
As far as notable rewrites I've previously done:
- Kaoru (+1,481) - The subject matter was pretty obscure, considering she's from a Japanese fire safety film, but even by that standard the page as written was atrocious - and I do mean atrocious! With the tag having been applied in August of 2016, I decided it a 'good' idea to spend one of my later nights pulling the article into a much more tolerable state. Whatever the case, I'll probably come back to the video and the characters once I've somehow seen the film for myself (her brother could use a page of his own, really), but as it stands after I got done with it, Kaoru's article was pretty solid and remains so, only requiring the usual minor touch-ups now and then.
- Miss Endless (-573) - The pagewas highlighted by Power Flotzo (talk), one of the good ol' folks at The 'Shroom, and I was already in the middle of a correcting fix, I decided "why the hell not" and gladly obliged. This was one of the relatively quicker ones for me to knock out - if anything, its crime was being overwritten, containing an overstuffed paragraph for what the article readily admitted to be a minor character. I mowed most of that fluff down into three smaller and easier-to-digest paragraphs, unpadded the trivia note, and then adjusted a bit for verb tense while adding a note about her name. I'm looking forward to taking on other spotlight articles in the future.
no NO NO TOO LONG T O O L O N G
What, you're not hard wired to automatically skip long chunks of text in {current year}?
The point you so humbly request, prospective reader, is that--
...right right, too pompous and formal, got it. Sheesh, tough crowd.
Anyway, I was rewriting Shrooba Diver and more or less said what I'd long been thinking: that a lot of articles about stuff from various Mario-based RPGs were lacking the usual MarioWiki writing quality. [As it so happens, weeks after initially writing this, I discovered that this was a commonly cited cause of Bad Writing™ within the Guidelines themselves. All the more reason, eh?]
The Partners in Time sections are a bit weird: they're written in past tense for no reason,[1] refuse to mention the actual game title, and seem pretty obtuse besides. All were symptoms of Grand Epic Syndrome[2][3][4] that [as now indicated by the above link to the Guidelines] was completely at odds with the general tone of the wiki. As for the Super Mario RPG sections... iunno, I think some of them still have whiffs of late-noughties-to-early-new-'10s-MarioWiki writing about them. Not offensively bad by any means, mind, just relics of an era where standards were considerably more lax. [This is to say, they were more loosely constructed and lacked the usual organization into sections.] Meanwhile, the Bowser's Inside Story ones just need some formatting more than anything else, with occasional defluff and clarifying. To top it all off [even before discovering the Guidelines' citation of similar examples as something to be avoided], my rewriting habits just kinda... led me to focus specifically on these all on their own.
And thus...
Official Unofficial Mission Statement
- The goal of the undertaking whose discussion is the purpose of this userspace documentation is to correct what has been, in the writer's opinion, a long-standing issue with the quality of the MarioWiki's articles pertaining to RPG matters; and in so doing, act wholly in accordance with the standards so established in the Manual of Styles brought to us by His Gracious Porpleness and the MarioWiki Parliament, and established since the second day of March, in the 2007th year of our great red plumber. For it matters not that the humble role-playing game may be their pet genre of choice, or that they have a soft spot for the cartoonish presentation and artstyles of the first three outings of the Mario & Luigi series; no, what matters is that a grievous oversight shall soon be set into balance, for the betterment of this, our Wiki of Mario.
- As of the date and time given henceforth (02:27, September 16, 2019 [EDT]), I have officially made it my unofficial personal mission to oversee — or at least participate significantly in — the rewriting of these articles listed and discussed thereof, and from the backs of out proud and wonderful editing collective relieve this great workload.
And with that, I now declare The Great Mario RPG Rewrite of 2019 underway.
List of pages to tackle
Footnotes
- ^ Or because "lol time travel" I guess?
- ^ As a reminder, said "epic" is about a couple of dudes who get time traveled backwards into an alien invasion, promptly eat floor and get bailed out by two other dudes who are them but babies, and then hijinks ensue until the last five minutes, then the atmosphere gets unusually dark and apocalyptic... (by Mario game standards) before sprinkling in more than enough silly to buoy through the end credits. Yeah, TTYD probably outdarks it but it's Mario, come on.
- ^ Plus dark as the original angle is, PiT's not THAT much darker than most alien invasion plots -
EldritchElder Princess Shroob is pretty much the peak IMO. Furthermore, the irreverent atmopshere of TTYD and the endless stream of genuinely enjoyable characters it presented tend to distract from how surprisingly morose it can be. - ^ Not to say PiT and the M&L series don't have themselves a colorful cast; PiT had some decent humor to boot, but it was one of the more... sparse and linear entries to me, so unfortunately it couldn't compare well anyhow. Super Paper Mario would turboslap it out of the darkness ring about a few years later anyway.
