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The Mario (& Luigi) RPG pages have majorly outdated writing, and I'm bringing it up to standard.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) - Granted the subject matter was pretty obscure, considering it's a Japanese fire safety film that she appears in, 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. I forgot what I referred to during the rewrite, though I think most of it was the article on the video itself (which could still use a rewrite of its own, for those reading and interested), and the actual writing itself probably didn't take long - my problem is that I tend to go between wiki editing and about 4-5 other tasks at any given moment, for such is the working of my genuinely-diagnosed-autistic mind. 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 stood after I got to it, Kaoru's article was pretty solid and remains so, only requiring the usual minor touch-ups now and then.


 * Miss Endless (-573) - Now this was a page highlighted by, one of the good ol' folks at The 'Shroom, and as I happened to be already in the middle of my corrective tear, I decided "why the hell not" and gladly obliged. This was among one of the relatively quicker ones for me to knock out - if anything its crime was being overwritten, containing an overstuffed paragraph of text 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 tense while adding a note about her name. I'm looking forward to taking on other spotlight articles in the future.


 * Look here for more rewrite commentary that the author has somehow deemed notable.

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.

The Partners in Time sections are a bit weird: they're written in past tense for no reason, refuse to mention the actual game title, and seem pretty obtuse besides - done as though they were all part of some grand epic  that seemed 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. 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, 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 &mdash; or at least participate significantly in &mdash; 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

 * To be compiled.