MarioWiki:Proposals

Establish a guideline for citing archived web pages
I've made a previous proposal about this in the past, but it was unnecessarily complicated. To put this as simply as possible, many online web pages are very likely to be taken down at some point, and many already have; a user may come across an online source which is no longer on the live web, and only exists on an online, the largest of which is the Wayback Machine.

To establish consistency when citing pages from these web archives, a guideline should be listed on Citations, below the template for citing live websites. This is what I believe is the best style to follow for such citations: cite the original, unmodified link to a page as usual, then include a statement in parentheses that lists the page as being archived, with a link to where the web archive hosts the page, a timestamp, and finally, the web archive which was sourced. Below is a template of such a citation (the link to the archived page would be accessed by the word "Archived"):

"Author Name (January 1, 2000). . Publisher. Retrieved January 1, 2023. ( June 1, 2022, 00:00:01 UTC via Web Archive.)"

As an example, the list of rumors and urban legends about Mario already uses this style for the majority of its web page citations. Here is an example from that page:

"Nintendo (1985). Super Mario Bros. Instruction Booklet. Retrieved July 8, 2021. (Archived March 9, 2021, 10:01:59 UTC via Wayback Machine.)"

A note should also be added to MarioWiki:Citations that the precise timestamp for a page from the Wayback Machine, the most common web archive source, can be found by examining the date in the URL; for the above example, 20210309100159 can be read as 2021-03-09 10:01:59, and should be formatted as March 9, 2021, 10:01:59 UTC.

To clarify the proposal, this should not be considered a strict rule that must be followed, nor a necessity for every citation of a web page, but simply as a guideline to follow in case a page has already been taken down, or if a link to an archived version of a page is being added to a citation.

Proposer: Deadline: June 1, 2023, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Per proposal.
 * 2) Per proposal.
 * 3) Per everyone, as users might think they’re going into an active link when really they are led into a 404’d link
 * 4) Per all. Preservation is extremely important, and it'd seriously help if we pointed to archives when applicable.
 * 5) This is a great way to combat link rot and I strongly encourage more regular usage of archived pages regardless.
 * 6) Per all.
 * 7) Yes, please.
 * 8) Per all.
 * 9) Per all.
 * 10) per all
 * 11) let’s git archivin’ now
 * 12) Per all.

Comments
I am sick of these “active” links that are really dead or 404 links. This proposal acknowledges said statement of mine. 17:53, May 18, 2023 (EDT)

@ThePowerPlayer Did you give this a 2-week deadline? 'Cause that's for talk page proposals only, normal proposals get one week and so this proposal should end today. SmokedChili (talk) 07:51, May 24, 2023 (EDT)
 * You're very wrong. To quote rule 3, "except for writing guidelines and talk page proposals, which run for two weeks". Spectrogram (talk) 07:59, May 24, 2023 (EDT)
 * Right, that exception escaped my notice. SmokedChili (talk) 08:41, May 24, 2023 (EDT)

New features
None at the moment.

Removals
None at the moment.

Prioritize the 2001 iteration in Diddy Kong Pilot
The 2001 iteration is the only iteration officially announced by Nintendo. Also, the official artwork is based on this one. They planned to have ten background environments in the game, while the 2003 version had only five backgrounds. There was unused splash screens in 2001 iteration, it had a copyright date. While the 2003 iteration is the stage before changing to a Banjo-Kazooie game, and the copyright at the beginning is missing and no copyright date is displayed.

Also the voice used within in the game is different, the former is same actors as Diddy Kong Racing and Donkey Kong 64, while the latter used completely different one. The music is also different, the former is brand new (unused in a leaked build, but implemented), while latter is same as Banjo-Pilot.

The proposal is moving Diddy Kong Pilot (2001) to simply Diddy Kong Pilot.

Proposer: Deadline: May 31, 2023, 23:59 GMT

Oppose

 * 1) In the end, they're both unreleased games that should have equal priority.
 * 2) Agreed. Just because 2001 Diddy Kong Pilot has the Diddy Kong Racing & Donkey Kong 64 voice actors doesn't give it priority over 2003 Diddy Kong Pilot, Diddy Kong Racing Adventure, or Donkey Kong Racing.
 * 3) - What does prioritization even mean in this context, anyways? Aside from moving the article to a "simpler" name, but that feels redundant when having both articles keep their dates and making the dateless one a disambiguation feels a lot easier. There's no reason to "prioritize" one or the other when both incarnations of the game just got nixed anyways; there's no "true" incarnation of this game in the first place. And even if there was one which released over the other, we don't really "prioritize" like this elsewhere on the wiki. See the Donkey Kong games, Mario Bros. games, and most relevant for this, Super Mario 128 and Super Mario 64 2 are just distinct articles, despite the latter also sometimes being called Super Mario 128. That's not to mention that if we were to enact this, what about all the other articles where we don't prioritize?
 * 4) Per all, I really don't see the point of deciding which scrapped Diddy Kong game is more "official" than the other.
 * 5) The only time a subject gets priority over another is if it's significantly more prominent to the point that we can reasonably expect someone searching for the title to be looking for it most of the time. I doubt that's the case here, and most of the points brought up in the proposal are irrelevant to that.
 * 6) Per all.
 * 7) Per all.
 * 8) The 2003 build is also the one that is actually a fully functioning game rather than an alpha crashfest. Why should it be prioritized less?

Miscellaneous
None at the moment.