MarioWiki:Proposals

List of Talk Page Proposals

 * Separate Wii U audio files from the ones on the GBA (Discuss) Passed
 * Separate the Nintendo eShop paragraph from the 3DS and Wii U pages (Discuss) Passed
 * Separate the Mario Bros. stage from the Smash Bros. stage of the same name (Discuss) Passed.
 * Move Fire Chomp Super Mario 64 DS info over to Kuromame page or Merge the articles. (Discuss) Deadline: May 1, 2015, 23:59 GMT Extended: May 8, 2015, 23:59 GMT Extended: May 15, 2015 (GMT)
 * Split the Paper Mario boos from Big Boo into a separate article. (Discuss) Deadline: May 16, 2015, 23:59 GMT
 * Merge Parabuzzy with Para-Beetle. (Discuss) Deadline: May 19, 2015, 23:59 GMT
 * Move Swooper to Swoop. (Discuss) Deadline: May 22, 2015, 23:59 GMT
 * Merge Fried Shroom with Shroom Fry. (Discuss) Deadline: May 24, 2015, 23:59 GMT
 * Merge Piranha Plant (Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door) with normal Piranha Plant (Discuss) Deadline: May 26, 2015, 23:59 GMT

Writing Guidelines
None at the moment.

New features
None at the moment.

Removals
None at the moment.

Changes
None at the moment.

Stop Using the "Super Mario Daijiten" as a Source
Let me preface this by saying that the "Super Mario Daijiten (Big Dictionary)" has proved to be correct on some other occasions in the past. However, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

So, what is this "Big Dictionary"? To put it simply, it is us, but in Japanese: it's a compilation of everything in the Mario series (and the Donkey Kong, Yoshi, and Wario series) with some information about them. Naturally, this includes all of those obscure enemies from the older platformers, like Scubi, Bībī, Sutāzu, and many more, though these names were either taken from or changed to ones from the Daijiten. One immediate problem is noticeable: Japanese names are hard to search for. Names taken from Japanese sources are (supposed to be) written out not with a translation, but with the romanization, avoiding the problem of subjective translations. This also includes any special characters with macrons above them, and this results in links being difficult to use with them, for the simple reason that a very large portion of readers wouldn't be able to type these letters, and the wiki isn't able to recognize substitute letters, so "Sutazu" would not work as a link or a search term for "Sutāzu", and it's a tedious process to get to the article of relevance. There's also the point of English and Japanese names looking rather messy side-by-side, though that's mostly personal preference. Of course, these points are completely ignored if they're the only official names that we can find, and therein lies the problem.

As mentioned above, the site is basically us with a different language, and that includes the fact that it is a fan site, subject to all of the follies that editors can employ. If it doesn't explicitly display that the name is from an official source, listed here, it cannot be used since it could easily just be a made-up name. Even if other similar sites share the name with the Daijiten, if they don't have an official source, it doesn't count: they could have easily taken the name from each other, validating the name by virtue of lazy editing. Even besides that, however, there's no reason for all of the names for a certain game to be correct if a few of them turn out to be correct. For example, I've picked up the Prima guide for Yoshi's Island DS, and it turns out that most of the enemies from that game (on this wiki, at least) take their names from this guide - emphasis on most. Scorchit, originally "Zeus Guy", and Toober Guy, originally "Tube Guy", went under different names between the guide and the wiki, but since some of the other names were backed up with "is good is from book", all of them were thought to come from the book. This is faulty logic and using such a broad generalization really can't be healthy for the wiki.

While I understand that some of the conjectural names weren't very descriptive (Dōryī, for example, was "Plant"), I'd rather have a million "Birds" and "Crabs" than a name that is not only hard to link to and search for, but a name that has a good chance of being just as conjectural as the other names. Even for a site that's had a good track record, I feel like allowing the site to be used for all names is just opening the floodgates for name-related debacles, and I'd rather avoid that. Note: this proposal, if it succeeds, would involve removing all names that are currently "sourced" with the Daijiten, as well as renaming articles with those names to English variants.

Proposer: Deadline: May 14, 2015, 23:59 GMT

Remove it

 * 1) Per my proposal.
 * 2) Per TT and by the way, I'll go with him on this case!

Do not remove it

 * 1) - It would be a waste to wholesale dismiss the Daijitan as a resource and potentially move countless pages away from legitimate names to pure conjecture (and scrap dozens if not hundreds more  entries) just because it's been wrong a few times. We're no better than them when it comes to making periodic mistakes, rampant eschewing of citations, and the occasional rogue user just making stuff up: we might as well tell people to ignore us as a resource too. It would be better to simply be transparent by citing them whenever we use them and marking those citations as less-than-ideal with a "better source" template, the same as we would with Wikipedia references or any other iffy, yet better-than-nothing references. The anti-Japanese arguments are meaningless: we will always have Japanese and other non-English names to deal with, mixed in with the made-up English names (and/or in the foreignname templates). Redirects get around the macrons without any grief for searchers or editors who don't want to bother copy and paste a macron from somewhere else for the link, and policy actually says redirects should be created for that reason: any macron-bearing pagename without a redirect is an oversight.
 * 2) Changing my vote, per Walkazo. Removing names that are possibly correct and replacing them with names we made up is a horrible idea.

Comments
As passing this proposal would mark many of our articles as conjectural titles, one strategy we could employ is to see the references of each page on the Super Mario Daijiten (if there is one). That way, we can see still use the Daijiten to indirectly get official information, which we can in turn cite. Andymii (talk) 16:44, 10 May 2015 (EDT)
 * I made the assumption that, if the Daijiten used sources, we would have used them in the first place instead of citing the Daijiten. It's a fair point to make, though, but I'm not exactly fluent enough to navigate the site, and some online translation probably won't help. Would you happen to be able to go through the site?

Unfortunately, no. I guess it is up to our Japanese-fluent users to help us out now. However, there is a function though on Google Translate that translate whole entire websites, so that might be useful in getting the general idea, maybe even enough so we can get official information accurately without knowing much of the language. Andymii (talk) 09:50, 11 May 2015 (EDT)

Just noting here that I retracted my vote in favor of removing it. I agree with Walkazo's argument enough to change my mind, but not enough to fully cast a vote either direction now, as it hinges on a type of template that we currently (to my knowledge, at least) do not employ. -- 1337star (Mailbox SP) 14:51, 11 May 2015 (EDT)
 * The template exists now, for the record. -