MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive/52

Change the way that recurring Mario & Sonic events are handled, round 2
After the no quorum result of the last attempt at this proposal, I've taken on board the comments from last time and changed the proposal to reflect this. So, at the moment, there's an issue in the way that events that appear in more than one of the Mario & Sonic games are handled, as events that share the same or similar names across games are all put together on the same article, despite the fact that they are very different between games, using different controls, scoring systems, characters, etc.. This isn't only a problem between Wii/Wii U and DS/3DS instalments, which would obviously and understandably have very different controls and slightly modified gameplay, but also between games on similar consoles, for example, the Trampoline event in the first DS game required certain patterns to be drawn with the stylus to perform various moves and the player to slide up with the stylus to jump, whereas in the 2012 3DS game moves are performed automatically and the player must use the circle pad to keep their character within a certain area, pressing the A button to jump. This means that infoboxes are overloaded with excessive information, defeating their purpose, and that the articles are a complete mess of headers and sections. 100m Dash and 100m Freestyle are examples of this, and please keep in mind that they still have a considerable amount of missing information, particularly from the later games. Part of the reason that all of the events are sharing one page seems to have apparently stemmed from the fact that they're currently being treated as generic subjects, which is not really how they should be viewed. They should be treated in a similar way to minigames, with each getting an individual article, even if they share a name, a few controls or subject that they're based on. Just because they're based on a real world subject, it doesn't mean that they should be covered like one (And any that currently have generic subject-like articles will be changed in the future, to give them more of a minigame-like focus, similar to 100m Breaststroke). Additionally, several Dream Events also share this issue (Including Dream Race, Dream Long Jump and Dream Bobsleigh), which are in no way affected by the generic subjects policy, and should be treated as separate minigames, but are currently all placed on the same page for being similar. These should also be split, in the same way as the regular events, as the two are treated as the same thing within the games.

Therefore, I'm proposing that we split each game's version of the event into its own unique article, which only covers the event's appearance in the one game. Only the controls, missions, playable characters, etc. for one game's version of the event would be included on that page, and an About template would be added to the top of name-sharing articles with a link to the disambiguation page for the other events or the events with a similar name. An identifier would be added to any articles with shared names, and I'm currently thinking that it would specify only the game if it only appears in one of the instalments for a specific year (Such as "Pole Vault (Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic games)", which appears in the 3DS version but not the Wii one), or both the game and console if it appears in more than one version (Such as "BMX (Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (Nintendo 3DS))" and "BMX (Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (Wii U))"). This is just how I think the identifiers would work from what I can piece together from here, but unfortunately, it's not really designed to help out in cases like this thanks to naming in the Mario & Sonic series, so any other suggestions for identifiers are more than welcome. Any shared names would be turned into disambiguation pages, listing all of the separate articles and any with similar names, such as 100m and 100m Dash. If an event has a slightly different name in one or more instalments, it will use that name instead of the similar one that all the other events are named after with an identifier, but will still have the about template and so on. Events such as Balance Beam that only appear in one game will not be affected by this and will remain at the one name.

So, in summary, each version of an event from each game is split and given game-specific identifiers (Or some other form of identifier if a better one is suggested), the shared title is turned into a disambiguation page and About templates are added, events with different names between versions go to the unique names and events that only appear once remain unchanged.

Proposer: Deadline: July 17, 2018, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Per proposal.
 * 2) Per proposal.
 * 3) Sure. And maybe the original page for each event would be a disambiguation?
 * 4) Definitely. I have all of the games for both consoles each, so I can assist if necessary. Per all.
 * 5) Per proposal.

Comments
@SeanWheeler: Yep, that's the plan, things like Archery (event) would be turned into disambiguation pages, and ones that already share a name like Football will be added onto the existing one. BBQ Turtle (talk) 05:25, 11 July 2018 (EDT)
 * Actually, Archery (event) should undergo a page move instead to preserve page histories, and the Archery page should instead list the two events. 13:11, 11 July 2018 (EDT)
 * That's a good idea, alright, so we'll move the current Archery to Archery (class), Archery (event) to the now empty Archery, convert that into the disambiguation page, and have the separate games' information split off onto the separate pages, which is linked to from the disambiguation page along with the class. If I find any other pages with the same names as their classes, the same thing will happen there too. BBQ Turtle (talk) 14:27, 11 July 2018 (EDT)
 * Additionally, for the Archery events in particular, I'd suggest using and . For the other cases (such as one event sharing its name with another event on a different release of the same game and with yet two other events on different releases of a different game), talk to Porplemontage and he might know what to do.  19:50, 11 July 2018 (EDT)
 * Well, the thing is, Archery is one of those awkward ones- it is appears in every game except 2012 for Wii, even 2016 Arcade. There's not a problem with 2012 3DS, as it's listed as Archery (Individual) and Archery (Team), so it'd go to those names, but if we named the 2016 3DS one that, things might start getting confusing. 100m Freestyle would only be worse too, as it appears in every instalment, and I don't think the name changes at all unlike 100m and Javelin. I don't know really, naming's hard with this lot, the determining the identifier thing doesn't really cover this case. BBQ Turtle (talk) 16:38, 12 July 2018 (EDT)
 * Maybe Porplemontage would like to look at this case. 11:15, 13 July 2018 (EDT)