User blog comment:MDF infin/Mugen Wiki Commentary: The Blog That Was Past Due/@comment-5702923-20140823231940

In my opinion the matter is more of a public image issue rather than just a wiki issue. No matter how good any alternative wiki that strives to have better standards than this one  is, the M.U.G.E.N. Wiki is still gonna be the one with most users and the first result Google tosses out at  people searching  a MUGEN wiki site. I know demographics are way more complex  than one might think, but unless standards are raised to match those of other  fandoms' wikis, newcomers aren't going to think much of it in terms of quality at best and at worst feel discouraged because no other site can  come clear on answers. Let's face it, ther is so much content for this engine  it is very easy to get lost. This wiki offers links to download said content, and I am being honest when I say this, I appreciate that, but it could be a whole lot better.

And I am not limiting myself with  just  "casuals" or "hardcores" when I am saying this. The Mugen engine is capable of so many great things and we should work together to give it the reputation it deserves while still making it friendly to people who are just getting into the fighting game genre. See there are people who come to MUGEN with varying degrees of knowledge about to genre, be it guys with average knowledge about it, people who like playing them, people who like the techical aspects of it, the people interested in the competitive scene, people interested in developing their own fighting games, etc. And there are those who come to MUGEN as complete newcomers, this is their gate to the genre and should be taken in consideration. Be it to a newbie, a developer or a hardcore gamer, a first impression comes a long way, and so far, this wiki might not be doing a good job at it.

I am not suggesting to make an elitist purge of every character article that does not meet up to the standards of quality  of a proffessional game,  I would not like that direction either as it could  discourage newbie creators. What I'd like to suggest though is that at least this wiki aknowledges which constitutes as proffesional quality and label it as such. Add categories to character and stage pages that label that quality, feature the really good stuff as a recommendation from the site, not just the popular characters. And yes, add more info to the characters pages other than biography and the button inputs. Say why it is a good or bad character and most importantly, describe the gameplay. Saying that some characters don't have a readme file is not as excuse,  all you have to do is put time in playing  the character and analyze it using Figher Factory,  Andres Borghi does not really describe how his characters play yet I  figured out just that by doing what I mentioned. Even if  all the character does is fart  and fall over, you should deliver a description. This is where I agree with you, character priority is an excellent idea,  the best characters out there should be the the ones given more attention in terms of cleaning, detailing, description and gameplay. This however does not mean that other character pages should be completley neglected, because well, if a character is bad, it would be wise to explain why it is bad. Wether the user chooses to downlaod it or not, that is their problem.

Whathever someone is looking for in a character, they are expecting  that something to be satisfied once they try it out. Inputs and a few animated gifs are not going to accomplish that,  so far the only surefire to know wether it was worth it or not is to download it. When a character does not meet with what the user wants, they waste their time and disk space and become ultimatley dissappointed. To demonstrate, I will  put my experience with Madoldcrow1105's Finn and Jake as an example. I was  not sure what to expect from it from how it's page is at the moment and ultimately I was dissappointed by it as a whole, not gonna  go much into depht since this is not a character review  but I expected a different gameplay out of it.

While Im on the topic of character pages, lets talk about  command moves, yes, a sim there is infact a definition for a command move  To quote from the full description : " A simple or complex move, in execution or animation, usually performed with a simple combination of joystick and button action, such as a 'Forward' Punch or Kick.". This includes combinations like "Forward + Punch" "Down-Forward + Kick "" as well as double tapping on a certain direction. Some characters have command moves, others don't. but omitting them from the former's respective pages omitts in turn important aspects on how to play them. Any player new to a character should, by all means, learn all the moves a character is capable of.

On the topic of wether to use gifs for showing animation, I'd have to disagree for most of it,  let s take Noroko's article for example. Could you have made out from the animated gif of her "Snow Woman" move alone  that she goes up stops, clings from the ceiling for a while and can then lunge down for another attack? Some moves like that cannot be described proper with a gif, for non hyper moves I would suggest instead using a series of small still images instead taken from in game screenshots, what better way to show what a move does than showing it in action? I like the idea of gifs for hyper moves only (optional if it loads to slowly )since it'd  look nice and do justice to  the shock and awe most hyper moves offer  graphically but, again, they would have to be from in-game footage rather than  sprite rips. Colission boxes could be optional as that is a very techical matter and takes plenty of time to cap them properly, I'd limit that to the really good original stuff like BLustreak and the Black Heart characters since there are no other wiki that could show us that.

No argument here from citing sources, it will add proffesionality to this wiki and make it overall more trustworthy.

And if you want to prevent the really crappy stuff from getting out of hand DISABLE ANONYMOUS CONTRIBUTIONS, you dont need to grant permissions or create a rank  to accomplish this, just disable  anons from being able to post comments, edit articles or contribute to the site and you will have better control on who posts\edits what and when. Other wikis do this and have better control over their content than if they didn't. Speaking of crappy stuff that needs cleaning up, I'd suggest cutting down on the dozens of versions  of one character in one same page (I am looking at you ROnald MC Donald and Spongebob)  Either keep the ones that are TRULY worth mentioning or make a special page to talk about soley  alternate versions of a character. In my opinion each character page should only have one version (the best one if possible, you could hold this sort of stuff to the vote since what constitutes as "Best" is subjective)

TL:DR  This Wiki has a responsability for being the most popular MUGEN wiki in giving a good image to the engine and should improve its standards to match those of other wikis. It ithere is a lot to be done, it will not be easy but nothing worth in life is easy now is it?