This came to my attention recently. I haven't read the Blockland Wikipedia article in over a year. We've had a history of the Blockland article being pretty badly written, but I didn't expect this. Someone posted this screenshot recently:
Skill, this thread reminds me of a Wikipedia entry I chanced upon:
http://i56.tinypic.com/2virpr4.png
Congratz
Is that really the Blockland wikipedia article? Seriously, the Roblox article is written better.
What are we doing wrong and what should we probably be doing
Okay, lets look at some other video game articles on wikipedia. Not just any game articles, articles that were so good they became featured articles.
Here's a complete list. We probably won't be able to get featured article status, but it's a good target to shoot for.
We can see that all of the articles have a few sections in common: gameplay, plot, development, and reception. The gameplay section covers just that, it gives a short and clear overview of how the basic mechanics of the game work. Plot talks summarizes the plot, we obviously won't have a plot section. Development gives an overview of the hurdles involved in development, and some of the history of the game. Reception talks about the game's reception.
Right now, it's immediately obvious should happen. Most video game articles have between 4 and 7 sections. We have
10, and this is just a small indie game. We're doing something wrong. Here's a list of all of our sections: Gameplay, Eventing, Game Modes, Demo, Retail, Modifications, Community, See also, References, External links. Gameplay is fine where it is. Eventing and game modes should be merged into gameplay. Demo, retail, and modifications should be merged into development. Community should just be removed because nobody cares and the community really is not significant.
The See Also section should just be removed. You're probably going to have to fight Roblox tooth and nail over this, so here's a prewritten argument you can just copy and paste:
No other games have a see also section. There is no precedent. Castle Wolfenstien is a similar game to Doom, but there's no see also section for it. The Garry's Mod article has no links to any other sandbox games. The Quake article does have a See Also section, but it doesn't link to Quake II or any of the games that are similar to Quake, it links to Quakecon! Why does Blockland suddenly need a See Also section? If you think that this link should be added,
please justify it.
References and External Links are fine, although the magazine articles should follow
a standard magazine citation rather then links to page scans. You should see the
Wikipedia citation guidelines for example citations.After merging them we'll probably need to rewrite them all. The game modes section especially strikes me as useless and poorly written in general.
Oh yeah, and the B is not the logo of the game, it's the icon. The full logo is the word Blockland, and it's in the UI folder somewhere. Blockland also has no pictures in the article at all. We should add at least 2: one of the game as it is now to the gameplay section, and another of the old Blockland (v0002) to the development section. Any images you upload need to have a
fair use rationale written for them. In order to qualify for fair use the images should also be small - the logo should probable be reduced to about 180px tall (smaller? bigger? someone try it out and post it in the thread) and the game screenshots should be about 640x480. Maybe we could have a competition and vote on the best screenshot?
Some stuff we should probably mention in the article
Blockland went to the 2007 GDC.
It was a semifinalist in the Indie Game Showcase at the 2007 GDC -
http://www.ecdsystems.com/media/pdf/2ndAnnualIGSSemifinalistPR081607.pdfBlockland went to the 2009 IGF -
http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entries2009.phpLots of development information can be found looking up the Blockland website using the wayback machine. You can also cite content found on the wayback machine link.
How are we going to fix this
Well, there's two goals here.
The immediate goal is to get the article back in shape. It's absolute rubbish right now. What I'm going to propose is that before we commit any changes to the actual wiki, you post your submission here so we can all proofread it and recommend revisions. That's one of the problems we've got right now, people just post bullstuff without any quality control at all. This isn't a "What I did over summer" essay you're turning into your third grade teacher guys, it's supposed to be an article in like, an encyclopedia that people read or something like that. The Wikipedia editors do a relatively decent job of keeping big articles cleaned up (some kid deletes the Biology article and someone reverts it pretty quick), but we're a small, relatively unknown indie game and if we don't want an article that's really just embarrassing we're going to have to write and maintain it ourselves.
The long term goal is maintaining the quality of the article. Again, we've got two primary causes here.
There's a lot of people who contribute to the article and just can't write. I don't know what the issue is. Maybe they're young? Maybe they've never taken any kind of writing courses? Maybe they're just all stupid? In any case, this content needs to be either erased if it's just spam or not encyclopedic, or rewritten so it makes sense if it actually does contribute to the article. For example the game modes section could be condensed to ONE SENTENCE, like "There are many unique game mode modifications produced by the Blockland community, ranging from store simulators[1] to zombie survival[2]", where [1] and [2] are references that link to the rise of Blockland and zapt threads or something. Of course there's going to be arguments over which mods to mention. I just picked two that seemed to be at opposite sides of the gameplay spectrum, but if you guys want to argue over this or try and come up with a fair way to pick them out that's fine too. An example of something we just flat out deleted was the clans section. Clans, while arguably significant in Blockland (I don't think they are), are not significant to the world in general, nor do they really define Blockland.
The other issue is vandals. We get random people, people from our forums, and people from Roblox constantly adding dumb stuff to the article. Use the
undo button on the history page to revert vandalism.
So we'll need volunteers to regularly keep the article free of crap.
