Too Many Pages on the Wiki Shouldn't Be There

**HoorayItsMike** · Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Posts: 1604 Location: Ohio

EDIT: Ok, basically this can be locked now because I went thinking about this thing all wrong. I pretty much disagree with most of my post now.

So I'm going down the list of pages seeing a LOT of things that we really just don't need to have pages for. All of these things are debatable, though, and they are already NOT deleted because it seems valid to have them in there at first. We have 341 pages right now as I type this and I would say about 1/3 of them could be deleted or meshed together to save space.

User Created Bands and Albums - Whether it's Always Hard or Moving Pictures, having these things will make this wiki so incredibly cluttered. World Tour is going to be here soon and do we really want every band that's formed to make it's own wiki page? I don't think so. Add your band and some info about it on your user page if you'd like, but I don't think created an entire wiki article is necessary. I also don't think it's necessary to have a bio on every album DLC that's ever been in Guitar Hero/Rock Band. Think about in the future when we have 50or 100+ DLC albums, what then? Do we really need all of the information we currently have for each album? It's nice to know stuff, but we're stretching out too far from a "Guitar Hero and Rock Band" Wiki. The only information we need about a song is it's title, the album (maybe), and the band. We DO NOT need information about a band, that is what Wikipedia is for. We can compose all of these into one page.

DLC Track Packs - Now I know there is another thread talking about this and IWillKickU is putting in a lot of effort making all of these pages about them...but it just doesn't look nice at all. I don't have a solution for this so this really HAS to work for now. I just wish we could have pages for these packs without having actual "pages" if you know what I mean. Maybe we could implement system pages for each Track Pack?

Tiers - Do we really need to show what songs are in what tiers for each game? I mean it's nice to know information...but that really doesn't help anyone, you know? Possibly they should be added to the Interesting Information About Guitar Hero page.

Random things like "AspyrMedia" - This is like the above..they are nice to know...but often don't really help anyone and is information meant for Wikipedia more than ScoreHero

Characters - This is something I'm still iffy about. We have like 25-30 or however many character pages there are and it seems so clustered with them there. It would be a pretty damn big page if we put them all into one, though. If we have a very well organized Character page I think that it'll much better than 25 separate character pages.

Types of Guitars - All types of guitars should be in one page. That's another 8 or so pages gone. Any mention of the guitars in ANY other page should be redirected to the "TypesOfGuitars" page.

Overall, the biggest thing that we need to realize is that this wiki is about Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and ScoreHero. Nothing else. We are starting to branch too far out into the "real music" world and having pages that have too much information that this wiki isn't supposed to have in the first place.

I also have a question. Do we want a very serious and fairly strict wiki? Or do we want it somewhat relaxed and have it be perfectly ok to include things such as "idunnolol"?

Post your opinions. I'm interested to hear them.
_________________

Squeezing Guide - TTFAF Section by Section 5* Guide - Trials HD Extreme Courses Guide
Proud Christian

**JCirri** · Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 4576

Well I think the main problem is how you view things as being cluttered, and having a PageIndex section is probably to blame for that. As you notice, Wikipedia doesn't have a PageIndex, and if it did, everyone in the world would probably feel that it's extremely cluttered with multiple million articles in the list.

I expect at some point probably relatively soon, the PageIndex on the SH Wiki will become too large to be meaningful and may eventually be dropped. There's nothing wrong with SH having a million wiki pages as long as people can efficiently find what they're looking for. The ways to organize information on a wiki, unlike a forum, don't neceassrilly involve eliminating pages because the existance of one wiki page does not impact any others. On the forums, if there's several non-contributing threads on Page 1, then several other topics would be bumped down to Page 2 losing visibility.

The ways to organize things on a wiki are through context, with highly relevant page titles and content that will match in search queries; and also through categorization. I think the new preferred way to browse wiki pages will soon be through Categories, rather than PageIndex, and if people want their pages to be found they'll need to categorize it appropriately. We already have many categories set up, but there's a long way to go.

I agree that full artist/band histories aren't needed on our wiki and are better suited for Wikipedia. But things like the difficulty tiers by instrument for RB songs I think are very relevant to SH. Even band pages I believe are ok, as long as they're not categorized anywhere except for CategoryScoreheroBands. Pages for each character/guitar don't hurt anything, but I agree that a pages summarizing all that information grouped by game (containing links to the individual item pages) would make for a nice wiki page, and I don't know if we currently have one or not.

The SH Wiki should be a complete comprehensive knowledge-base about everything and anything inside the scope of ScoreHero, Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The developer companies, tiers for the songs, guitars and characters all fit within that scope and I don't think we should exclude them or merge them all into gigantic multi-purpose articles. That doesn't mean that we can't create a category page for TypesOfGuitars and add other pages to that category. See here for how the category pages work.

Even things like idunnolol are somewhat relevant to the SH community as it's common here and categorized appropriately within CategoryMemes which is a sub-category of CategoryScorehero. So when new people ask on the forums or in IRC, "what does Gegorge mean?" someone can quickly reference the wiki article here to explain.

There's still some things I need to improve like the search function which doesn't prioritize by relevancy at the moment. But each article should serve a unique relevant purpose and be categorized correctly. As long as that happens then I think then we're on the right track regardless how many (uniquely relevant) pages we have.
_________________

**CleverTangent** · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 3:25 pm Post subject:

**HoorayItsMike** · Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Posts: 1604 Location: Ohio

**Gotsmack** · Joined: 01 Apr 2007 Posts: 1693 Location: Manassas, VA

The idea is that if something appears on a wiki page that anyone may have a question about, they're able to click a link and get the answer. If someone is browsing Strutter, for example, and it lists that its part of the Opening Licks tier, wouldn't it be cool to click on 'Opening Licks' and get a quick list of all the songs that appear in the Opening Lick tier for all games?

This is just an example of course, but it certainly pertains to a lot more across the entire wiki.

**Megaman703** · Joined: 29 Jul 2006 Posts: 91

I believe that any information at all that is relevant to Guitar Hero/Rock Band should be included. Lots of other popular games/movies/shows/etc have their own dedicated wiki, and GH/RB doesn't have a really good one. The SHWiki has an opportunity to be the one stop source for ALL information related to GH/RB, assuming we let it grow to be as such.

**arweryn** · Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2008 6:26 pm Post subject:

This is very true. I have seen the most random pages and definatly think it should only include information about the game not about yourself. You can put that in a forum here.
_________________

I took off my goals to say this so it is important. Our website is a great website! It is a lot better than the frets on fire one! We should all be proud about that!
Probably the best quote ever:

Imterrible wrote:

devinring wrote:

I can't properly grip anything circular about 3-6 centimeters in diameter for like 30 minutes anymore or I get massive knuckle pain in my fretting hand.

I pray to god your not talking about your dick.

**footballtom3685** · Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 2478 Location: Bay Area, CA

**HoorayItsMike** · Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Posts: 1604 Location: Ohio