Daizenshuu EX DB wiki...again

[Taku128]

References in culture would be a fun page to add, but pages for fan fiction like Toyble's AF should be not be used. I don't like how most wikis (Like the Godzilla wiki for example) use fan art and fiction for their wiki. They are fan fiction, and don't really play a importent part of the series.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, the Wiki should stick to official products. When you start taking in fan projects you have to determine when something isn't notable, because there's probably a billion pieces of Dragon Ball Z fanfiction on the internet.

[SHINOBI-03]

I can't believe they even have a page for this!! <--NSFW

[linkdude20002001]

Yeah... I saw that recently. I cannot comprehend Dragon Ball Wiki.

[Turtle Marked Stone]

That's...something.

[Piccolo Daimaoh]

I cracked up when I saw the "users" on the sidebar.

[Adrian Malacoda]

While I like the idea in theory, I don't think "The Unofficial Dragon Ball Wiki" is the way to go. That just makes it sound derivative of and less than the actual Dragon Ball Wiki. It implies that the Dragon Ball Wiki is official or comprehensive or any other positive adjective.

In that case, I think Innagadadavida suggestion of "Encyclopedia Dragon Ball" or something like that would be good. "Encyclopedia" certainly sounds better than wiki or wikia.

I'll throw my support behind that as well.

It's a good enough name, but it looks like the "other wiki" moved off of Wikia about a month ago and they thought it was a good name too.

Yeah... I saw that recently. I cannot comprehend Dragon Ball Wiki.

It's a silly subject, sure, but I don't see how it's not worthy of an article. The infobox isn't really appropriate (if I'm not mistaken that's the "technique" infobox), but it is a pretty significant humor element that even stretches all the way to the final arc of GT.

[Fin]

It makes more sense than Memory Alpha and Wookieepedia's respective breast articles.

[dantman]

I've read through this entire thread, and I was planning to post a few days ago, though I had issues with getting an account so I've forgotten "precisely" what I was thinking of saying. So here goes what I have from my fuzzy memory.
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This idea seams to have been around for several years, though never actually put together. I wouldn't say to drop the idea altogether, but do you think it would be at all possible to improve the existing Dragon Ball Encyclopedia close to what the community here is hopping? Would it be any different if you had a connection to someone who had an outside influence on the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia community? Someone who could implement technical aides to help the people trying to improve the quality and validity of the information?

Could you give me some examples of inaccuracies and things that would need to be fixed, pages and specific pieces of information in them that are incorrect.

[Bussani]

do you think it would be at all possible to improve the existing Dragon Ball Encyclopedia close to what the community here is hopping?

People have tried. The users over there really think that it's perfect the way it is and simply undo any changes people try to make to better it. It's a lost cause.

Could you give me some examples of inaccuracies and things that would need to be fixed, pages and specific pieces of information in them that are incorrect.

Check this thread where someone from the wikia asked the same sort of thing. I think Herms and others listed a bunch of things.

[Innagadadavida]

I was mulling over the idea of sending in a $50 donation to Daizenshuu EX. This would be to help get the wiki up off the ground. Would this be beneficial to anyone in charge, you think?

[VegettoEX]

Bussani covered the prior question. It's not worth "fixing" anything. Sometimes you build something better.

I was mulling over the idea of sending in a $50 donation to Daizenshuu EX. This would be to help get the wiki up off the ground. Would this be beneficial to anyone in charge, you think?

Hold onto that... there will probably be a dedicated server/hosting in the mix for it (just not right this second).

I've got some conversations to get back on with certain folks, so just be aware that yeah, it hasn't slipped anyone's mind .

[dantman]

do you think it would be at all possible to improve the existing Dragon Ball Encyclopedia close to what the community here is hopping?

People have tried. The users over there really think that it's perfect the way it is and simply undo any changes people try to make to better it. It's a lost cause.

Could you give me some examples of inaccuracies and things that would need to be fixed, pages and specific pieces of information in them that are incorrect.

Check this thread where someone from the wikia asked the same sort of thing. I think Herms and others listed a bunch of things.

Ohhh, thanks for that thread. I read over it, and the thread on the Dragon Ball Wiki it linked to, and got a nice overview of both communities from them. Makes me feel right back at home sitting on the line between two disagreeing groups.

Ok then, the easiest way to do this would probably be to drop in some context.

Wikia's obsession with "attracting new editors" without attempting to evaluate whether the "people" (complete and utter newbies who previously would not have realized they even had the ability to edit a page) they were bringing in overall had the capability to improve the wiki as opposed to mostly consisting of an influx of people that caused more work for the existing editors and made quality fall further, did bring a lot of really bad users to the wiki, even more so than before. After Wikia went and released the new skin and other features which disrupted the content and caused the community to move to Dragon Ball Encyclopedia trying to re-purpose the Dragon Ball Wiki into a social site. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of those users obsessed with Wikia's social features and not "encyclopedic" content were left behind. At the same time some of the regular editors and "admins" went "AWOL", in fact the user who seamed to provide the initial unreasonable rejection and trouble in that "Original VS Dub terminology" thread has all but disappeared for a month. One editor making a good number of contributions to the new wiki even commented on hoping to switch to Viz names.

In short, what I'm trying to say is that theoretically, at least ideally, or hopefully, the current Dragon Ball Encyclopedia should be much more permeable to the idea that a lot of the content on the wiki is in need of citation, fact checking, and general removal of identified misinformation. And any of the related ideas. Especially now that the community has reconnected with someone who has mediated things in the past, and has a connection to and history with a portion of the wiki mentioned in the discussions here referred to as a comparison for quality [1][2].

What I wanted to get from here as a starter, was a few (three points are probably good enough) very specific examples I could bring up with the current community. As an attempt at figuring out the viewpoint of the current community and seeing if it were possible to move the wiki towards improvement and what it might take to do so.

As an absolute ideal, or at least part of an ideal; It would be nice to see a Daizex wiki (whatever you chose to name it), and the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia. The Daizex wiki being the reliable wiki. The Dragon Ball Encyclopedia actively noting the reviewed/unreviewed state of articles, noting the level of quality and accuracy of articles, while moving closer to the level of quality on the Daizex wiki. And the Daizex wiki and Dragon Ball Encyclopedia cross-linking articles trying to drive people already reading and relying on the less reliable Dragon Ball Encyclopedia articles towards the more accurate ones on the Daizex wiki, while the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia tries to siphon readers away from the wiki on Wikia filled with misinformation and the portion of the community that refuses to correct the information (leaving behind the people obsessed with junk blogs).

Though, whether that attempt at fixing the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia works or fails, you're welcome to my knowledge of MediaWiki. Whatever happens to the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia, I'd love to help out with technical stuff. Especially if you've got a community more vocal about features they want than the other communities I try to find things to implement for.

[VegettoEX]

I can guarantee you 100% that not a single article ever created on what this community writes would ever link to that wiki as its citations. They have showcased a complete disregard for research methods, have little-to-no folks actually fluent in Japanese (never mind those who own the original reference materials), and so on and so forth.

Why link to some other site when you can cite (if not visually provide) the original source? I'm not going to link DB Wikia when I can cite, both in Japanese and properly translated in English, an interview from the Shenron Times that several of us own. It's right here on our shelves. We can show it.

It's not TRULY even a matter of "us vs them" -- it's a matter of accuracy and authority. They don't have it. We do. It's arrogant, but it's the truth.

That place truly is a lost cause. We have complete and distinct ideological differences about what an authoritative encyclopedia should be, and that doesn't even get into the technical and administrative end of things. Short of replacing their entire user base, we cannot contribute there. Perhaps in time what we create will be seen in the same way, giving them some wonderful irony... but I somehow doubt it.

[Fox666]

Dragon Ball Wiki surely has it's problems. Both in terms of sources and reliability, and how they organize information.

I would say the first problem of it is that it takes the old american dub as priority. While Wikis like One Piece attempt to use the information based on the japanese version, some nostagic fan made the wrong choice for the Dragon Ball Wiki. And like everything in the computer days, once something is estabilished it's hard to get rid of it (i.e. Microsoft products).

Besides they have a very strange way of organizing pages. Look as the Kamehame-ha page, it has tons of sub-categories like "Kaio-ken Kamehame-ha", "Father and Son Kamehame-ha", "Kamehame-ha while wearing white underpants"

[VegettoEX]

Well, yeah, we've long-since-covered the fact that one of our major ideological differences is that they place emphasis on an adaptation of the series, rather than its original source material. That's the least of their problems, though! (Well, actually, I'd argue that it's the root cause of tons of other issues, but whatever...)

[Herms]

In short, what I'm trying to say is that theoretically, at least ideally, or hopefully, the current Dragon Ball Encyclopedia should be much more permeable to the idea that a lot of the content on the wiki is in need of citation, fact checking, and general removal of identified misinformation.

That certainly sounds good, and looking through the wikia now it does look like there have been some improvements, but much of the same old problems remain.

That thread Bussani linked to was several months ago, long before the DB wikia became the "DB Encyclopedia". For a more recent example of problems with the wikia, a little while ago when the game “Zenkai Battle Royale” was announced, there were not one but two articles on the game saying that ‘zenka” was a “Saiyan power”, and one article even cited the wikia as a source. The page for zenkai there is of course based entirely around the fan-made meaning of the term, which it does note as being fan-made…in a tacked-on note at the very end of the article. I would think that if you wanted to inform people, it would be best to a) not base entire pages around nonsensical fan terms, and b) if you must, note right up front in the first sentence that it is fan term. It would also be nice if the page for “zenkai” made some mention of “Zenkai Power” (short for Detekoi Tobikiri Zenkai Power/”Come Out, Incredible Full-Force Power”), the closing theme for 199 of DBZ’s 291 episodes, and the actual source for the ‘zenkai” in the title of “Zenkai Battle Royale”. I’m not wholly opposed to acknowledging fan terms, but that shouldn’t get in the way of your site being able to accurately answer people’s questions on what, for instance, the names of upcoming DB games mean.

Looking through the wikia now, I notice that they have a page for King Chapa’s wife Ruhna, and it even lists her birth year. This information comes from Chapa’s profile in the Bouken Special, which I translated here. Now, even if I am extremely generous and assume that whoever put up this page isn’t just taking information from my thread without giving me a lick of credit, they still ought to properly reference this information as coming from the Bouken Special. Instead, there isn’t a single work cited for the page, and it merely says that Ruhna is mentioned in a “special jump”. Same goes for the rest of Chapa’s family. Oh, and they idiotically refer to Chapa’s son Chapu as ”Chapa”, the exact same name as his father. For those who don’t know, King Chapa’s name is written in Japanese as チャパ, which can pretty unambiguously be transliterated as “Chapa”. His name is a pun on Indian chapati bread, which is sometimes spelled “chappati”, which is probably why Viz spells his name with two ‘p’s. I don't really have a problem with the double 'p' spelling, but the wikia's page for King Chapa has no information on his name pun or how his name is written in Japanese, which probably contributed to how a mistake like calling Chapu "Chapa" didn't strike anyone as obviously wrong.

The wikia still refers to Rito as the home planet of the space orphans Gohan and co. encounter in that filler episode, even though the name actually refers to the home planet of the small alien race whose armor Gohan and Kuririn wear to fight Freeza (Vegeta is also shown attacking the place in the Garlic Junior filler). The place should actually be spelled リット/Ritto in Japanese, and is obviously a pun on “little” (remember the whole no l/r distinction in Japanese), so probably the best English spelling of the place should be “Litt”. Viz apparently thought this name was too plain for an English audience, so they changed the planet’s name to “Lilliput”, a reference to the country of tiny people from Gulliver’s Travels.

The reason people mistakenly think that Ritto/Litt is the home of the space orphans is because Greg Werner erroneously assumed that in his influential “Ultimate DBZ Info Site”. Werner went through Daizenshuu 7’s character dictionary, translated the names of each character and then essentially writing everything he knew about them. His Japanese at this point was not good enough to actually translate anything from the entries beyond simple things written with numbers or alphabet letters, such as heights, weights, battle powers, and addresses. When he came to the entry for the people of Planet Litt (which he wrote as “Rito”), he had no idea who they were and simply guessed that they were the space orphans. And so this bit of misinformation got passed on throughout the English-speaking fandom, and eventually to the wikia.

I’ve pointed out this error when talking about the wikia many times over the past few years, but nobody’s done anything about that page. What bugs me about this isn’t simply that nobody on the wikia is listening to me (though that does kinda bug me), it’s that nobody who works on this wikia has ever discovered this error on thier own. At no point over these years has anyone over there looked at this page and gone “hey, when is this planet ever called by this name? What’s the source for that?” This whole Litt/Rito confusion probably isn’t that important an error in the grand scheme of things, but it illustrates a glaring fault with the wikia that continues to this day: that the place is still severely lacking when it comes to fact-checking and research.

[GamingBuddha]

Short of replacing their entire user base, we cannot contribute there.

I'm not sure that I really get that. I mean it's not like the site has some Daizex detector that'll prevent people from editing there. Any contribution there is welcome, as long as it's correct. I get that there's a lot of problems with the site, but I don't believe it's beyond being fixed. A big problem is that we don't have the manpower right now to fix everything over there. I've been meaning to start a thread to get some Daizexers to help with a few projects on there. About not having fluent Japanese speakers, that's the problem with it being a wiki. There's not a specialized task force that is chosen to work on different things; people just voluntarily edit on what they know. I get that there's a ton of animosity against the wiki, but I hope that'll change one day.

The wikia still refers to Rito as the home planet of the space orphans Gohan and co. encounter in that filler episode

I read your post about fan/dub races a couple weeks ago, and I was planning to overhaul the whole race section. I've only changed a few names so far, but I'm slowly getting to the rest of it. I just added a deletion tag to the Rito pages. Btw, do they have an official name?

[VegettoEX]

Any contribution there is welcome, as long as it's correct.

Were that the case, the plethora of edits suggested and made by several members of this community would still be there. I can't give you any hard examples at this exact moment, but it's been documented before. (That of course leads in to the fact that incorrect information shouldn't even be there in the first place...)

A big problem is that we don't have the manpower right now to fix everything over there.

Manpower is something we have in droves to put toward our own project .

About not having fluent Japanese speakers, that's the problem with it being a wiki. There's not a specialized task force that is chosen to work on different things; people just voluntarily edit on what they know.

Which is why a completely open wiki is not something we are even remotely interested in doing. What we have planned is a community-based project directly tied to the exact database that drives this community, including all registration, posting, moderation, administrative, grouping, etc. privileges. The technology exists, and we will leverage it.

I get that there's a ton of animosity against the wiki, but I hope that'll change one day

It's not even really animosity toward the users or even the wiki as an entity -- it's against incorrect information, poor research practices, poor documentation, etc.

If someone doesn't have the proper knowledge, resources, and citations to back something up... they shouldn't be adding the information in the first place. Which brings it back to being an open wiki. Which brings it back to non-focused consensus on what to base the darn thing around. And so on and so forth.

None of those problems exist with a focused project from a single community.

[Bussani]

Short of replacing their entire user base, we cannot contribute there.

I'm not sure that I really get that. I mean it's not like the site has some Daizex detector that'll prevent people from editing there. Any contribution there is welcome, as long as it's correct. I get that there's a lot of problems with the site, but I don't believe it's beyond being fixed.

I think the thing is that everyone's had this conversation before already, and people have already tried what you're suggesting several times, only to be met with hostility. Maybe things have changed over there since then, but you're asking people to go out of their way and pet a dog that's already bitten them a few times.

[GamingBuddha]

I think the thing is that everyone's had this conversation before already, and people have already tried what you're suggesting several times, only to be met with hostility.

Could I get a specific example of when this has happened? I don't understand why anyone would be treated with hostility for trying to benefit the site. Was it one user that was reverting the edits or was it like a group? Because whenever I've edited a page, I've usually been treated pretty nicely.

@VegettoEX
This manpower is exactly why I'm asking Daizexers to come help out with the wiki that is already there . I understand that some of you have have problems with the it in the past, but I think since the split from Wikia, I think the site has taken a turn for the better especially in the community. A lot of the people tht t@lk3d LIKE dis on the blogs and never edited a single page decided to remain on the old wiki.

Another thing is that if your site was made, they both would share the same goals. We both want an amazing wiki with the most accurate information on Dragon Ball. We prefer the original information from the Japanese chapters/episodes over a dub and the manga over the anime, but unfortunately many previous editors hadn't seen the Japanese version or even read any of the manga, so dub lines and filler usually got mixed into the main body of the articles. You've said that that the DBE is beyond fixing, and it would be easier to just build a new wiki, but I don't exactly follow that. There are some good articles on there that can be kept. The ones with minor errors can be fixed rather easily. The articles that have major problems can simply be deleted and just started over again.

Sorry if I sounded a little too forward; I just want to get all of your opinions on this.