Dragon Ball Encyclopedia recruitment

[GamingBuddha]

Hey, I'm GamingBuddha, and I'm an admin on the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia. I made this forum post for two reasons. The first, as the the title says, is to recruit people to help on the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia. I understand that there has been some animosity towards the wiki on this site, but I'm hoping that I can change your minds about it today. The second reason is more directed to the site owners of Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai: VegettoEX, Julian, Herms, and Hujio. I've seen that you guys have been thinking about starting your own Daizex Wiki. You guys need a wiki; we need more editors. I'd like to suggest that you endorse the DBE as your wiki. I'm sure that it could benefit both of the sites.

First of all though, let me address the major complaints against using our wiki: (1) it favors the Funimation dub over the original, (2) all your edits will get reverted, and (3) it is beyond fixing.

The first issue is definitely no more. Here is a list of policy changes that have been approved for the wiki.

• Funimation's subtitle names will be used over the dub names. (Currently only in page titles. The pages themselves will be changed soon.)
• The Funimation episode titles will no longer be used as page titles. (I will have those changed by the end of the week.)
• The Japanese title cards will be used as the main image in episode pages.
• Funi's saga arrangements will no longer be used. We will be creating our own saga divisions based on the official sources.
• Dragon Ball Kai will no longer be called "Dragon Ball Z Kai". (Will be changed in pages soon).

All of these changes show that the wiki is moving on to be more committed towards the original version of the series.

The second issue is nonexistent at the moment. There have been many complaints about an editor reverting good edits in the past. I'm not sure who he was, but he seems to be gone from the wiki now since I haven't noticed any strange edit revertings while I've been there. If anything like that occurs though, I'll be sure to take care of it.

The third issue seems to be an overstatement to me. Fixing up the wiki will be a huge task, but it is definitely doable and will be a much smaller task than completely starting a new wiki. While there is a bunch of crap on there, there are many good articles too.

That brings me to the second part of my post. You might think that I'm spouting crap when I said to use our wiki, but hear me out first. Other than the large amount of work, there are also other wikis out there, most notably the Dragon Ball Wiki. Joining up with an existing one would help with the popularity of the wiki. We are also trying to distance our selves from the wiki on Wikia by concentrating more on accurate and encyclopedic articles.

We also have some features to offer on our wiki. We're currently using Semantic Media Wiki, which is a MediaWiki extension that lets you assign properties to certain pages. For example, on the first episode of Dragon Ball, "February 26, 1986" is assigned for the "Japanese Airdate" property. Similarly, we have properties on all the episodes for titles, airdates, sagas, etc. Assigning these properties lets us generate automatic lists and lets us search through the properties. We're planning to add Semantic Media Wiki functionality to manga chapters too.

Another feature we have that might not appeal to you so much, but is cool nonetheless, is naming variants. While Funi's subtitle names will remain the default for editing and viewing, users can individually choose to display pages using the Funi dub or Viz manga names. The option remains at the top of every page.

These features were brought about by two of our admins: Dantman and Nonoitall. That's another thing that the DBE has to offer: users with extensive MediaWiki knowledge. Also, all of our users know general wiki markup and could help new users that aren't so familiar with it.

Lastly, we're open to any suggestions that we can get to improve the wiki. Also, we will need new administrators if many new users join, so we will be willing to promote respectable users from the community.

That's basically all that I have to say, so I hope you'll consider my request on using the DBE as your site's wiki. For everyone else, I hope that you'll be contributing to too!

[Gaffer Tape]

It's late, and I don't really have much of substance to contribute right now. But based on how things have gone in the other thread, I don't know if I really expect much positive feedback. Not saying that's not generally deserved. My opinion of the DB Wiki is as low as the opinion of most others here. But just in case a flurry of messages saying that it's not worth salvaging do crop up here, I do want to say that it is very encouraging to see such work, such strides in professionalism and accuracy in progress. If anything, it shows that, even with such a large and acrimonious rift in the DB fanbase that we can all manage to engage each other in civil ways, and that gives me hope. While I still look forward to a DaizEX/Kanzentai-based Wiki... whatever happens, it's always inspiring to see someone act so passionately in a positive manner over something they love. I wish you the best of luck.

[Saimaroimaru]

Please use references so that people can verify the info themselves. You know the little [#] that occurs next to a sentence that links to a reference section and the particular link or just what the reference is.

[Leviathus]

Well, I'm a member of DBE but I got discouraged when I heard edits were reverted. I think I'll give it another chance... but really man.. it's a immense task. And like it's said before, please use references. That's what really bothers me.

[DemonRin]

Hey, a Wiki that's using the right names! Neat.

Tho, I took a quick look, and the wiki still lists the Cyborgs as "Android No. __".

It should be either "Cyborg No. __" or "Artificial Human No. __"

[Bussani]

Tho, I took a quick look, and the wiki still lists the Cyborgs as "Android No. __".

It should be either "Cyborg No. __" or "Artificial Human No. __"

Why? Cyborg isn't a more accurate umbrella term, and Android is exactly what jinzo'ningen means.

[Michsi]

I thought jinzouningen was more of an umbrella term and can be applied to both cyborg and androids. It seems pretty logical since Dr. Gero creations are cyborgs and androids.

Or maybe I'm remembering the term wrong.

[Fox666]

The second issue is nonexistent at the moment. There have been many complaints about an editor reverting good edits in the past. I'm not sure who he was, but he seems to be gone from the wiki now since I haven't noticed any strange edit revertings while I've been there. If anything like that occurs though, I'll be sure to take care of it.

No offense, but it sounds like the administrators have no power over the users... "we don't have that problem anymore because that user quit"

The third issue seems to be an overstatement to me. Fixing up the wiki will be a huge task, but it is definitely doable and will be a much smaller task than completely starting a new wiki. While there is a bunch of crap on there, there are many good articles too.

Even if it is harder to create a Wiki from the zero, it still would be worth the effort. I believe I can trust Herms and all staff of Kanzentai and Daizenshuu Ex for the job.

I have done plenty of Wiki works around, and I want to save my efforts for when Daizenshuu Ex / Kanzentai comes up with their own Wiki.

[Adamant]

Not to speak for anyone else, but as you yourself say, your wiki is just too overflowing with crap. It's nice that you want to fix it, but with so many pages and so much material, it's going to be a far more momentous task to carefully check and double-check every single statement made on the wiki, correcting and removing the mistakes, than it would be to just nuke the entire thing, start over from scratch, and do it right this time.

As it currently stands, your wiki is not a place anyone can, or should, trust until you come out and announce the repair work is done and completed, and even then, there's going to be a lot of crap still floating around, since it's a complete impossibility you're not going to overlook something.

So... what's the point of this restoration? Even if you can currently claim to have a 50% accurate and factual wiki, that's not going to help anyone, since they'd have to go elsewhere to figure out which of those two camps anything and everything they read falls into anyway.

[Bussani]

I thought jinzouningen was more of an umbrella term and can be applied to both cyborg and androids.

You'd think so from how it's used in Dragon Ball, but not really, no. Kaizoningen ("modified/enhanced human") is more the sort of thing you'd use for cyborgs.

[Herms]

I've said a few times that the dub terminology is the least of the DB wikia's problems, and I wasn't just blowing smoke. It's great that you're trying to switch to a name scheme more faithful to the original version (though looking through any given page currently reveals a bewildering array of inconsistent spellings and terminology), but all of that is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic if it goes without improving the quality of the actual content, and frankly I still don't see any notable improvement in that area. Yes, some mistakes have been fixed, but whenever someone on the forums here begins a sentence with "I read on the DB wikia..." what follows is almost inevitably inaccurate. I can still go to random pages and find inaccurate or unsourced claims, improperly translated or transliterated Japanese, and a confusing lack of distinction between what's said in the manga, the anime, or the Funi dub. The overall quality of writing is still terrible, like a 12-year old trying to imitate Wikipedia. The layout is still garish and unappealing. I do appreciate that you guy are trying to improve, but everything I see suggests that it really would be less work for you to just burn the whole thing down and start again from Square 1.

[Cipher]

In addition to the inaccuracies, I find it kind of concerning that there's a general lack of style control with this project. It's difficult to justify putting time and effort into improving the Wiki when there's an obvious lack of professionalism coming from the actual staff. We can edit and improve all we want, but it's not something individual contributors, or even a mass of them, can fix. If the higher staff aren't enforcing editing limitations and improving terrible, terrible writing, there's never going to be an acceptable level of quality.

For example, here's an excerpt from an early portion of the Piccolo Daimao entry. I use it because it's absolutely exemplary of Herms' description of the writing:

King Piccolo, like most other villains, happens to be very intellligent, being able to think ahead and learn from his previous mistakes. This was shown when he destroyed Shenron after making his wish (so that no one would be able to use the Dragon Balls to stop his reign), as well as when his reincarnation decided to injure both of Goku's arms at the World Martial Arts Tournament (as opposed to before, when he ended up leaving one of them unharmed). King Piccolo also happens to be somewhat manipulative, since he was able to use Emperor Pilaf and his associates, Mai and Shu, to gather the Dragon Balls for him. Due to the fact that he saw them as nothing more than pawns to be manipulated, he decided to dispose of them when he figured that he no longer had a use for them. Despite being pure evil, King Piccolo shows mercy on a few occasions; The first time is when he leaves Mutaito to die but spares Mutaito's students Master Roshi and Master Shen; The second time is when he does not kill Yajirobe, who hid from him during his fight with Goku (King Piccolo can sense power levels, as he states Master Roshi, Chiaotzu, and Tien are hiding from him); Later, after regaining his youth and becomming agurably more maniacal than before, he also spares the lives of Emperor Pilaf, Mai, and Shu, and later the life of King Furry (though he kills almost all of King Furry's guards). Also, during the worldwide announcement of his takeover, Piccolo stated that he deeply sympathizes with the criminals. According to himself, he sympathizes with them, because he viewed their imprisonment as being no different from his own, having been sealed within the electronic jar for many years.

This article, about a major character in the Dragon Ball franchise, appears to have never gone through a single round of copy-editing.

Ignoring the fan irks of switching between different adaptations' terminologies without citations, and blatant misinformation such as Piccolo "sparing" Pilaf and company, and hell, ignoring even poor wording, there's a multitude of basic style and spelling errors.

In this one paragraph, I've bolded three misspellings and lord knows how many tense-shifts. You write about fiction in the present tense. This is basic, standard style. This article seems to switch between present and past whenever it wants, sometimes multiple times within one sentence. These are middle-school, "My First Essay" sorts of mistakes.

And again, this speaks to the entire site. There's better writing, and there's worse, but this is a frighteningly average excerpt. The fact that not one staff member has looked over this high-profile article and realized the egregious amount of errors, or the fact that staff are unable to enforce (or worse, are unaware of) basic standards of style and quality, really discourages putting time into the Wiki. We can edit all we want, but someone's not doing their job to make the site coherent, well-written and professional. Why should we bother?

And before anyone says, "Well, it's just a fan Wiki. There's no way we can police an entire fanbase of editors into using proper style," go look at the Transformers Wiki. Whatever they're doing, they're doing it right, and there's no reason we shouldn't expect a proper Dragon Ball Wiki to be capable of the same. That Wiki works because, despite the thousands of no-doubt inept robot toy fans working on it, some group of editors is doing their job to keep it consistent and clean.

[VegettoEX]

There's so much to say...

I was debating responding at all, because I want to try and be both as nice and as helpful as I can be. There's not a lot of that to go around, though. I just have no real support to give. I'm gonna just break things down short and sweet. I could go into a lot more detail, and if anyone wants I may respond with additional information. Otherwise, I'm just gonna reference a couple things already stated, toss in a few of my own thoughts / reasons, and call it a day.

BRANDING / PERCEIVED VALUE:
You'll have to excuse me in some regards, but since I do this for a living, I look at this stuff in ways that a lot of people (1) don't and/or (2) don't want to. The fact is, "Dragon Ball _____" (whether it's Wiki or Wikia or Encyclopedia or Whatever) is a damaged brand. I'm not even just talking about from within this community. Part of what I consider "my job" in running Daizenshuu EX and its assorted initiatives (website / podcast / community) is that I'm aware of what other communities are actively doing and saying. Like Herms said, comments about a wiki for the series either question its information, or outright dismiss it on principle -- DB Wikia really has caused that much damage to the idea of a general, fan-run wiki for the series. It really has. It doesn't matter if you call yourself something different (in this case, "Dragon Ball Encyclopedia"). They're assumed to just be one-in-the-same.

CHANCE OF SUCCESS:
Therefore, without a strong brand image to bank on, there is little chance of success. Yes, it's been damaged that much. Part of the reason our website's podcast was able to get so successful so fast was because it was launched in conjunction with an already successful brand which had a built-in community to support and push along its success. Someone could have easily come along and have just done "The Dragon Ball Podcast", but it never would have skyrocketed the way we were able to leverage what we already had. "Dragon Ball Encyclopedia" has nothing. Nothing at all. All it has is, "OK, well we recognize that other stuff kinda sucks..."

REQUIRED EFFORT:
As folks have already said, there is just so much wrong with so many different areas of all existing fan-wikis for the series... it's not even worth "fixing". It's that bad, and it would be a monumental task to "correct" it versus starting over from scratch. Who would ever bother with that? I sure wouldn't.

OWNERSHIP:
There's already a gigantic thread that details a lot of our vision, but the one important reason that we are doing our own is: control. That's right -- we would control it. We would own it. It would be ours. We would own the server it would be stored on, the domain that would point to it, anything else that interacts with it on a software level, etc. That ties in with...

ADMINISTRATION:
For it to be as successful and as authoritative as we all want it to be (and it deserves to be), well... this isn't a democracy. It would follow the established Daizenshuu EX + Kanzentai style guides for everything (extending to spellings, image sizes and types, formatting, design, etc.). It would be a part of us. It's already been stated that it will run off the same user base as this exact forum, taking care of any and all administrative "problems". Someone sucks / vandalizes? No problem; they're gone for good. Need to run up special permission groups? No problem. Done. Again, not a democracy. Content is king, and while the general masses will be leveraged and taken advantage of, the same general masses don't dictate HOW it gets done. I'm sure a lot of people don't want to hear comments like that. Too bad. Look at the existing wikis and realize why it needs to be different.

That all being said, there is absolutely no way Daizenshuu EX can put its support or advocacy behind a project like this that isn't our own. There's just too much wrong with it, and the effort would be worthless when compared with what our own vision and plans are.

[Fox666]

It's not just the effort required, but that you are only "fixing" the mistakes, it would still be a not trustable source. If you write it from the scratch, it's reliable, because you take care of everything that's being writen.

Besides Wikia host is getting worse and worse... heck, I may sound discriminative, but a noobish system will bring noob users. Like VegettoEX said, there is a problem of ownership, and I am driven to believe that Dragon Ball Encyclopedia is only popular because it was the first one to be created, not because it truly deserves such number of visitors (which is a common effect on Interne)

[Pokewhiz7]

Honestly, I think it would be easier to just start over. I was considering rewriting articles, but I decided it would be a waste of time. I would be willing to write articles, but not to fix all the mistakes and such within the articles.

[Piccolo Daimaoh]

It's gratifying to see that manifold steps have been made in the right direction since I last browsed the site. IMO it's silly to think that their information and image are somehow irreparable. Accurate and coherent articles speak for themselves. A Bulbapedia-calibre Dragon Ball Encyclopaedia would be orgasmic. I hope that will be realised someday. Best of luck!

[thedarkuniter]

I say that changing the American names to the original Japanese ones is a great step in the right direction. Its a sign for me that the fanbase for Dragon Ball Z is no longer divided but is coming together. Sure you guys may want to edit entire articles altogether and it will be hell but keep it up.

[Herms]

changing the American names to the original Japanese ones

Not to pick on you or anything, but it always bugs me when people phrase it this way. Viz's English translation of the manga uses a naming scheme that is often quite different than the Funi dub, and the naming scheme the DB wikia is switching over to is largely based on the translations Steve Simmons provided for Funi's DVDs. The names used in the Funi dub aren't the "American names", any more so than Viz or Funi subtitles name schemes are.

[thedarkuniter]

Yeah, I meant the ones made up by Funimation since most American fans are most familiar with them, generally speaking.

[Fox666]

Probably Herms corrected you because of an argument used, i.e. the Encyclopedia uses the Funi translation is what USA fans know. And Herms have argued before that Funi is not the sole translation avaiable in USA, there are manga translations and DVD subbing. I guess he dislikes to hear "american names".