Lit Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed that talk page questions don't get that much attention!

 

I know.

That's the issue with any plan involving forums, wikis, etc. It is hard to not only create, but promote and run a website. Even then, whether it survives and thrives is essentially random in the sea of similar websites floating across the internet. @Brandon Rhea can attest to that. So, typically, the only progress that happens for offshoots is some vague plans and ideas, culminating in maybe a short lived website using free software and hosting that tends to die out as soon as the creators loose interest.

It may sound cynical, but I've observed several sites and wikis go down the same route. Like I said, if you actually pull this off, you have my support, but that isn't usually how these things go down.

 

Yeah, they unfortunately tend to either get shut down or ignored altogether.

 

Shouldn't the hypothetical new Wiki be for the new canon? Wook already has the majority of the Legends stuff and starting a new one for the new continuity would be easier than building a new Legends one from scratch.

 

Wikis on FANDOM, at least, are generally in a better position to thrive because there's an inherent SEO boost that comes from a few factors:

1. Being on a massive site like FANDOM which has great SEO.
2. Writing about a subject matter that attracts a lot of eyes (bonus points if the movie/show/game/franchise has ongoing releases or staying power, like LOST or Breaking Bad).
3. Attracting an obsessive fan base.
4. Setting up a structure that makes sense and positions the right content in the right ways. (I won't name other wikis but there are some out there that have really off-the-wall policies in terms of content creation that harm their search engine rankings).

Wookieepedia was in a unique position to be a successful wiki because Star Wars is a popular subject matter, the wiki was created right before Revenge of the Sith came out, the structure is fairly straight forward and typically encourages content creation, and Star Wars fans are the most obsessive in the world.

Obviously I'm coming at this from a very theoretical point of view since there isn't an existing successful offshoot wiki for the EU, but a new Legendspedia or whatever you would want to call it would face some major hurdles:

1. The internet at large does not know or care about the issues some people have with Wookieepedia. That's a very curt statement, I know! But, I think the directness of that statement is important because of the next point which is...
2. Wookieepedia has massive SEO benefits that, for some subjects, even beats out StarWars.com. Overcoming the SEO of Wookieepedia would, in the best case scenario, be next to impossible. If you were to follow the advice to ditch FANDOM, it would be entirely impossible. Wookieepedia, and FANDOM, is where the audience is going to go. Especially when you consider...
3. Wookieepedia has a 13 year head start, so creating the amount of content to even potentially be a competitor would take years. As a result of all these issues...
4. You have very low odds of attracting anything more than a small community of dedicated EU experts.

But on that last point, maybe that's what you want? If you have a desire to create Legends-based wiki content and feel like there's no place for you on Wookieepedia, why not start a passion project? Maybe it won't take off and it'll just be for you and your friends. If you're having fun, that's not necessarily a bad thing. And who knows? Maybe along the way, you'll figure out how to overcome those hurdles. But if not, you're still doing something you're passionate about, which I wouldn't want to discourage.

 

Curse wikis aka Gamepedia seem to be the only thing that can compete with Wikipedia, at least when their official game wikis are concerned, but they are the exception, not the rule.

 

Halo has two wikis, one Wikia, and one MediaWiki. From the discussion I've heard it sounds like plenty of people hate the Wikia version. I agree. I think it's ugly to look at. But still, the Wikia site ALWAYS appears first on Google. I'd love a MediaWiki site for Star Wars, but I don't think it's too realistic. FANDOM seems to have a monopoly on the wiki scene.

 

Yeah, the long odds of such an endeavor surviving, growing, and thriving to become an ongoing resource are why it hasn't already happened. If it weren't for so many instances of good information being randomly deleted from Wookieepedia, few of us would even be talking of replacing it at all.

Well, that would be one way to go about it- keep the existing Wook for what was already established and move everything post-2014 to a newer Wiki. I think what really prevents that is that a lot of people who aren't longtime fans as we are have no idea that there are actually two different Star Wars Universes that are not compatible with each other.

As for the majority of Legends information being present- I really do wonder about that. Certainly many, maybe even a majority, of basic details are present; but I have copies of almost every single printed and online EU work from '76 to the present, and quite often many rather interesting details are simply not to be found anywhere online at all. Many times new information will come to light, or things that are just obviously so but unofficially sourced ("original research"- look at how long Anthony Lang was BoShek and not Sim Aloo) are forbidden when they really should be added.

 

I think this is a good example of why maybe a small community for people who are particularly interested in this can be a good idea. For better or for worse, Wookieepedia is seen as the foremost website on Star Wars lore. If it started adding information that seems obvious but can't actually be sourced, it gets into subjective territory. While there are things where we can be 99.9% sure that it's correct, any nagging doubts are ultimately what triumphs because Wookieepedia doesn't want to present information that another storyteller could go in a different direction with.

Wookieepedia ultimately has to side with presenting verifiable information to readers, rather than appealing to the preferences of editors. Which may mean that Wookieepedia is not everyone's cup of tea. That doesn't mean disagreements aren't invalid, but maybe it does show the usefulness of a different kind of wiki that isn't going to be a major online resource but can be a passion project for editors who want to do something different.

 

I actually agree with all but one of these points- that Wookieepedia generally encourages content creation. There's so much good information that has been deleted, reverted, or changed for no good reason, to point that quite a lot of knowledgeable fans have been turned off from contributing at all. Just because some random mod deems something to be lacking in notability (whatever happened to the older big tent approach the early Wook had?), to be unsupported (despite being onscreen in plain sight), or otherwise, is no reason to prevent valid information from being uploaded. Ideally, there'd be some sort of mechanism to allow enough votes by other contributors to override bad deletions or changes. One reason I and many others here even bother to share information and analyses is because we want our fellow enthusiasts to be aware of certain things we come across. Ideally, that would involve sharing them with the greater world on such a prominent site as the Wook.

 

I am actually an admin on Halo Nation. That situation was the result of a schism from before I became an admin. Both wikis are kind of floundering at this point, the few people keeping up with new content are mainly on Halopedia, which is why it looks better than Halo Nation.

 

Sure. There are qualifiers and caveats to my statement. Wookieepedia has decided to be in the business of a certain kind of content. Analysis is not one of them, because Wookieepedia only wants to present factual information in its wiki pages.

That being said, the scope of Wookieepedia has changed somewhat in recent years. Now, there's Wookieepedia Discussions, where you can post analyses. It's not going to be on a wiki article page, but there is now a place for it within the greater Wookieepedia community.

I should note, though, that while this doesn't change your objections in anyway, that's not just a Wookieepedia thing. The vast majority of wikis don't put analyses into their wiki pages, because they also follow a model of only posting objectively verifiable information.

Are there going to be cases where maybe some admins or other community members aren't going to be that nice about it or maybe actually just outright get something wrong? Yeah. Like anything, there's room for human error. And there's certainly a self-importance that can sometimes come with running a wiki, Star Wars or otherwise.

But as a basic principle, I think it's a pretty good idea. Readers, by and large, come to wikis because they have a question. "Why did X happen?" or "Who killed X?" or any other straightforward question you can think of. They're just looking for the answer, and then they're going to go. The subset of people looking for analytical content is very, very small.

That's why I think a smaller passion project type of wiki is a good idea. I personally wouldn't want to see Wookieepedia start presenting analyses to hardcore enthusiasts at the expense of people who are just coming in looking for a quick answer to something. Having worked at FANDOM for 8 years, and having gone through numerous feature releases where we've tried to do new things with wikis and wiki content, I can confidently say that if there's one constant when it comes to wikis, it's this: let wikis be wikis. They're a fact-based resource. Trying to change their nature generally doesn't work because they tend to attract a specific type of editor and the audience is going to those wikis for a specific purpose.

Analyses can ultimately muddy the waters for the majority of the audience. But I see no reason why an analysis-based wiki can't exist alongside Wookieepedia. If it's going to do something new, then why not have it?

 

I understand this approach- but it goes too far when it reaches the point of willfully denying that which is RIGHT IN PLAIN SIGHT and thus needs no additional official sourcing. If something can be verified by our own eyes, then why shouldn't it be added? The source can be the film itself, can't it? I really do appreciate you taking the time and effort to compose thoughtful and well explained posts here, which is why I'd like to ask flat out if, to use an above example, should there be a page on the Wook for the 6th Dignitary? He's seen onscreen, and we do have clear images. The character still exists, whether or not certain Wook editors choose to acknowledge it. If a character doesn't (yet) have a name, what's wrong with having another "Unidentified" page created? There's plenty already, and many more that could easily be added- and would if more reasonable moderation were present.

 

There are some rumors that Tarkin also falls into this camp

 

Oh, in the case of that example it's another matter entirely. Generally, "Unidentified" pages are allowed. The policy that resulted in your page being deleted was a specific one created right after the EU became Legends and Wookieepedia decided to create new canon pages. What the community wanted to avoid was a slew of pages like "Unidentified wolf man in the Mos Eisley cantina" when we could have otherwise waited a short while for those characters to be named in canon sources. (Which, by and large, they have been.) So the policy was created to say "if a subject was named in Legends but not in Canon, it doesn't get a Canon page until it's named in a Canon source."

That said, that was 4 years ago and with all the new canon information and sources, I would agree that that policy is now out of date. It's still there, so we still have to follow it, but if there was a proposal to reverse it now then I would support such a proposal.

That being said, it looks like the article was also deleted for being copy pasted from the Legends page. If that's the case, while I can understand the inclination to do it, there are two reasons why I don't think it's the right approach:

1. Wookieepedia is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA). The content a user would copy from one page to another probably wasn't originally written by them, so that would require an attribution notice on the new page. That looks ugly.
2. Duplicate content is penalized in SEO rankings.

Creating it from scratch (within the bounds of existing policies) is the right approach given those 2 issues.

 

The complicated thing Wookieepedia has done is pretty much two things:
1) The back and forth over Star Wars in 100 Scenes between Canon and Legends despite clearly being Canon with a few mistakes.
2) Leland Chee's tweet that every name is essentially the same unless they need to be changed.

 

I don't think Wookieepedia should run rampant with conjecture by any means, but some things are just kind of obvious. To use a specific example, Shadow Troopers. The wiki makes a distinction between the two appearances despite sharing the names, unit placement and role. Is it conjecture to assume Shadow Troopers and Shadow Troopers are the same thing?

 

I believe one of the Story Group members stated they had no involvement in that, so IMO it's not a valid canon source. That doesn't make it Legends either. Sometimes things just exist without being part of a continuity.

Stay tuned on that one.

So far as I can tell, there's only one page. Can you link me to the two separate pages?

 

Also I'm not the only one who thinks several of their April Fools gags in recent years have crossed the line to flat-out mean, am I? Like there was one that said Dave Filoni has an Ahsoka sex pillow, or something like that.

 

There's a reason why Wookieepedia doesn't do April Fools jokes anymore, and it's because the "sense of humor" in the last few AFD jokes became insulting and mean.

 

Do you mean shadow stormtrooper and shadow trooper? The sticking point there seems be not only their slightly different colors (really?), but different materials in their armor. Still, they seem pretty much the same to me.

Edit: Even the LEGO set including the gray shadow trooper just calls them shadow stormtroopers in the official item description.

 

@Brandon Rhea
Here you go.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Clone_shadow_trooper
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Shadow_Trooper/Legends
The only reason the articles are separate is b/c the armors are different. And as @AV-6R7 says, LEGO clearly supports them being the same. Blackhole's men and Dessan's men may be similar, but their origins are both different. However Shadow Troopers and their Clone Wars companions have no reason to be separate.

 

Oh huh, that's actually why they stopped? Who made the call to do that, do you know?

 

The admins.

 

I'd argue that clone shadow troopers are different from their Imperial counterparts for the same reason the Imp navy is separate from the Republic one. They're technically different orgs. I still think the Imp-era shadow troopers should be merged, though.