User blog:WoeisWingbat/More changes

NOTE: Please check this blog as well by one of our admins, about certain unlicensed dubs being tackled on the wiki. Don't want to flush that one out.

Hello! We're still making important changes as we move towards the future of the wiki. Currently I am working on removing and editing Stub articles that are not notable enough or could be fixed, respectively.

If you've ever looked at my profile, you may have noticed that I compiled a list of the bare basics of articles that are expected to be tackled on the wiki. You can get it more in depth from my profile but summarizing it quickly, it's this:
 * Media
 * People
 * Characters
 * Dubbing studios
 * Songs

But the two types of articles I did not list (that we hadn't publicly spoken out against before) are Countries and Channels. Bare with me here.

After editing on some other dubbing wikis and giving it some thought, I have concluded to myself that country pages and channel pages are ultimately worthless. Justifying why I don't jive with country pages is easier, I personally believe that we don't need them; not many people use or edit them anyway, and if you wanted to know a Romanian person or see a dub from Israel, you'd just go to the closest category for it.

As for channel pages, before I justify why I want to get rid of them, I'll first explain my other concern: the staff has to work on having better categories for pages. A lot of these categories are very specifically non-specific, such as "Arabic television shows" instead of just simply "Arabic dubs", and no "Dubs" category in general. It likely isn't going to be too easy but we do want to change that so that browsing isn't that much of a chore. My overall outline for an average page would look like this:



That way, if you wanted to know what channel something was broadcast on, you could very easily just check the categories.

The reason why I don't like channel AND country pages exactly co-exists with my category concern: that we don't necessarily need them if we already have categories. We don't need to make a list about how many Albanian people there are when we already have them; how many dubs air on Minimax when we already have them.

I acknowledge fully that the problem then would be to have to edit so many dub pages, again, just for this. But it doesn't have to be like that; my simple solution is just to link to Wikipedia for channels which have a page for it (which is a lot easier to do en masse on a template than on the pages itself, but honestly, it's worth it).

Now, the very last concern somewhat distanced from all of this is the big one (yes, even bigger than the "removing flags" concern): Phonetics. Do we need them? Not to remove a whole two years worth of work from very dedicated users but I think that having phonetics causes more problems than it solves, especially when hearing two outsider's perspectives about how they can't read IPA (myself included) and it just makes things complicated.

To further prove my point, the amount of pages that have missing IPA is 7,306. That is like most of the wiki. It just feels pointless now and not many people are going to bother actually adding it. This also helps clean out the categories. By like, a lot.

Transliteration on song pages is fine but probably will not be the standard if someone doesn't want to bother with it.

But I do want to hear your thoughts on all of this. Do you think that any of this is a poor decision? Let me know!