AliceSoft Wiki talk:Wikia ACG

= Prior discussions = From w:anime:Project talk:Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project: 

ACG
In Taiwan, people coined an abbreviation, ACG, to stand for "Animation (including anime & cartoons), Comics (including manga), and Games (most games in Asia tend to get characterized as "anime games" by Westerners, although Asians themselves don't really divide the games by art style, especially since there's no "anime style" from their perspective, only Asian vs Western style. The G in ACG refers to all of gaming, although "Asian styled game" does have a significant majority since the Japanese on average pump out 30~40 new PC games each month). It's a very regional term (to my knowledge, mostly used in Taiwan), but it might serve nicely, as it is at least a term already being used somewhere.

That brings me to the next point: are you interested in expanding the project into "Asian styled games" (aka "anime games") earlier than phase 4? Your phases 1 and 2 can be characterized as "Asian styled ACG, minus games", whereas phases 3 and 4 are "Western styled ACG, minus games". If you are interested in first focusing on "Asian styled ACG", then expand into "Western styled ACG", then the AliceSoftWiki would be quite intersted in partnering up. -Afker 17:32, 13 May 2007 (UTC) From User talk:Afker: 

WGEP
Your comment on Anime:Animepedia talk:Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project was interesting. I don't feel that we're going to change the name further anymore. ACG is a Asian coined word, but it's not recognized in the Western world where most of the WGEP's readers come from. Plus technically it would mean we're using an abbreviation within an abbreviation. WACGP for the abbreviated form, Wikia ACG Project supposedly would be a proper name, but the real full name would be Wikia Animation, Comics, and Games Project. And because the readers are mostly westerners the Games part would get confused with other types of games which are under the watch of Wikia's Gaming Hub. And the biggest reason... T_T It's a hellofalotta work to change the name. I changed it from Wikia Anime Project to Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project, and there was so much work involved in that, even using Bots to take out most of the work there are still remnants of the old name left over.
 * As for the Alice Soft Wiki joining the WGEP, that sounds interesting. Have you familiarized yourself with the various things that happen to wiki which join the project? Pages with info on that can be seen at What will happen? and Extended information. The first thing I scanned were your templates. Once the AutoTemplate bot runs, your Template:Disambig, Template:PD, and Template:Stub will be overridden. And Template:GFDL will become useless (I can help with any migrating you want; Bots handle that like pie). So you should check over Anime:Template:Disambig, Anime:Template:PD, Anime:Template:Stub, and Anime:Template:FS. I'd be interested in learning a bit of the Alice Soft Wiki's policies and positions on various things to compare them with the WGEP's. I was at some point considering creating a bot to regenerate the sidebar (because the sidebar is used to link back to the WGEP, and at times new Top-Level wiki are added), considering the extra links would you be comfortable adding new links using a special type of format? Most likely it'll be done by adding a few subpages to MediaWiki:Sidebar which the bot will read to decide what to add in addition to the standard things.
 * One of the things which deterred me from AliceSoft, other than the Gaming focus was the Japanese. How much more Japanese is used in the general areas of the site? I see something even in the site notice, but I don't know what it means. The Visual Novel and Animanga Related Games section of the WGEP was a unofficial idea, not a planned phase. So it can actually come in at any point. In fact, it might make the MMKB a little less opposed to joining.

On another note, I saw your stuff on Image Use. But from my memory you can at least use a few screenshots from the games under Fair use laws. Of course, there would be a few limitations, but generally Fair use laws are geared with free documentation in mind. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 13, 2007 @ 20:41 (UTC)
 * I realize it won't work for much of the interface. But, using fair use you could probably use some box art, and screenshots of general areas of the games on the individual Game's main articles. It would be good for giving people a good look at what the game is actually like. On another note about re-drawing the interfaces. If you had your readers use SVG and draw those images in an editor like Inkscape, the quality of those images would be improved, and you could scale them up. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 13, 2007 @ 21:01 (UTC)


 * In terms of ACG, I was mostly using it as a springboard to make the connection that AliceSoftWiki's focus would be highly related to WGEP. Your arguments against renaming makes perfect sense, and I respect that (-:
 * Most AliceSoft games are not actually "Visual Novel and Animanga Related Games", unless you count having a stereotypical "Anime art style" as being "Animanga related". And if simply having a stereotypical "anime art style" is sufficient to being considered an animanga-related game, then the "Visual Novel" part of the section name probalby should be deleted for redundency and dilution of focus.
 * Thanks for the headsup about the template conflicts. I'm fine with using Animepedia's version of the templates, and also fine with our GDFL template being useless.
 * For the sidebar, as long as I can keep the custom links we currently have, I don't mind the exact formatting or addition of new links.
 * The usage of Japanese:
 * Japanse site notice - Angela added it for us originally, and I modified it slightly. It currently says "Welcome to wikia!  For all Japanese wiki content, click here".  Angela added it because supposedly we are getting quite a bit of traffic from Japan (our site is listed on one of the major Japanese PC game walkthrough portals).
 * On the main page - The Japanese paragraph on the main page says "AliceSoftWiki is a wiki for all the fans that support Japanese (although it's currently only in English). It is not the AliceSoft's home page.  For AliceSoft's home page, click here."
 * Our Template:Box and Template:Game also uses Japanese. They display the English name, the Japanese name (in Japanese), and the romanization of the Japanese name, of various people/places/events/games etc.  Our Games article also shows the games' Japanese titles alongside our translated English names.
 * Sengoku Rance:Version history currently has quite a bit of untranslated Japanese text. Those are just placeholders until I (or someone else) get to translating them into English.
 * If there are any that I forgot about, please let me know. In general, this is an English content wiki.  Usage of Japanese is limited to notate the original Japanese term, or non-content notices for Japanese users (that are unnecessary for English users).
 * For image use, I intentionally chose a policy stricter than Fair Use, because the AliceSoftWiki is more as a fan wiki then the average "documentation wiki", and as an overzealous fan I would like to respect what AliceSoft wishes of us. That said, it is something that only applies to the AliceSoftWiki, and I do not intend to impose such limitations on any AliceSoft-related article on the main WGEP wiki (I assume for each game it'd have a general article on the WGEP wiki).  Is letting AliceSoftWiki keeping its existing policy while having the main WGEP fairuse anything AliceSoft-related an arrangement that is acceptable to you, or do you believe that the AliceSoftWiki should allow any fairuse image in order to be part of the WGEP?
 * For naming policies, we currently adopt a "plain-text friendly" convention towards romanizing Japanese names. That means where wikipedia uses "ō" we tend to use "ou".  Exceptions include things like "Tokyo" (Wikipedia doesn't use "Tōkyō" as their article name; and we probably won't use "Toukyou" if we need an article for that, unless it's something that happens to have the same pronouncation, but is not actually the current capital of Japan).  In the end, as long as redirect works, I don't particularily care about the exact naming convention.
 * Importing from wikipedia
 * Atlach-Nacha is an article that is imported from Wikipedia. For attribution, I mentioned wikipedia and provided the perma-link to the version that I exported from Wikipedia.  I'd be happy to have the article changed to whatever format WGEP requires for proper attribution to Wikipedia.
 * Aside from Atlach-Nacha, I don't really see any other article being imported from Wikipedia. If there happens to be a wikipedia article of decent quality on something AliceSoft-related, I'd be happy to import it.  But generally speaking I can type up an article from scratch better than what's currently on Wikipedia (with respect to AliceSoft-related topics).  So in general, I would prefer to be able to bypass the "when creating a new article, import what Wikipedia has first" policy.  Of course I can hack around it by simply import the wikipedia article, then do a complete rewrite (keeping the attribution which will become meaningless), so it's not too big an issue for me.
 * Those are all the issues I can think of right now. -Afker 21:43, 13 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Importing from Wikipedia:
 * For Wikipedia attribution the WGEP uses a template. The template looks a little similar to the default one, except it's been upgraded with a few improvements and standardization to work the same as the other WGEP wiki. To attribute a page you would use . Currently there is no parameter inside of it to specify a specific revision id like you have there, but since you have that I'd be willing to upgrade the template so that a revision ID can be specified.
 * I was considering letting the MMKB bypass a little of the use Wikipedia content. The Mega Man articles on Wikipedia are pretty fair, though the MMKB actually has much more on the subject than Wikipedia does. I was considering letting them off on that as long as they tried to get the bits and pieces which Wikipedia had that they were missing. I looked over the AliceSoft related articles on Wikipedia and they are pretty poor, so since the AliceSoft Wiki is doing a fairer job of documenting than Wikipedia is, I'm fine with the AliceSoft Wiki making their own articles. ^_^ Actually, the Animepedia has the start of an article on a series that Wikipedia is missing; Okusama wa Joshikousei.
 * Fair use:
 * The Fair use policy is waved in certain circumstances; Again I'll go off to the MMKB which still hasn't decided on it's final stance. There are so many images on the MMKB, and nearly every one of them is missing the proper tagging. It is ideal to tag everything you can, but since that would be a near impossible task on the MMKB the tag every thing policy is kinda waved in place of a Disclaimer on the wiki. As long as the AliceSoft Wiki can keep a normal, nice graphical side to the wiki that could be fine.
 * Though, I don't know about Fansite. The WGEP is more of a an Encyclopedic project, but if the AliceSoft Wiki is still attempting clear documentation on every aspect, and it's not diverging to far into the fanatic form of writing on things (eg: Keeping NPOV like an Encyclopedia does) then I suppose that is fine.
 * Naming conventions:
 * Tokyo would be a complete exception to the normal Naming of things. Those policies in our cases are targeted at Series titles, Character Names, etc...
 * Do you have reasoning behind the plaintext-friendly form of naming? As the ō's and other characters are a strong pronunciation guide it's generally preferred to keep them in titles when using romanized names. But the WGEP makes sure that all forms of the name work despite that, for example the character Choji Akimichi can also be found using his nickname Choji, the list format of his name Akimichi, Choji, the Japanese form of his name 秋道チョウジ, the 3 different variations of Romanization: with symbols Akimichi Chōji, extended Akimichi Chouji, and plaintext Akimichi Choji.
 * Content Style: This is more of a very nice heads-up not some type of warning.
 * Look at the tables in randomly picked article of yours such as Dungeons & Dolls:Inventory and Items.
 * Now look at the tables on the Narutopedia's List of Ninjutsu page.
 * This is the result of the WGEP's Box class sytem of CSS classes. That general table style is created by using class="box table colored bordered type-basic" in the {| table start definition. No other stuff is really needed, in fact if you add fill-horiz it'll also fill the page vertically. There are also a number of other special content improving and simplifying CSS Classes.
 * These classes are part of the Global Styles of the WGEP, part of the setup of a wiki becoming part of the WGEP is some additions to the wiki which reference the global systems. Simply put, they are shared to all wiki in the WGEP, they can be used the same on all wiki in the WGEP, and when new things are added and upgraded they appear on all wiki in the project.
 * I should also note that the SearchSwitch you'll see below the WGEP box on the Animepedia is something which will also start showing up here because it's part of the global scripts.
 * I see you're missing Wikia's Forum system. That's another part of the WGEP setup, though the WGEP uses a different type than the rest of Wikia.
 * Our Forumheader template supports placing a topic in multiple forums at the same time.
 * The Forumheader template also has a special mode which allows it to output the forumheader on one of the individual Forum pages so that a manual one is no longer used ^_^ Changing the style in the template doesn't leave the topic lists behind anymore.
 * The forums also have a forumnav to help navigation.
 * Instead of the Watercooler forum which Wikia uses, the WGEP uses a SITETITLE Discussion; In your case this would mean that what would usually be the Watercooler would actually be AliceSoft Wiki Discussion.
 * We also use an extra SITETITLE Announcements forum cause it's proved to help some types of involvement in WGEP communities. Some wiki which have trouble bringing the editors together also put a special listing of the 5 most recent topics (Most recently created, not most recently edited; unlike the actual forum, to prevent people bringing old topics to the top of the announcements and to allow those announcements to also be used as discussions) on the Main Page.
 * The Image:Forum new.gif which is uploaded normally in the Forum setup is not needed in this setup, the code has been significantly changed in the way that the CSS uses the global image instead of a local one, and even the template which has the extra post button using that image uses the global one instead of a local. The WGEP actually has it listed in the things which CleanDeleteBot actually erases from all wiki in the project.
 * Oh ya, there are a number of images which the WGEP shares across all it's wiki. You can check w:c:Naruto:Category:Images/noedit for a general idea of these. Don't worry about any issues with them, most of them are actually for use in the shared templates (... I'll admit that 3 of them are there because my shared userpages actually use them ...) but most of them are under Free licenses and even from Commons actually.
 * ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 14, 2007 @ 08:31 (UTC)


 * I should also note something about the 3 sharing bots. They actually don't only share the content. They actually also mirror Category structures.
 * I only see one which will conflict at the moment, Category:Templates is going to have it's category content (Not Subcategories or Pages in that category) overridden to become like Anime:Category:Templates.
 * Fortunately that page does not have any actual text, so that's not anything to worry about.
 * Though, the categories will be changed. That will no longer be a subcategory of Category:Meta but instead of Category:AliceSoft Wiki. It appears your category tree is Broken meaning you have categories which do not lead back to a master category. I've got a good structure used on many wiki, and I can give you a tour of it if you want. Also, Category:Images will be made with a bunch of stuff, and the new template will be using Category:GFDL instead of Category:GFDL images.
 * I'll note that the WGEP is developing a very good Infobox system, some time later on I can actually add some Character Sub Boxes and possibly get things working for your stuff.
 * You should look over Anime:Project:Administrators, this is a standardized form you see on all wiki in the WGEP. Your's is pretty small, and one of the setups is the Anime:Project:Rules area. Compare that to w:c:Naruto:Project:Rules and w:c:en.ghostintheshell:Project:Rules for an idea on what is normally copied to the wiki in the project.
 * Just note that I'm actually listed as a Project Head, which means that other than Sysop I also use the Bureaucrat flag. If you're wondering the purpose of that, as Project Head I half to Sysop any new Project Admin to the WGEP on all the WGEP wiki cause a Project Admin's task is keeping the standardized and shared things working on all the WGEP wiki. Though, unlike the other wiki in the project I'm probably going to stay out of the Local Head and Local Admin section and leave that area to you.
 * ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 14, 2007 @ 08:47 (UTC)

= Current discussions = Blah, you are not supposed to add stuff in the boxed "Prior discussions" area ~_~". Anyways, splitting topics into their own subsections for ease of keep track of each topic. -Afker 10:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Naming policy
I'm confused. On one hand you said "As the ō's and other characters are a strong pronunciation guide it's generally preferred to keep them in titles when using romanized names", on the other hand Choji Akimichi's article is titled "Choji Akimichi", not "Chōji Akimichi". So in that particular case you aren't keeping it in titles, but only making sure redirects are working with it. Within the article text, "Chōji" is the dominent spelling, leading to a strong sense of consistency. Does that article happen to be misnamed?

Also, "Okusama wa Joshikousei" seems to adhere to our "plain-text" friendly convention, as opposed to "keeping strong pronounciation guide". This makes me furthur confused as to what your actual naming rules are.

Anyways, the "ou" convention came about because most layman do not know how to type "ō" via the keyboard directly, and I never did anything with the edittools, and even with a edittools section, it's still slower and more tedious and annoying to have to look for the "ō" link to click on it, compared to simply typing "ou". So while the edittools can be easily installed, I still see myself personally preferring "ou" over "ō". In terms of "o" vs "ou", that's because I often have to type and look up stuff in Japanese on the internet, and the "o" convention makes me forget there is a "u" following it when I type in Japanese. But anyways, since we got redirects, I don't really oppose any particular convention. It'd take a bit of work to ensure consistency inside article text though (which is not to imply we currently have good consistency here, only a loosely enforced convention). -Afker 10:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I do not know the location of the characters which would not be normal alphanumeric characters in that title, so I was never able to properly romanize it as I remember. Wikipedia is my common source for the romanized form of a name, I actually copy names rather than typing the special characters out. As for Choji, Akimichi Chōji is the romanized form of his name, Choji Akimichi is the translated English name. Notice how the name order has been switched from Eastern to Western order. That's because that's an English name and not a Japanese name. It's because part of the Naruto series has been Dubbed. As for the articles themselves, we're actually needing to rework a lot, the current task is copying all the Wikipedia related content to the wiki following a special guide on how to do that. Choji's article actually hasn't been done yet, even though it is marked as a Wikipedia copied article yet the actual collaborative project hasn't gotten to it yet. Technically, the ō is a better guide than ou; It's because it takes into account both the spelling and pronunciation. The proper word is spelled with an o, but it sounds like an ou. That's why ō is a good thing to use. So Chōji states without doubling anything that it is spelled Choji but spoken as Chouji. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 14, 2007 @ 12:59 (UTC)

Fansite-ness
Well, we don't do reviews, and because I know myself as a zealous fan, I've been refraining from putting too much content in the AliceSoft article. Anyways, articles such as game lore, game walkthroughs/stats/maps/data are nothing that can realistically be fanatic about, IMHO (please do point out if I am wrong), and that constitutes the majority of the content of our site. I am hoping we can eventually keep track of all AliceSoft-related products, not just games, to a level that can be considered as "stalking". It'd still just be data and information, not reviews, so theoretically it'd still be hard to violate NPOV (IMHO), we'd just be stalkers. As a fansite, we might try to encourage user-drawn fan art, as an alternate means to graphically illustrate certain game characters (who doesn't have a usable image from the AliceSoft official website); we might also have other activities that tries to bolster a sense of fan community (fanfics in userpages, or something, still brainstorming). Finally, as a fansite, I believe we should not document ways to pirate the game, or channels to obtained pirated games. Instead, we should try to promote the purchase of legit imported copies of the games (by providing a guide on where to go on the internet to order legit games). In this instance, the fansite-ness means we consciously decide to omit certain information from being documented, and instead strive to promote a certain type of action. I am personally quite fanatic about this last issue (no encouragement of software piracy), and I hope it does not significantly conflict with the encyclopedic stance of "to document all knowledge". -Afker 10:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * That should be fine. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 14, 2007 @ 12:59 (UTC)

Forum system
I believe our wiki was launched before the forum system was implemented on wikia, which is why we didn't start with it. And after we have the extension, I simply haven't bothered adding it, though I do not oppose it. I just don't have a best structure in mind yet, and being too much of an old styled monobook wikian, I'm just use to post things on various talk pages to discuss things, which limited my imagination. Feel free to add the forum system on here. -Afker 10:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * The advantage I see with the Forum system is it's useful for discussing things which are not specific to one page. It replaces pages like Talk:Main Page which some may use for wiki wide things, stops the Project talk:Community Portal being used in that way, and also invalidates the use of talkpages such as these. The fact that's it's centralized also makes it easier for people to notice these discussions and reply to them. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 14, 2007 @ 12:59 (UTC)

Misc

 * Once all the details of AliceSoftWiki joining WGEP is worked out, I'll +B you. I have +S-ed you in the time being just so you can start do things with the mediawiki stuff.
 * Not only is our category tree broken, some parts of it loop, so it's not technically a tree, but rather a graph. The uncategorized categories are ones I haven't thought of a good logical parent category for yet (and aren't really "Meta" stuff).  Feel free to restructure it, though I prefer some of the loops remain for ease of look up stuff.  I see no strong compelling reason to force the category structure into a tree format, as opposed to simply a connected graph.

-Afker 10:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Contrary to the name tree, a Category Tree is actually more like a Web than a tree ^_^ rofl... The only main thing is that if you backtrack through enough categories you always end up back at the primary category, which is normally Browse and that is the only category which the specialpages should list as uncategorized.
 * I'm not going to do to much till things are made official, a lot of what I do depends on the use of the bots. After it's made official I'll request one of the Staff to +Bot AnimeBot and DantmanAWB and I'll personally +S AnimeBotSys. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 14, 2007 @ 12:59 (UTC)

If you want a good reason why I never start the bots until a wiki has officially joined. This is what the recentchanges looks like if you hit show bots (Fortunately the bot flag hides most of these so the RC isn't cluttered) on a wiki which has joined after I've added it to Anime:Project:Bots/Wiki and run the bots. Just look here. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 14, 2007 @ 14:37 (UTC)