Forum:Marching Onward
Alright. Here, I will finally reveal just what is going on with the Pikmin Fanon in terms of the most recent announcement revealing that things are being moved around and updated and whatnot. So, here goes, I'm going to explain myself and my plans. It is very late (or, early, since it's 5 AM at the time of writing this novel) where I live, so if I become sloppy in my writing, just know that that is the reason why. And of course, since I tack on extra ideas onto something after I post it, I'll probably be doing that here too.
Basically, as dead as this site can be, I want everything in it to be organized and consistent so future generations can enjoy a user-friendly, informational, easy-to-navigate environment. It's why I've been so incessantly editing articles and moving images to give them better titles. It's why I've been editing and practically slathering myself over it all. I'll list my projects down below:
Enemies and vegetation and other content
Definitely the biggest focus of the Pikmin Fanon. There are more enemy articles than anything on the wiki, I would think. And many of them are uncategorized or categorized incorrectly. Yes, any enemy page that lacks an enemy icon, placeholder or not, in its infobox is stuck in Category:Enemies until I get around to them, but some of them aren't even enemies. Some are vegetation instead, and other pages, such as user pages, don't even belong there. And then there are enemy articles that don't even have an infobox, that are hidden completely unless you manage to reach it by clicking "random page". They are orphaned because nothing links to them and they link to nothing. I want to fix that so badly.
And categorization isn't even the main issue. It's also rewriting poorly-written articles to make them coherent and fun to read. And by "fun to read", I mean rebalancing really overpowered enemies, like the Virus Dweevil, and bosses, like the Rainbow Goolix and the two other versions of it. In my honest opinion, reading about enemies and bosses that can use every single hazard at once whenever they want and can kill the player's Pikmin in an instant with no chance of saving them is boring and I dislike it. Some articles are so poorly written that you can barely understand what the enemy does or what it looks like, should its appearance is even described.
One huge tool that helps greatly when organizing enemy articles is to take a gander at all what is contained in Category:Enemies by hazard and Category:Enemies by characteristics. I read the article, learn what the enemy can do, how it attacks, and how it looks, and then look at what is in those two categories. Then, at the bottom of the page, I input in alphabetical order (with some exceptions) what categories that enemy fits into. If it's a boss, I put [[Category:Bosses]] first, then what else it fits into. Note that [[Category:Final bosses]] takes priority over the bosses category. If the enemy has an "enemies by game" category at the bottom where the categories belong, I place those above the "enemies by characteristics/hazard" categories. An example would be:
*Bosses *Pikmin: Wide World bosses *Airborne enemies *Eating enemies *Stabbing enemies
Vegetation articles also need to be worked on and fixed up and organized. So do many family pages, treasure pages, area pages, and cave pages, other pages full of other stuff. There's probably even more that I'm forgetting about. They all have to be looked at, edited and proofread, organized, and looked after to ensure they are quality articles and stay quality articles. Again, it's why I've so persistently edited and renamed and dipped my hands into everything everyone has been doing lately, because I want everything to be excellent. Not saying you all don't make excellent content, I just want to give your creations my stamp of approval.
In reality, I'm just so happy that this place has some active people for the first time in forever, and you all are creating such wonderful ideas! Keep it up!
Images and other files
Ever take a gander at Special:UncategorizedFiles? There's a ton in there. I've tackled quite a number of the things in there, and there's maybe... I forget how many left. Under a thousand, I think. Categorizing files (I say files because there's more than just pictures in there; there are sound files and other things too) is somewhat easier than organizing and categorizing content articles but it can get tiring and boring, which is why I moved on from it for the time being just like I did with the enemy articles. All that has to be done with them is to look at them and decide which category they would best fit into. If they're unused and are low-quality or probably not of any merit, I delete them. If I see a future for that file, I keep it, categorize it, and move onto the next file. That being said, a small description to accompany a file is always appreciated, and if you look at images (such as the ones in Category:Enemy images, for example) you'll see I've written a small description of what the picture shows. Of course, that description varies between images, even more so if it depicts a canonical enemy. There are some things that have different appearances between games, which is why some files have a prefix such as "P2", "P3", or "PUD" because it signifies how that thing appears in that specific game.
There's also the whole issue of broken links, which, admittedly, I haven't been very tempted to fix for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is that, if an article I need to fix broken image links on has to do with Pikmin: Wide World, I'd rather just do everything on that page in one fell swoop rather than fixing everything and then coming back later. It seems more efficient to me, but it takes longer, which is quite contradictory. Icons, be them for enemies, treasures, or whatnot, are also very important.
There's probably more to this section but I want to move onto the next before I forget. Maybe not, I don't know.
Templates
Templates are a sort of minor issue that I've started exploring. A number of them are outdated (such as Template:Infobox treasure, which I updated within the last twenty-four hours) or set up poorly (like Template:Infobox area or especially Template:Infobox cave), and that needs to be fixed so future generations can write all they want without the worry of having to update those things themselves. There are also lesser templates, like infoboxes, that need to be fixed up and made consistent and without any mistakes; some user pages are categorized into Category:Userboxes because somebody didn't put the category between <noinclude> and </noinclude>! Ugh.
Categories
Yes, there are even categories that need to be looked at, edited, and categorized! Not much to say here, since you get the idea. At least, I hope you do.
So anyway, yes those are my plans for this site. At least, the ones I remembered. Hopefully, I elaborated my plans well enough. I just want to see this place be perfected, as difficult and drawn-out as that will be. But there will be such triumph upon the completion of this gargantuan task! Much like in the Pikmin games, I can't go it alone, as much as I want to. We need to work as a team to accomplish this goal. I would appreciate comments, suggestions, criticisms, anything.
