Zelda Wiki:Discussion Center

Satellaview Zelda pages
This has been bugging me for a little while now. Is there any particular reason the BS Zelda game pages are so devoid of content when compared to, say, the CD-i abominations? Inishie no Sekiban (Ancient Stone Tablets) in particular is very lacking in info. There are category listings for enemies that appear in the CD-i games but not the BS games. The BS Zeldas may be "uncanon" in the same vein as Crossbow Training or the Tingle games (although I'd argue that Inishie no Sekiban has no reason not to be considered canon plot-wise, but thats a whole debate I don't want to get into) but they WERE still made by Nintendo unlike the CD-i stuff. I would love to improve their pages, but its far, far too much work for me to do alone. I would really need help; it would be nice to see the effort that people are going into to categorise the stuff from those unplayable messes being put into the geniunely good and interesting BS games (no offense to the effort placed there, it is fascinating in a morbid way). I will work towards it as well, but I might need to get consensus on a few things.

To get started, I want to suggest that the BS The Legend of Zelda: The Ancient Stone Tablets be moved to BS The Legend of Zelda: Inishie no Sekiban or even possibly just BS Zelda no Densetsu: Inishie no Sekiban. The game has no official translation; fan translation should probably come second, with the possible and popular translations mentioned prominently, of course. Although if someone can find mention of these games in any NoA media that does name them, that would be great. I am quite well versed in the game being an ALttP obsessive so I am happy to get work done on it, but help would be appreciated. Fizzle 10:12, 2 January 2012 (EST)


 * Fizzle, there's nothing wrong in asking for help, but I hope you understand that everything at this wiki is done voluntarily. Everyone is free to contribute in whichever way they like, and should never ever feel obliged to do something they don't feel like doing, just because an area of the wiki is underdeveloped. Some subjects, regardless of how insignificant they may seem to you, simply get more attention than others. That being said, I'm not afraid to say that I myself know next to nothing about the BS games or the original Zelda classics, for that matter. I'm afraid I personally couldn't be of much help at all.


 * For the record, I agree with moving "BS The Legend of Zelda: The Ancient Stone Tablets" to "BS The Legend of Zelda: Inishie no Sekiban". 10:45, 2 January 2012 (EST)


 * Hey hey, I know that. Its not like I'm somehow forcing people to help me, that wasn't my intention. I was just asking for some help if anyone was willing to focus on it. I think you're misreading my distaste of the CD-i games (a natural reaction, surely!) as distaste at people adding that information in favour of others, which isn't the case. People can focus on what they like. I am sad that these games don't get much attention, however. Inishie no Sekiban is basically an early concept for Majora's Mask in a lot of ways, but not many people know that. They're fascinating and often forgotten, so it doesn't hurt to prompt people to check them out, surely.


 * And I was mainly just wanting to ask that naming question to be honest. Felt like a pretty big thing to go and change without any consensus.


 * Also, may I just add that I was genuinely wondering if it was wiki policy not to have categories for these games because they were Japan only or something like that. Fizzle 11:01, 2 January 2012 (EST)


 * We certainly do not have a wiki policy for not having categories for these games! :] I know it's a big task to work on adding content about a game without any help (I got to the exciting work of adding info about the cartoon and the original LoZ comics! :P), but really, there's nothing we can do to get other people to cooperate. :/ Believe it or not, adding info about the BS Zelda games was next on my to-do list (I saw some gameplay videos about that and they look pretty fun!), but since SS came along, that has taken priority instead.


 * I went ahead and moved the page since it never got an official translation. I'm sure no one will mind. :P Dany36 11:33, 2 January 2012 (EST)


 * Well, I personally look at it like this... Everyone knows about Skyward Sword now, there will be plenty of willing participents to update those pages, but those people who know about the BS Zeldas are much fewer in number, so it was sort of a "call to arms" of a sort I suppose. It's up to whoever to update whatever they want, of course! Everyone has their favourites and priorities (by the way, I really appreciate all the cartoon and comic information, I actually find that geniunely fascinating, I love all that stuff, I've been trying to add some manga information in a similar fashion). Was more of a suggestion than anything. SS work is a big deal right now, I know.
 * Thanks for moving the page! I think I'll focus on a characters page first. Fizzle 14:42, 2 January 2012 (EST)


 * For the record, I know you weren't trying to force anybody to do anything. My bad for sounding reproaching. I was just trying to answer your question: some areas of the wiki, such as BS Zelda, have weaker content because some things just don't get as much love than others, and no one wants to work on things they aren't interested in just because that part of the wiki's content sucks. Hopefully it won't be the case this time, but, like Dany said, sometimes you just end up being the only one who really cares about a particular subject. That's just the name of the game! 12:07, 2 January 2012 (EST)


 * In that case, people need to rearrange their priorities, ha! Having played both, I certainly recommend them being more worth the time than the CD-i games. Ah, I'm half kidding though. Like you say, people can care about what they care about, so I'm not trying to order people about, that's silly. I'll do what I can to work on the BS Zelda pages and hopefully it'll make more people interested the more they know. Very unique games. Fizzle 14:42, 2 January 2012 (EST)
 * Should Navi Trackers, the Tingle games, Mystical Seed of Courage, and other Japan-only games also have their titles moved to their Japanese pronunciations? Or did we get official translations for them somewhere?KrytenKoro 17:35, 10 January 2012 (EST)

Same-article coverage of same-named but different-entity subjects
Okay, currently this wiki has a general policy of merging the articles of subjects whose English names are the same, but not for Japanese. Personally, I have several qualms about this:
 * If the intention is to "merge things that are meant to have the same name", then this leaves out things which have different names only through translation quirks, like the Tower of the Gods and Tower of Spirits, which were given the same name by the Japanese authors who wrote the games, but were translated differently by the NoA localizers.
 * This leads to a lot of confusion on articles where we know for a fact that the entities are meant to be separate and unrelated, like the Hyrule of ST and all the other Hyrules, or the Temples of Time, or all the Links. While there is something to be said for merging the same-named character articles (as the Zelda authors love them some character archetypes), it's very messy to apply it to locations, where the most you can say is that both Temples of Time are "timey".

The method I've seen on wikis that are very succesful at comprehensively communicating all the knowledge of their subject franchise is to separate similarly-named-but-separate-entity topics by continuity/appearance. A good example of this is Transformers Wiki's coverage of Optimus Prime. Even then, they group all of the G1 versions of Optimus in one article, even when they are technically separate characters, but are the same "template" of being.

Minor characters and species of monsters, I think it's clean enough to merge them as done with Optimus Prime (G1) and as is already done on this wiki. There's no seriously conflicting backstory to each character.

Link and Zelda...as much as they portray a static archetype, they almost always have detailed backstories and plot that generate articles large enough that each version of the character could safely stand on their own. Or, you can keep the current version if you want.KrytenKoro 17:35, 10 January 2012 (EST)
 * I will cover qualm # 2 because it's the most delicate aspect. I wouldn't mind a separate article for ST Hyrule, I'm actually indifferent about it. But I've seen that some people incessantly makes analogies and the like as evidence to split or merge something. That's not how it works. The most ideal approach is to use common sense and discuss things case-by-case, it all depends on the subject of the article and its coverage. Take Fado as an example. There is an article about Fado from OOT, an article about Fado from TWW, and an article about Fado from TP. Yet we have different articles about Link, Zelda and Ganon. I know consistency is good and all that, but we can't take it to the extremes, since not all articles can be approached from the same perspective.
 * As for point one, the Japanese/English thing is a policy we have had since the inception of the wiki. I know some people want to merge Palace of Darkness with Temple of Darkness, or Tower of the Gods with Tower of Spirits. Problem, is, not all of us have played the Japanese version of the games, they're associated with the names given in the software aimed towards North America. Nowadays, in fact, Nintendo and several other companies localize the games in not only English, but also Spanish and French, and expectantly those language versions will have their own names for objects, places and characters as well. The Names template allows us to include those names and even translate them, but when it comes to the core content of the articles, as well as their titles, we must abide to the English version since this wiki's language is English, and therefore the names we must use are the ones provided by the English versions of the games. As flawed and schizophrenic as the North American canon is, it's unfortunately a law dictated by the wiki's canon policy, and therefore that's the canon we must abide. The Japanese canon can be helpful, however, when there is no official English naming about a subject, as would be the case of the enemies seen in the NES games, or Hyrule Historia.-- 22:08, 10 January 2012 (EST)
 * My point with qualm one is that the author intention is that these objects should have the same name. Personally, I would prefer split articles for all entities who we know to be distinct, but that's not how this wiki works, so I roll with it. However, merging by English name only (a second-degree version of the work) makes little sense when we end up having Eastern Temple and Eastern Palace kept separate, solely due to arbitrary limitations placed on the translators at the time. "English canon" and all that, but we still take the time to pave over obvious and fatal translation failures like the Oocca creating the Hylians.
 * Also, I do not think that asking to merge articles based on their Japanese name (while still using the English names for how we refer to things) is at all equatable to asking for merges based on the Spanish or French names. Japanese is the language that the games were authored in. Spanish, French, and even English, were not. In my mind, the common sense method would be to, when the authors intended two subjects to have the same name, at least treat the two subjects like they are meant to have the same name; even if we actually refer to them with separate names, or end up having separate articles for them. Especially since it is an indisputable fact that the translations for the early games were in many places, artificially false, it does somewhat of a disservice to the material to treat those translations as the "true and proper way the material was meant to be received and interpreted".
 * As an example of how I've dealt with this elsewhere, I work on the Digimon Wiki. Although the wiki is dub-based, and treats the dub canon and dub names as the primary source, we readily admit that the various attempts at localizing the material have been atrociously inconsistent, and that in order for a reader to recognize any sense of consistency, we have to group topics by what the author intended, even if we communicate all the info using dub terms. So, when a creature that has five different dubbed names but only one intended name appears, we give it just one article.
 * Long story short: That the wiki's language is English is not a good justification for ignoring author intention and instead binding ourselves to a source that has proven itself still able in this late period to make startling errors that lead to impassible contradictions, and was for a few titles intentionally false.KrytenKoro 10:16, 11 January 2012 (EST)