WiKirby:Proposals/Archive-2023

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The following proposals have been successfully passed by WiKirby's community. For older proposals, check the box to the right:

Proposals

Reception sections on game pages: Yes or no? (January 2nd, 2022 - January 16th, 2022)

Time for the first proposal of 2022. Looking around the wiki, there are a handful of game articles which contain sections for "Reception", referring to how a game was perceived both critically from review sites and at large by the public, including sales figures where applicable. Having a section like this on a game page is traditional for places like Wikipedia, and is done on several other NIWA wikis. However, there has been a fair amount of reticence towards the idea of having these sections on WiKirby for a number of reasons, which mostly come down to personal preference, and that is part of the reason why most games do not have such sections. However, I think it's important for us as a community to decide one way or the other definitively, rather than maintaining this awkward halfway house approach.

So, here are the choices in short:
Vote Support if you are in favTemplate:Or of adding reception sections to every game page that warrants one, and expanding existing sections to be more complete.
Vote Oppose if you would rather WiKirby did not do reception sections at all, and remove the ones that currently exist from pages.

Vote now with your phones (or other computerized devices). Please do not vote by carrier pigeon, as that service is discontinued. --Samwell (talk) 11:37, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Support

#Honestly, after looking through our current reception sections within pages, I really don't want to just throw them away, because it's some pretty interesting stuff. I agree that going further with them regarding information could be tricky, but we'll be fine as long as we know where to put the right boundaries, imo. That said, I moreso want to see these sections on all appropriate game pages, rather than possibly extending them beyond reasonability.
It could be argued that reception is mostly unofficial, but I really can't follow that line of thought, since we cover similarly unofficial material on the wiki, like glitches and speedrunning, which are cases of something more or less unofficial eventually becoming enough of a considerable impact in the games and the community at large that they're worthy of the spotlight on wikis like this. I will admit that reception is still a bit of a different case for a few reasons, but hopefully that gets my point across.
Might change my vote once others put their two cents in, since I'm personally in a numb spot right now that might be spinning all of this around for me, but this is where I stand for now. -- Jellytost♡ (talk) 18:15, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I'm really only in opposition because of how difficult it is to quantify this kind of information in a standardized way. Sales is a good metric, and review scores are tricky but still fine, but beyond that how much can we really say that isn't personal interpretation? It's not a bad idea, just one that would be hard to keep consistent across the wiki, and it just doesn't give that much to users coming to the wiki.LeoUnlimited (talk) 14:12, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
2. These sections don't add much value to a seasoned fan reader, and whatever we already have can just be donated to Wikipedia. If they have anything interesting to say, for example how the game plays, just adapt it into the Gameplay section. When it comes to covering community-oriented content, no adequate site exists for glitches, while one does for speedrunning and another for unused content, rendering our weaker coverage redundant. Sales are a good figure, but I feel iffy to opinions, however reputable. Primary/official magazines like Nintendo Power will always praise/promote the games on another hand. For official information, people would look here. For how the game fares, people would look into review sites. ⁠–⁠Wiz (talk · edits) 05:51, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
3. Okay. Thanks to those who gave their opinions and gave me a clearer insight on this whole thing. Apologies if what I said before made absolutely no sense. I forgot to consider just how vague and subjective reception in general can be, even on so called "professional" sites, making it considerably difficult to settle on a proper way of doing things overall. I can generally see now what the problem with these sections are, and would think the best way to "settle things" would be to retire this reception concept. Scattering any solid information throughout the article(s) sounds just fine. -- Jellytost♡ (talk) 17:47, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
4. After thinking about this for a couple days, I've ultimately decided to go against it. While I don't have any strong feelings in either side, I am opposing because I don't feel they add much to articles and, as mentioned by others, are usually pretty subjective. While we could use bigger sites like Metacritic and only use reviews from there, reviews are still subjective. I think everyone else will agree with me that the internet reviews like that of Kirby games are often widely different from the fandom itself, praising the more experimental games like Canvas Curse and Epic Yarn while considering games important to the franchise like Return to Dream Land as okay games. I do want to mention however, I like listing of sales, so I would at least like to see sales listed, but I am also okay if they aren't. - Gigi (talk • edits) 11:49, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
5. I personally do not like game reviews, it can easily make people skip a game that has the potential to actually be a fun experience for them. Besides, I don't think it has its place on a wiki, but otherwise I don't have much more to add since the others already summarized my thoughts on this. Halcyan (talk) 17:48, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
6. Reception sections usually end up full of personal opinions of reviewers and wiki editors. As well as specifically in the case of this wiki, most Kirby games are generally regarded/received the same way regardless of game by reviewers and general gaming community. In the end, I think subjective content does not really belong on a wiki.SaviroZenu (talk) 00:36, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Neutral

1. I personally think that a reception section would be a good thing, but they are also based (almost) entirely off unofficial material, so I could go either way. ---PinkYoshiFan 14:06, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
2. I don't want to delete what we currently have for reception sections, but personally public reception is a no-go. Review sites give one score and that stands, public reception often changes by a drastic amount over time and there's almost allways two sides at minimum, as the Sonic Community taught me. So if I was the being with unlimited infinite power around here, I'd only let reception from review sites be on the game pages and nothing else. Infinite Possibilities (talk) 23:25, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
3. I don't feel that these sections are something that this wiki should aim to do so much, as "WiKirby seeks to provide the most accurate, complete, and concise information about the Kirby series" (- WiKirby:About ) and I don't think that reception about video games are completely accurate, complete and/or concise.
   This doesn't mean that I am in complete opposition with them, because experience (and thus, reception) of games are essentially part of the games themselves, some inconveniences like not knowing about which sites are the most "professional" to take reception off can be solved "innerly" between editors by choosing some specific ones (like just building reception sections around just IGN, Nintendo Life and Polygon, to give an example; but also choosing some specific reviewers to evade polemic reviews like IGN's "7.8 too much water" about Pokémon ORAS and "5" about Star Fox 2) and that there are some points that couldn't be mentioned in article pages, like Star Allies' main Story Mode being perceived a lot as being ultra easy. Although I don't mean that I am in complete support either, as nor me nor every reader gets into WiKirby to see specifically the reception about the games, and choosing which specific reviewers opinion would be used to build said sections would be a chaos, so I am fine either way.
   In any case, I don't think that having some game pages with reception sections and other without them (as it is right now) is good; either all of them have reception sections, or nor of them has them, so I am against leaving the receptions that we have while prohibiting any new ones, if "Oppose" wins.
   Lastly, I do am in favor of including completely objective information like sales numbers (which could be included either at the end of the opening paragraph or in the game's infobox), and "whether the game meets some other objective(s) set out by the producer(s)" as Samwell mentioned. -Kirbeat (talk) 19:46, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

So, naturally, I cannot vote on my own proposal. However, I would like to give my own thoughts on things relating to it. Some have made the case that the voting choices lain out here are too all-encompassing, and that a middle ground solution where we only consider reception from dedicated professional review sites be considered. This sounds fine on paper, but I would like to point out that there have been several instances of so-called professional review sites (IGN being the perennial punching bag example) giving reduced scores for games based on things generally agreed to be silly or unimportant. As it turns out, it's not actually possible to objectively evaluate a game's quality. The closest you can get, I suspect, is to judge how well the game sells, whether or not it has value to the consumer (in whatever form that value takes), or whether the game meets some other objective(s) set out by the producer(s).

Because of this subjectivity, it is my opinion that leaving the reception section in a situation where only "professional" review sites are considered would be creating another awkward halfway house situation, where it could then be further debated what does and does not qualify as "professional". That's why I think it's preferable to either have reception sections that include things like user aggregate data and overall public perception, or to just decide that WiKirby does not have an obligation to cover this aspect of games at all. Considering the potential difficulties that would come with verifying such information, I personally lean toward us not doing reception sections. --Samwell (talk) 17:25, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Where in the policies does this proposal belong? WiKirby:General content policy? ⁠–⁠Wiz (talk · edits) 20:04, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

That would probably be the best place to put it. I was initially thinking about putting a note on it in the layout policy, but that page generally does not talk about what shouldn't be in articles. --Samwell (talk) 20:11, 15 January 2022 (UTC)