Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24770490-20140529170016/@comment-34326521-20140529202228

I have a few comments, but I'll save the important ones for last. Feel free to tell this to Derrick, if you see fit. I'd very much like to talk to him personally (in real-time; preferably face-to-face, as I'd like to get his autograph).

"It isn't riddled with spelling/grammar error or anything (...)"

Can anyone point out what's wrong with this sentence? I'll give you a hint: it's the "error". It should say "errors". No one I know of who's over the age of 18 and had a proper education (as I assume Derrick had, given that he's working on Omniverse's artwork) would make this mistake.

"I'm no writer (...)"

Obviously you're not a writer; you're an artist. However, I am a writer. I am also the best English speaker/speller out of everyone I've ever interacted with, including teachers and native speakers. I can speak with such a flawless accent that I've been mistaken for a native speaker before. In fact, one of my English teachers called English my "true first language". I'll explain why I haven't fixed the entire wiki at the end of this post.

"Also, those "trivia" section factoids feel like they miss the mark like half the time. Just because YOU think something in the show reminds you of something else in pop culture, does not mean that was the creator's intention. The trivia section looks like it's written as if the info comes right from the creators, and it doesn't. If you are going to put those opinions in, at least write them as opinions, not as "facts.""

The above is 100% true. Trivia sections are messy. I tried setting up a team to clean them up, but it fell through. I'll try again and see what happens.

"Sometimes it's really outrageous, the things that are considered to be "canon" or "jokes" over there."

Well, if someone wasn't making jokes half the time with things that sound serious, given the fact that Omniverse is incredibly childish...

"The whole Darkstar totem thing is still vaguely annoying. Whoever made the judgement call on that thing made a very foolish error. The counterpoint argument was groundless, and absolutely absurd."

FYI: I'm the one who made that judgement call (at first; other admins agreed). I explained the reasons for and against the stone figure being Darkstar and concluded that the evidence was, at best, ambiguous. That is not to say that I don't think the stone figure is Darkstar. I just think imposing what I think of the show on the wiki isn't proper wiki behavior. Otherwise, the Omniverse article would state "Omniverse is the worst incarnation of Ben 10 to date, mainly due to its childishness and lazy artwork". Although, to be fair, some things (aliens, for example) were introduced that almost make up for it.

"Everyone who works on the Ben 10 wiki should be looking at the Transformers wiki. TFWiki.net is widely considered to be one of the best fan wikis around."

I'll be frank: I don't care. I have been on that wiki, as I've heard this before. There's fan cruft and speculation, and... this. If that's the kind of articles Derrick wants on this wiki, he's going to be disappointed. Also, best fan wiki according to whom? You? The fans? Or the people who visit wikis and judge them based on more than just emotional/personal investment? I'm willing to bet it's not the last group.

"I hope this will be taken only for what it is:

My personal opinions and constructive criticisms that I am giving because I was asked for them."

Same here.

Now, on to the important stuff.

I haven't cleaned up the entire wiki for one simple reason: it's freaking huge. As I speak, we have 2,989 articles on the wiki. Assuming that's the total number of pages (which it isn't; there are over 5000 user pages), and assuming an average of 10,000 bytes per page (which, again, isn't true), we get a total of 29,890,000 bytes. Each character takes up approximately one byte. That means there are 29 million characters (give or take another million) on the wiki. If we assume there's five characters per word (which is probably true), that's 5,800,000 words (5.8 million). Let's assume 10% of that is templates (and, for the third time, this is not so; most templates don't take up that many characters, and, even if they did, not all pages have templates). That leaves us with 5,220,000 (5.2 million). I'm not sure Derrick realizes how much that is. To put it into perspective, the number of words in the Oxford English dictionary is... 414,800. That's less than 10% (one tenth) of the words on this very wiki. Now, try reading that dictionary ten times (and I mean really reading it), then tell me how long it took. Because that's only half of how long it would take to fix the wiki. The other half would be spent trying to fix it. I'm not saying it can't be done; just that we can't wave a magic wand and will it to happen. The wiki went largely unmonitored by a very long time. Not any more.