User:Lord Grammaticus/Rewriters' Log

The following is a list of pages that I aim to fix when I can find the time, along with pages that I already HAVE fixed, as well as relevant commentary on their (mostly personal) significance and blathering thereof. Yes, I know that the MarioWiki has a maintenance section specifically for that, and while I may naturally pull from that list from time to time, realistically not all my targets will be on said list. If you're reading and feel like helping, then go for it!

To Do

:Always be sure to check the watchlist and SMW:MAINTENANCE tab now and then.

• Resolve the Kuribo conundrum.
• Figure out the deal with the Big Hit.
• Rewrite the following with priority:
  • Make Melon more tonally consistent.
  • Make Magon's massive muddling more manageable.
  • Unjunk Space Junk Galaxy.
  • Ask about an alternative approach to Ankiron and its apparent apathy.
  • Look over Mario Party 8 and see what's missing.
  • Glitz up the Glitz Pit and bring the battles up to peak fighting condition.
• Other rewrites:
  • Beanstar
  • Cobalt Star

Notable Rewrites

All pages are listed in order from earliest 'start' date to latest, to the best of my knowledge. The numbers given are the overall amount of bytes added or removed specifically by me between the pre-rewrite reversions and the one I 'finished' the rewrite on. Links are included where possible and most convenient.

• Graffiti (+476) – Probably my earliest attempt at a rewrite, and while it's undergone some significant overhauls since then including contributions by Phoenix (talk) and LinkTheLefty (talk), I think it was pretty significantly improved by the standard of a 2011 MarioWiki article. It'd helped that at the time, the Gamecube was the one console I'd spent the most time on, which naturally led me to focus on articles from the Mario games I had played at the time - that pattern would work its way into my later editing habits.

• Boom Boom (-1,122) – My next big rewrite, done both because I was following in the footsteps of one Chester Alan Arthur (talk) and because the cruft (which is a nifty term to know - thank you Walkazo (talk), blessed be your memory) was significantly bad to the point that I couldn't tolerate it. Even with my then-somewhat-questionable writing ability, it helped that the page was marked 'Under Construction', which probably acted as a further motivator.

• World 8-3 (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) (-641) – This was another major "defluffing", specifically to remove details about the Star Coins that had been duplicated and transplanted into the layout section for the apparent purpose of padding out the article. As I noted, the resulting description was a bit flat and textbook-like, in addition to not quite being up to my personal standard, but I figured this was preferable to an artificially lengthened walkthrough piece.

• Koopa Troopa Cave (-408) – Another article that needed de-"walkthroughizing", though unlike the previous applicable examples, I hadn't played the game in question, making it a bit tougher than usual.
  • While there isn't much to note about the page otherwise, articles like these do provide me with a chance to practice my summarizing abilities and test how efficiently I can present a subject. Part of why I engage in such rewrites, as well as lengthy personal commentary like this, is because as poorly designed as our educational system is for real life preparation, my schools instilled in me a love of writing that I've yet to let go of, and MarioWiki is an outlet for that expression... after a fashion.

• Shadow Queen (-1,336) – [VIOLENT AND PROLONGED RETCHING]
  • ...this is a long story. Suffice it to say that mine was only one part (albeit a part sadly one byte short of a "legendary" 1337 get) of a larger concentrated effort to pare down a massively overwrought piece of RPG article writing. Said article ran both epic and grimdark tropes to their logical conclusion, and at its worst was literally twice its current size!!! Though my contributions in particular were long after that particular Great Wall was demolished and cut in half, there was still much to be done. As such, many thanks are in order to the various wiki members involved in this 'collaboration', that we can hopefully set an example and avoid creating such monstrosities in the future.
  • As was discovered in the writing of this segment, this was perhaps my first "major encounter", or at least the most significant one, with the potential of how poorly written an article on an RPG subject could be - and of course, it would not be the last.

• World 1-1 (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) (-936) – Yet another treatment of Walkthrough Syndrome, applied to yet another New Super Mario Bros. Wii game. It was one of my primary games at the time, so it figures that I'd put significant effort into some of its articles during that time period.
  • Personal projects like these are as much journals as they are anything else - there has to be a purpose to the self-indulgence after all. If nothing else, they can unearth some memories I'd inadvertently associated with moments like these. It's oddly therapeutic in a way.

• Garlic bottle (-761) – It's a goddamn garlic bottle, how much mileage can you get!? The article itself seemed to struggle for an answer and had to "settle" for explaining a very basic gameplay mechanic to justify the padding. The amount of cruft I'd removed in that one edit was roughly a third of the article's size right there. And then Lefty went and doubled its size after - and ironically, the majority of it was just adding proper references and formatting, because that's how small the article was once it was trimmed. At that point, you sorta understand the temptation.

• Propeller Mushroom (-366) – The first rewrite I did after coming back from that one 3-year hiatus. It was a simple case of "thoroughly overexplained item" that I felt a need to cut down to a more tolerable size, using what I remembered from playing the games. I think my general editing habits picked up again from there and never quite stopped.

• Treadmill Grill (-563) – Inflated Mario Party minigame articles tend to occur as well, and there's a general tendency towards noting every possible detail and animation used during said minigame... even when all the animations are pretty standard stuff. I figured I'd done well enough initially, but when I looked it over a couple of months later while searching for stuff to add to this section, I ended up not liking the result and decided to give it a second go. I'll probably have to do the same to the rest of the minigame articles before long, of course.

• Miss Endless (-573) – This was a page highlighted by Power Flotzo (talk), one of the good ol' folks at The 'Shroom, and as I happened to be already in the middle of a correcting tear, I decided "why the hell not" and gladly obliged. This was among one of the relatively quicker ones for me to knock out - if anything, its crime was being overwritten, containing an overstuffed paragraph of text for what the article readily admitted to be a minor character. I mowed most of that fluff down into three smaller and easier-to-digest paragraphs, unpadded the trivia note, and then adjusted a bit for verb tense while adding a note about her name. I'm looking forward to taking on other spotlight articles in the future; in fact, I believe these two articles led me to undertake The Great Mario RPG Rewrite of 2019, the fruits of which are on display further below.

• Catch Card (-316) – An RPG article that overexplained its subject, which I generally made much more concise. Not much to be said there. As usual, I figured I could do one better after a long-overdue glance at the initial rewrite and tightened it up further, integrated the trivia, and adding headings while reordering the statements for better organization.

• Mass A-peel (-543), Fish Upon a Star (-652), Cardiators (-576), Candy (Mario Party 8) (-405), Twist and Route (-928) – Miscellaneous Mario Party cruft.

• List of implied organizations (-1,118) – There's a lot to be said about the goofiness articles like these tend to attract, but it's probably best to let an example straight from the source speak for itself.

• Kaoru (+1,481) – Now granted, the subject matter was pretty obscure - consider that it's a Japanese fire safety film that she appears in - but even by that standard the page as written was atrocious - and I do mean atrocious! With the tag having been applied in August of 2016(!!!), I decided it a 'good' idea to spend one of my later nights pulling the article into a much more tolerable state. I forgot what I referred to as a source during the rewrite, though I think most of it was the article on the video itself (which could still use a rewrite of its own, for those reading and interested). The actual writing segment of the process probably didn't take long, either - my problem is that I tend to go between wiki editing and about 4-5 other tasks at any given moment, as such is the working of my genuinely-diagnosed-autistic mind. Whatever the case, I was able to knock it out in a few hours. I'll probably come back to the video and the characters once I've somehow seen the film for myself (and her brother could still use a page of his own; as it stands after I got to it, Kaoru's article is pretty solid now, only requiring the usual minor touch-ups now and then. I think it was around here that I also began to take more "pride" in what I did than usual.
  • And for the record, I was the one responsible for adding that particular article to BJAODN, because boy was the writing a head-tilter!

• Neuron Jungle (-1,088) – Since when was MarioWiki a goddamn travel brochure?? The writing was grossly outdated in general, with serial subject/topic drift taking up half the text when it wasn't being overly descriptive of the same. It annoyed me so much I had to fix it, but unfortunately I never played the game. The best I could do after was tag it, and it's been sitting in the {{rewrite-expand}} corner ever since.

• Gamer (+1,920) – Featuring everyone's favorite spooky mom. I'd noticed a few errors when reading the article around the time I'd decided to start watching footage of the game and its WarioWare Gold update, and proceeded as usual... except that I'd keep coming back over time to spruce it up further and make sure I'd gotten it all right - and here we are now, nearly 2k bytes and a couple months later. The fact that it had gotten a second version helped about as much as how enthralled I was by the absurd lengths 5-Volt herself went to. Long after I initially wrote this entry, I eventually decided to watchlist and check the page on a more regular basis after looking back and noticing a bit of conditioning for interim edits was needed.

• Fearsome 5 (-1,185) – Hilariously cluttered RPG article, surprise surprise. This was another one I would come back and touch up, mainly because no one else has since I slapped the rewrite template on it, and it's still probably a fair bit lacking in detail, but I think it's adequate for now.

• Stage 4-8 (-798) – The usual Walkthrough Syndrome. I've never played this game, though I have played the first two MvDK games that're closely related to this - a fascinating spiel in and of itself, albeit ultimately unnecessary to cleaning up this article.

• Rock Mushroom (+1,001) – Short and unsection block of text that needed more detail and expansion, especially considering Galaxy had a whole world and a used-more-than-once bowling minigame dedicated to the powerup.

• Sand Cheep (+4,018) + Sharkbone (+3,302) – This was mostly the result of a Talk Page proposal that I took it upon myself to enact. These were always a neat pair of MLSS enemies to me and the idea of near-identical enemies whose forms you had to track is a bit underrated in my opinion.

• Puffer Cheep (+759) – Mostly clarification and dealing with naming stuff that I may have tracked or cross referenced from Cheep Cheep at some previous point, not sure.

• Stupid Bomb (+2,408) – It's an article about an old NCS comic – 'nuff said. While the articles about both it and the comic it appeared in could still use some help, fleshing it out using information from the latter article was a big step forward. I might try and finish that comic's article myself later on...

• Megabite (-570) – Another RPG article decrufting, mostly involving padding from the locations that it appeared in. Long after the fact, I eventually decided to walk this one back, albeit with more ideal formatting.

• Polterguy (+363) – I'd been responsible for one of the images on the page back when it was merged with Ghost Guy, so it makes sense that I'd come back to this sometime later. Naturally, this occurred during a prior poking through my history of contributions - another habit of mine. After coming back to it again for this page, I decided to bring it more up-to-date, later creating a gallery to repost the screenshot I'd taken. The page could use some more images from other games, so it works as a bit of convenient "future-proofing", too. :B

• Pagoda Peak (+579) – It's my favorite Mario Party board, and I found it again while looking through my history for this page. Given the nature of Mario Party releases, it seems like this board was relatively neglected in terms of edits compared to some others - I'll probably see if that's the case for the other boards in the game down the line. In any case, I was already there, figured "why not" and gave it a big ol' cleanup.

• List of Mario references in animated television (-5,093[!!!]) – The bar for what constitutes a reference in regards to this section is well below sea level. As per the list of implied organizations above, the details largely speaks for themselves.

• Roy Koopa (-688) – This began with another attempt at reconciling a personality section, though this one was more poorly presented than anything. The idea at first was to trim things down just a bit and format it properly, or at least not have it be such a big eff-off wall of text. Of course, while putting things together for this section a couple of months after the fact, I realized both that section and the Mario & Luigi one could stand to be improved significantly, and went for it. I could probably provide more details on the battles and maybe fix the abilities section as well, but I think what I've done so far will suffice. I'm also debating whether or not to include this in the next section... Decision made!

• Glacial Meltdown (-500), Photo Finish (-773) – Yet more minigame cruft. About half the gameplay text was dedicated to the winning animations, which struck me as making no real sense. I'm definitely gonna try to pare down other minigame articles in a similar manner.

• List of Mario references in publications (-569) – Honestly, this wasn't nearly as clogged as the other two listicles, and if anything might almost be an example for them to follow, hence its inclusion on this page.

• Candy ring (+1,970) – Inconsistently written, over-detailed in some areas and skimped on in others. Alexo and I ended up back-and-forthing on it, mostly because of my habit of checking follow-up edits made after mine rather than any agreement between us (though it worked out pretty well anyway).

• MarioWiki:BJAODN/Other (-1,560) – NOT EVEN THE BAD JOKES ARCHIVE IS SAVE FROM THE EVER WATCHING EYE OF alright it's basically just relocating some entries to the Characters section. :B

The Great Mario RPG Rewrite of 2019 2020

See the above-linked page for details. I started this back in September of 2019, but as always, life events and sporadic focus had my attention elsewhere, and so here we are. I try to save the edits that were most relevant to the goal of the project here, which eventually led me to add an "Honorable Mentions" section for edits that almost made this list, but not quite.

All pages are listed in order from earliest 'start' date to latest, to the best of blah blah blah you get the idea.

• Shrooba Diver (+291) – I t b e g i n s . This was the specific article with the edit summary I cited for most of what I noticed regarding RPG articles, and as you can guess, things eventually snowballed from there.

• Elder Shrooboid (-1,739) – Done a week before this project was made officially unofficial, it was one of the more prominent cases of inexpedient wording with regards to RPG subjects, though much of this was regarding the battle, which comprises the majority of the article. It's still receiving occasional touch-ups now and then; the Elder Shrooboid was one of those articles that tipped me off to the fact the M&L series liked its share of references to brotherly dynamics with certain characters (though it took a long while to actually note it in this specific article).

• Shroob (-392) – Another similarly prime candidate; though the bulk of the editing was spread out within the month leading up to me announcing this, and I'm still catching errors months after the fact, I'd easily consider it improved over previous versions of the page. As indicated in the section link, it was one of the bigger steps down the path that led me to pursue this project.

• Blizzard Midbus (+2,265) – Mostly just a case of correcting awkward phrasing and a certain lack of detail in some places, then organizing the material as I fleshed it out. I also went back and added the battle details for the remake after studying a few videos, which also made me miss how much fun in general the series is, especially to play and watch. I also became a bit more fond of Midbus, mostly as a result of my work on this and his main article.

• Koopa Paratroopa Trio (+1,210) – Correction and expansion on details was needed, and I delivered the best I could.

• Time Bob-omb (+1,053) – Rewritten and reorganized, just as the edit summary says, not much else to it.

• Chain Chawful (+866) – Block of text that needed sectioning and organizing. There seems to be a tendency to mixing the tells of attacks together for both Bowser and the Mario Bros., and approaches like that are incredibly inconvenient for anyone reading to find that specific info.

• Moustafa (-1,518) – Severe padding, though I wouldn't say it's a standard case of RPG Cruft Syndrome - rather, it was just poorly written, particularly in terms of the trivia section (which is a much more common 'needs work' symptom and exhibited many of those usual traits).

Honorable mentions

• Fearsome 5 - Though I tackled this long before considering the project, it had all the hallmarks of the average target for the Great RPG Rewrite - major cruft in general, excessive purple prose, and disproportionate amounts of focus on a set of minor characters that played a part in a single chapter.
• Yo Bro - Got me interested in poking around with regards to version-specific drops and non-overworld enemies.
• Roy Koopa - Ended up focusing on the M&L section in particular as a consequence of general improvements.
• Candy ring - Same as Roy above; as stated earlier, unlike most RPG-related articles/sections this one wasn't detailed enough.

Other Notes

Stuff I considered notable enough to mention, but don't qualify as rewrites and won't fit anywhere above.

'Minor' Major Edits

1. Super Paper Mario: Removed just under 700 bytes... by trimming down a single trivia point. While I don't look down on the people who add them, it's occasionally amusing how amazingly specific some wikis' trivia points can get. #ThanksMarioWiki
2. Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The plot section was a monster in and of itself, one that rivaled the Shadow Queen at its worst. Yes, the goddamn plot section alone - the entire article itself dwarfs all but the most high-traffic of pages, though somehow there aren't any fragments from it archived in BJAODN... yet. All that juicy context aside... even compared to the Shadow Queen deal a couple of days prior, I didn't actually get to do much of anything.
   
   Yeah, despite having owned and played the game, most of my particular involvement with the Brawl article was primarily concerned with its featured status, the removal thereof, and the "drama" that surrounded it. I will not comment on said drama or the people involved. This is not merely for the sake of brevity, but also because there's no point ruminating over something that happened 5 years back in such a manner, especially since I bear no ill will towards any of the "opposing" parties, and all those involved - including me - have likely changed (hopefully) for the better.
   
   I will settle for summarizing events like these as an overall testament to why wikis are, and should always strive to be, a collaborative effort.