Headscratchers cleanup?

Do we need one?

We've discussed it before (primarily on ATT) and people have a bunch of different opinions into how necessary and helpful it'd be, so I thought I should make an official thread to discuss the potential need for it.

My case into why it might be useful is that Headscratchers pages are very much overlooked. They're nattery, complainy, debate-filled pages full of tropers arguing with and sniping at each other, and that's not getting into things like repeated questions, grammatical issues, and absurdly nitpicky threads that never answer the actual question. While I can see a potential for things to go too far and start cutting legit questions/answers or genuinely interesting discussions, I think something needs to be done here just to make them more useful for readers.

The pages that convinced me to ask about it officially was the Harry Potter pages. They check every box I mentioned: Questions are repeated, a lot of the questions/answers are needlessly bashy whether toward the work or other tropers, the debates go on for way too long and distract from the actual questions, there's a lot of grammar issues, and a lot of things seem like a holdover from IJBM, including the fact that a lot of the questions are minor nitpicks about the setting and characters and lore, rather than actual questions.

I feel like something should be done to clean these pages up, they're still part of the wiki after all and shouldn't just be treated like a free-for-all "debate" zone.

I agree that something should be done, though I think we should consider alternative measures for enforcing a better standard first. The Headscratchers page has a pretty good guide for what to add/not add, maybe adding it to other pages (especially popular ones, though maybe commented out) would help. At the very least, I think we should note on the Headscratchers page that while these entries involve discussion and are not part of the usual "written by one person rule", they are part of the wiki for readers, so style and grammar should be followed, and you are perfectly fine with editing other people's entries if necessary. The part about bashing is already mentioned on Headscratchers, so maybe it's needs to be more emphasised if we do add text to pages since it's not on Headscratchers.Video Games for instance.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 6th 2020 at 8:15:42 PM

It's less about making newer Headscratchers pages better and more about cleaning up the older ones that were written years ago when things were far less organized in general. The rest of the wiki is being polished to meet modern standards, and I'm not concerned as much over whether or not newer Headscractchers pages are up to snuff; I'm concerned over the ones that already exit.

Yeah, a lot of older HS pages are filled with sniping or unhelpful answers. I think those can be safely removed and some discussions go for too long or are unhelpful.

I also think that if a question is already answered with a canonical answer, there's not much reason to add on to it.

The Headscratchers will look a lot better if it were part of the forums but that is neither here nor there.

If we do clean stuff up, what would we do with entries that refer to Default Answer? (Yes, that page exists. Obscure, I know.)

I think those lean on being unhelpful at best so I wouldn't mind seeing them be discouraged

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 6th 2020 at 12:03:32 PM

Yeah, "because the plot says so" is quite possibly the least helpful answer that you could give.

Anyway, I'm in favor of cleaning up these pages, but I'm guessing that it's such a massive project that it would be a "clean up the pages when you see them" type of cleanup like the Laconic/ thread in long-term projects.

Absolutely, it'd be an endless project that just kinda requires people be on the lookout for issues when they appear, rather than a quick purge. Because there's legit questions and answers that shouldn't be messed with and we'd need to definitely discuss all major changes to these pages.

Keep in mind that Headscratchers pages are by design supposed to be Questions&Answers pages. We have periodically discussed moving them to a discussion page like format but that would require technical work.

Right; my concern is things like endless, rude, unrelated debates or repeated questions. Those drag the page's quality down.

I think how we should go about this thread is that we should bring up a page to discuss before making any cuts.^Disclaimer This may not necessarily apply to cuts that were made before this thread started, if only so I don't feel like I did something wrong for discreetly cutting two complaints that weren't phrased as questions nor led to useful discussion on Headscratchers.Lucky Star which I assume were left over from the days of It Just Bugs Me.

The more I read the Harry Potters pages, the worse they get. Who's up for the thread?

...Screw it, I'm making it.