Cleaning up PSA/Nightmare Fuel pages

Hi,

I've been coming on this site for years now, mainly as a reader, but I do make rare edits if something sticks out. Some of my favourite pages for about a decade now have been those related to public service announcements (PS As) and scary commercials. I'm deeply invested in the subject and over the past year have embarked on my own commercial archive, in addition to helming many searches for lost ads with folks from the Lost Media community.

There's a few things I've come to realise over the years which make browsing these pages a frustrating, and sometimes confusing, experience:

• There's a lot of pages. We've got the main Public Service Announcements page, which in turn has the expected subpages like Tearjerker and Nightmare Fuel. Where it starts to get confusing is that the Nightmare Fuel page has its own subpages for health and safety respectively. And then there's the Scare Em Straight page for Advertising, which also lists a large number of PS As. I can't help thinking that there's a better way around this, perhaps involving a merger of pages (though I'm not sure how feasible this is). Based on edit/discussion logs it seems like there have been some major changes to the page formats in the past, but that leads me to...
• Outdated information - a lot of the entries haven't changed since I started browsing the wiki in 2011/2012. There's also many links which are dead outright, or links to videos which haven't been available for years.
• General quality issues - this tends to vary wildly, and some of the worst examples show just how far back these entries go. On a few occasions I've changed extremely hyperbolic information, such as one entry claiming that charred corpses appear in the George and Betty PIF. In the case of unidentified PS As, many entries simply state a basic description and do not specify the date or location of airing. Whilst I understand this is not the wiki's main purpose, a lot of enthusiasts rely on these pages for research and it's incredibly frustrating to see entries over a decade old using phrases such as "aired recently".

These pages are added to fairly regularly, but many of the older entries are still in need of attention. Like I said before, these pages are a go-to resource for people interested in PS As (even those who aren't wiki regulars) and it doesn't always make for pleasant browsing.

I'd like to progressively bring these pages up to date, replacing (or adding) links where necessary and maybe getting rid of some vacuous entries entirely. This may not seem like a big deal, though I'm not entirely sure what the general consensus is on widespread editing so I'd rather get opinions from regular wiki editors/contributors first.

I think that others in the commercial/PSA archiving community would be interested in helping out. Whilst I don't think anyone expects these pages to be a comprehensive resource (there's no way anyone can ever document the thousands of PS As ever made), I think these pages can and should be a lot better.

Thanks, Auto

Edited by Automaton120 on Dec 28th 2021 at 9:31:22 AM

We have a Nightmare Fuel cleanup already and are tackling PSA stuff there. Join us.

Great, thanks so much! I'll give that a look and hopefully contribute.