User talk:Mitaphane

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Archives Current 2006 2004-2005

Contents 1 GGA 2 CVG Deletions 3 Start-class lists. 4 Comments concerning wikipedia entry for TPG League 5 Turok 2 review 6 Victorious Boxers 7 System Shock

[edit] GGA

Somehow GGA was nominated for WPCVG collaboration of the week. Issues

• 49 1999 January
• 53 1999 May

Seem to cover the game if you find time to scan them. I can use a slew of sources from MNSG, so this FA will be a walk in the park. --Zeality 08:03, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Here and here. Unfortunately, they aren't quite as meaty as the last offerings from NextGen. The preview was in their "Big In Japan" section which is more or less blurbs about significant events or games in Japanese gamer culture. —Mitaphane _talk 04:45, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a bunch. --Zeality 04:39, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] CVG Deletions

Please don't "prune" the closed section of the CVG deletions without also adding the deletions you remove to the Archive. Thank you! --PresN 18:27, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, no problem. I didn't know an archive existed. I'll do that. —Mitaphane _talk 01:19, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Start-class lists.

First off, thanks for doing the rather thankless task of assessing articles. A minor comment, but figured it was worth a mention. I noticed this due to watching List of Suikoden III characters, which you recently ranked along with other pages. I don't think I can agree with ranking that page, or some other such lists like as "start class." According to the assessment guidelines, Start class means that the article "provides a moderate amount of information, but many readers will need to find additional sources of information. The article clearly needs to be expanded." The problem is that if anything, some of the articles, especially the list articles, might need pruning if anything, not expansion. Take Talk:Ages of Myst V: End of Ages, for example- I'm not at all familiar with the topic, and it has a cleanup tag, but it seems reasonably "complete" and mainly needs copyediting and formatting. According to the guidelines, "roughly complete" but "needs work" would be B-class, not Start class. (And if I may so myself, I think that the Suiko III list is pretty good as it stands and doesn't even really need much work.)

I don't put too much worry in article assessments; this isn't a pride thing. I just don't want casual browsers of Wikipedia to get the impression that the article has barely begun and that they need to add lots more content, when in fact anything that's been left out has probably been left out for a reason. This goes for other articles, too. SnowFire 23:40, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

If you think the article is B-class feel free to change it. I don't have much time to go into details when assessing articles. The barrier between Start and B classes are the most ambiguous as I see it. The article is through; however there was one thing that prevented me from assessing it to B class, reference sources. I try to look for at least one outside, or in game, reference before I give an article a B-class, especially when comes to articles about fictional characters as they are rife with fan speculation and interpretation. See the FF VII (an its related character article) for good ways to do referencing for fictional character recaps. —Mitaphane _?|! 03:16, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Eh. I'd feel odd changing it; I'm a little bit too close to the article, having basically written most of the content and rewritten/edited the merged content. Also, I'm not a member of the CVG project. As for adding references, I dunno- the game itself is the reference, and as long as the events are hewed to pretty closely (that is, no seeming-OR or synthesis that isn't well-cited), I don't see the problem. I'd trust Romeo & Juliet itself more for sourceing than the Cliffs Notes on it.

As for the general case... I don't think references are a good tool to separate B-class and Start articles. The assessment guidelines say concerning a B-class article that "Nonetheless, it has significant gaps or missing elements or references, needs substantial editing for English language usage and/or clarity, balance of content, or contains other policy problems such as copyright, Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) or No Original Research (NOR). With NPOV a well written B-class may correspond to the "Wikipedia 0.5" or "usable" standard." (Template:Grading scheme) It seems to me at least that basically good articles that need references are clearly B-class- or for that matter, bad articles that are still reasonably complete. B-class seems the general umbrella for most of Wikipedia, in other words. I'd only assign Start class myself to articles that are obviously incomplete, where the problem is a paucity of information and not the verifiability of that information. To use Suikoden III again as an example, the article as of December I'd have classified as Start class- there's no gameplay section, nothing on the setting, nothing on the soundtrack or staff, a woefully short awards/critical reception section, and so on. It's more than a stub, but the article is clearly not complete nor close to comprehensive. SnowFire 04:13, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

To pull out one of the big policies, WP:V, "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth". Keeping that in mind, I assuming much of the article's information was added from people who are reciting things from memory after having played the game. While that has produced an article that is most likely complete and true to the game's story, there is no way to verify the information with out having played the video game. Without having references to lookup, this means the article's accuracy lies on the assumption that all the editors were correct in remembering the game's fictional details. To me, that is a serious issue with verifiability. It might be overly pedantic to site obvious things known in a game's story line, but doing so ensures a accurate article. For example, in the article UNATCO I read a lot of details that sounded true from what I remembered from the game. It wasn't until I went back to the game's text that I realized a lot of the details weren't ever mentioned it the game; they were editor's interpretation of the story. I ended up having to gut a lot of information in the article because there was no way to prove it outside my interpretation of the story.

Over at CVG, we have a assessment sub project. I kicked it over there to get a 3rd opinion about the article. If another editor agrees with your opinion he'll bump it up to B-class. —Mitaphane _?|! 20:45, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Comments concerning wikipedia entry for TPG League

Mitaphane,

First I hope I'm doing this right. These two links are reference for TPG League:

http://www.dayofdefeat.net/forums/showthread.php?s=8a7161a381d03482dd08cd3ea6d6939b&threadid=36685

We are listed on the offical game developer's forums as league right next to CAL, which has a wikipedia entry here.

http://forum.rscnet.org/forumdisplay.php?f=1096

RSC Forums are probably the largest race sim forums in the world and we are the only league with our own sub-catagory, that's not insignificant. The league has also been a past contributor to AutoSimSports news, which is a large monthly eZine devoted to sim racing, but I would have to find a past issue in a pdf to submit that to support the claim that we are "not insignificant".

So how do I dispute the deletion or otherwise fight city hall?

Sbopple 14:38, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Find that PDF and use that as a reference. Generally, blogs and website forums aren't usually considered reliable sources around here, but an online magazine would have more weight. It looks like the article has been deleted (it had the Prod tag on it for more than 5 days), but if you talk the admin who deleted it you might be able to get him to restore the article based on your more reliable sources. Good luck on writing a good article! —Mitaphane _?|! 21:19, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Turok 2 review

I noticed on the CVG magazine page, that you have issue 47, December 1998 for Next Generation Magazine that has a Turok 2: Seeds of Evil review. Could you take some excerpts from it? Stuff about the graphics, multiplayer, AI, etc. Thanks. Thunderbrand 17:43, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

How about the high-res scanned pages from the review instead: page1 & page2. If you don't feel like transcribing it, I can feed it through my OCR program but the results for even clear scans are sometimes shakey. —Mitaphane _?|! 01:26, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Heh, I guess that would be easier. Thanks! It should come in handy for the collab. Thunderbrand 03:35, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I can't access the pages now. I keep getting "The connection was reset" error message in Firefox, and a similar one in IE. Thunderbrand 22:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Fixed. A power outage around here knocked my server off line. Everything should be fine now. —Mitaphane _?|! 00:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry to bother you again, but only page 1 is showing up. Thunderbrand 17:17, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

No problem. The links are working for me. If you want I can just email the images to you that way you have them locally on your computer. Just send me an Special:Emailuser/Mitaphane email and I'll reply back to with the attached files. —Mitaphane _?|! 23:46, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the problem was with me, I mixed up the links a bit on the article's talk page. Its OK now. Thanks again. Thunderbrand 14:24, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Victorious Boxers

Hello, I just happened upon the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computer_and_video_games/Magazines by checking out the what links here on the Victorious Boxers page. First I'd like to say that I really appreciate the fact that there are users out there that are willing to do something like this. In fact I have a good stack of video game magazines that I think I'll go through to add onto the list to help out.

Anyway, back on subject, I was hoping I could bother you for information about the December 2001 issue of Next Generation. Specifically any information about Victorious Boxers. Coming across actual hardcopy references for a game from 2001 is kind of hard and I would really appreciate any information you'd be willing to provide.

One more question, I order to participate in the project, we simply add any unlisted magazines that we may have and the specific reviews/news within each issue? Or if there are duplicates, place our username in the contact cell? I'm asking because I have a couple years worth of PSM and a small stack of GameInformer and OPM here and there. (Guyinblack25 22:21, 21 February 2007 (UTC))

Here's the copy you requested.

As far as the other question goes, you're exactly right. See lead section at WP:CVG/M for any more details you don't already know. Your contribution would be greatly appreciated for the project. —Mitaphane _?|! 01:15, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much, another quick question if I could. Do you happen to know the page number of that article. I'll start going through what issues I have of what and catalog what information is in which issue. Thanks again. (Guyinblack25 04:20, 22 February 2007 (UTC))

Page 78 —Mitaphane _?|! 02:48, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] System Shock

Hi. I've been working on the System Shock article recently, but am having trouble finding sources for a future Reception section. Locating reviews for a 1994 game is a fairly impossible task, as I'm sure you can guess. However, I noticed that you listed a System Shock review as being in the February 1995 issue of Next Generation Magazine. Would it be possible to scan it, as you did with the other requests? If not, some excerpts about their general opinion of the game would be highly appreciated. Thanks. JimmyBlackwing 21:30, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Here's the review from page 95. Unfortunately, its not much more than a blurb. This was from issue 2 of the magazine. The first few issues seemed to take the approach of reviewing a lot of games in as short amount of time as possible. I hope this is able to help in some way. Good luck with your work on the article! —Mitaphane _?|! 23:36, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks! JimmyBlackwing 03:15, 18 March 2007 (UTC)