Talk:The Ultimate DOOM

Doom series content: what belongs here and what belongs on the Doom Wiki?
Hi folks. I've been hanging out at the Doom Wiki for several years, and I stopped by to see what was written here about the Doom series.

I propose that it is in all of our interests to avoid maintaining essentially the same articles in two or more places. (If you have ever tried to write a walkthrough, you know how much work it is!) As I understand it, when the original admins arrived from Egamia, it was decided to restrict game articles to brief descriptions if there was a Wiki site already dedicated to that game &mdash; though that principle is not recorded in the policies/guidelines here, so feel free to correct me.

Here are the articles I found: Obviously these changes are more extensive than average, which is why I'm posting here instead of doing some of it immediately. To avoid duplication of effort seems like common sense, however, and is consistent with Wiki's philosophy (e.g. the strict policy of not creating two sites about the same topic in the same language). So if no one replies to me for a week, I'll start.
 * Doom series &mdash;  No semblance of neutrality; needs to be rewritten from scratch.  Should discuss Doom's place in gaming history, the overall plotline, the differences between releases (commercial ports, third-party ports, modding scene), and licensed merchandise.
 * Doom &mdash;  Looks like an old version of the Wikipedia article.  This one began its life similarly, but is now much more polished (particularly to cut out the non-gaming filler required by Wikipedia).  A few paragraphs and an expanded "see also" section would suffice here.  If I revise this article, I'll leave the image galleries in place, but they clearly violate Wiki's terms of use.
 * Doom II, Final Doom, Doom 3, Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, Doom RPG &mdash;  Currently stubs at most.  Should include the same kind of material as Doom.
 * Doom engine, Doom WAD, Doom (film) &mdash;  Nothing here yet.  No reason to import the entire Doom Wiki or Wikipedia version; a short summary is fine.
 * Doom: Endgame, Doom: Hell On Earth, Doom: Infernal Sky, Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead &mdash;  Should be renamed by a staff/janitor as soon as possible, because they are inaccessible (due to the non-interwiki interwiki bug).  Doom Wiki does have an extensive article on these books.
 * Enemies in Doom, Enemies in Doom 3, Making of Doom &mdash;  Content from Wikipedia articles that have since been deleted.  Could be chopped to a fraction of their length, since all the information is already on the Doom Wiki (similar to Doom).
 * Doom 64, Doom 3 Engine &mdash;  I don't know a lot about these, but by the same logic they too should be checked for redundancy with Doom Wiki articles.
 * Template:Doom &mdash;  Omits Master Levels, third-party PWAD compilations, and one or two other things (e.g. Perdition's Gate).  Probably more trouble than it's worth to try to list all the shovelware releases, as mobygames does.

Respectfully submitted,   Ryan W 02:16, September 6, 2009 (UTC)


 * First off, I'm not sure if you've noticed but the strict policy of not creating two sites about the same topic isn't nearly as strict as it used to be, though I'm not sure if the principle you refer to is an informal arrangement or just lack of effort. There's no formal policy regarding this, though.
 * A formal policy would be especially difficult and annoying if one were a significant fraction of the way through documenting a game or series on Wiki Gaming only to have to remove most of it due to a wiki being created on the topic. That's not very applicable here but it's still worth noting.
 * Now on to my thoughts regarding the articles you mentioned:
 * Doom series &mdash; agreed.
 * Doom &mdash; Not sure what you're referring to as "non-gaming filler" here. I'd definitely want to see a sandbox version of any proposed revision to this article.
 * Doom II, Final Doom, Doom 3, Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, Doom RPG &mdash; Additions to these articles can only help, AFAICT, so I'll give the ok for these.
 * Doom engine, Doom WAD, Doom (film) &mdash; See Doom II et al.
 * Doom: Endgame, Doom: Hell On Earth, Doom: Infernal Sky, Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead &mdash; I suspect that doom: is stuck in the interwiki table. The articles themselves are stubs, though. (minor digression: InuYasha: is also problematic) In case you're wondering: these articles were created while Codex Gamicus was still hosted independently.
 * Enemies in Doom, Enemies in Doom 3, Making of Doom, Doom 64 &mdash; Making of Doom actually still exists. Again, I'm not too fond of the idea of removing content from here simply to make the Doom wiki look better by comparison.
 * Doom 3 Engine &mdash; Is a stub; could use expansion if anything.
 * Template:Doom &mdash; Not sure what is meant by "Master Levels". "Perdition's Gate" and other third-party PWADs can probably be left out though. I'm fine with Doom wiki being the place for that.
 * As for the "duplication of effort" issue, it would seem to me that it would be best to allow individual editors to decide for themselves which wiki(s) they wish to contribute to. If someone wishes to add Doom content here as well as at Doom wiki, that is their time to spend as they wish, is it not?
 * Still, this is just my personal opinion, and doesn't necessarily reflect that of anyone else. - Adan Aileron (talk) 15:58, September 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * Nothing in the above post is for the purpose of "making the Doom Wiki look better by comparison". If I sounded condescending to the people who have already put a lot of time into these articles, please accept my apologies as that was not the intent.  My idea is exactly the opposite &mdash; this site and the Doom Wiki are *not* in any kind of competition, and so I wonder if there is a way they can work together, rather than each being edited as though the other didn't exist.


 * Thank you for clarifying the policy point (at least in the sense that you hadn't heard about it, which is much stronger evidence than what I said). A blanket recommendation that every Wiki editor must monitor related articles on every other wiki seems unfair, I agree.  Let me give one more example, however...  The Doom Wiki has walkthroughs on it.  Some are stubs, as usual, but some look like this.  Is it reasonable to believe that Wiki Gaming editors would prefer to do all that work a second time, instead of just linking to the existing article?  Or the same logic could be applied to the single-game wikis; it was suggested years ago that Wiki's game walkthroughs be collected on one subdomain (as in commercial publishing, where magazine editors often write walkthroughs more comprehensibly than game developers do).  In either situation, no one's contributions would be "removed"; they would be merged, just like on Wikipedia.


 * The copyleft licenses allow forking anyway, so it's possible that my whole proposal is irrelevant: in the absence of a formal policy, any well-constructed article will eventually be copied to other relevant wikis.


 * I realize that these are not necessarily yes/no questions; are there any archived discussions I could read, maybe, to get a wider sample of opinions?   Ryan W 06:27, September 10, 2009 (UTC)


 * The "making the Doom Wiki look better by comparison" bit was purely inferential on my part. If your proposal was meant to be a two-way collaboration (eg. general gaming terms linked from Doom wiki to here), then I apologize for the misunderstanding and, by all means let me know and we can discuss how it would work.


 * While I agree in principle, in practice, if someone wishes to add content here, I'm not sure they should be prevented from doing so.


 * At any rate, it seems that duplication of content is pretty much inevitable. I've noticed that any game wiki almost always has an article about the company that published it, and possible the developer as well.


 * This is itself difficult for two reasons:
 * It actually is a rather substantial duplication of effort
 * Such articles almost never reach their full potential due to the wiki's scope limits


 * Is it reasonable to believe that Wiki Gaming editors would prefer to do all that work a second time? Who can say? I, for one, don't feel like duplicating the effort that went into that article but I can only speak for myself.


 * As for archived discussion, Project:Reorganize and subpages linked from it are the discussion pages from the time of the actual merge. - Adan Aileron (talk) 15:35, September 10, 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the link. To be clear, I am not interested in changing any policy, or forming one where none exists (those things are almost more trouble than they're worth even on sites where I know my way around).  I only want to find out what the current practice is, and IME on most Wiki sites the majority of such are unwritten.


 * Actually, I think I'm starting to agree with your view; right now some topics are covered in multiple articles, but that might represent far less effort than systematically weeding the duplicate coverage out and keeping it that way for years/decades.


 * Hm, the project and project talk spaces here are only ~150 articles total. Maybe I'll look at all of them.    Ryan W 02:52, September 12, 2009 (UTC)
 * I would say basic thing here such as List of enemies, list of weapons, games, books, films and protagonist. The detail stuff goes to doom wiki like for example a page about a specific enemy or minor characters-Cs california 08:01, September 12, 2009 (UTC)


 * (sort of replying to myself I guess) AFAICT the veteran contributors here are undecided on the question I asked.  Some want complete walkthroughs etc. for every game without reference to other wikis , some do not , and some are ambivalent .  Only 5-10 people seemed to participate in each discussion, actually, so maybe a lot of editors haven't even read them...


 * Wiki staff, unsurprisingly, favor a plan that leaves information divided among multiple sites, which creates more ad views as the end-user flips back and forth. In view of the forum thread linked above by Adan Aileron (thank you), however, that plan is implausible because new wikis are being created so rapidly that no human can keep track &mdash; even the MediaWiki bots have jacked it in.


 * All that said, I can understand the logic of KyleH and Cs california that the best solution is to find some middle ground. Wiki Gaming should contain more gaming information than Wikipedia, or else who will feel the need to visit?  On the other hand, if we demanded *all* information about *every* game, our breadth of coverage would suffer proportionately (volunteer time is limited after all).


 * I suppose I'll start with something uncontroversial, then, which is to create the redlinked articles in my original post. Which is probably what I should have done in the first place, but I didn't want to be one of those dumb newbies who just starts flatulating blocks of text without even trying to find out the site policies.  If someone takes issue with my approach on a specific article, we can hash it out on that article's talk page as normal.


 * Thank you for reading this far.  :>     Ryan W 22:22, September 24, 2009 (UTC)