Forum:Our Credibility (Or Lack Thereof)

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AS IF! The world is garbage! CRUNCH! Okay, look. During the recent tumult over the term "Somebody", JC did post a link to one rather interesting forum: this. Our PR appearance is definitely poor. Take a look at these. The issue raised in the last forum was actually corrected... by me. I immediately changed it after seeing the issue. That doesn't change, however, the perception of the wiki by the masses. The Kingdom Hearts Wiki has absolutely no credibility. So how should we change that? I have a few steps in mind, some of which are very drastic and I don't expect to be done, but here they are: We need to not turn debates over information into screaming fests. The "Somebody" debate is a perfect example of what not to do. Notice how he even posted an editorial on Kingdom Hearts Ultimania. That just shows how annoyed we made him. Why else would he have gotten the general public involved? Clearly things got out of hand. Let's not have that happen again. We need to decide whether we are a wiki about presenting 100% accurate information or not. Face it; the term "Somebody" is not fully official: Kryten even admitted it. And one of the largest points raised against changing it is that "the term 'Somebody' sounds less awkward than 'complete being'". But when has that ever stop us? The same thing happened when we were considering changing "Lingering Sentiment" to "Lingering Will", and we decided to change it because that is the more official name. So we have to decide: should we use the name that sounds better or the name that is fully official. This goes for all our information. We need to use names that are as official as it gets from now on, and we need to change the names that already aren't as factual as they could be to better ones. Which leads me to my next point... We need to recheck all our (specifically story-related) information for accuracy. Much of it is likely untrue. Other pieces, such as the "Darkness changing people's eye/skin/hair color" bit are based off of info. from Nomura's interviews. He said, "Braig gained yellow eyes and pointed ears, because he was close to Master Xehanort." Although it could technically be deduced that Xehanort's Darkness was the cause, is that 100% factual? No. Even someone like Ventus-Vanitas, who has yellow eyes, can be explained; Vanitas had yellow eyes because he was around Xehanort, and that trait was passed on to Ventus. Also, why is it that Riku's eyes didn't turn yellow when he started to become close to the darkness in Kingdom Hearts? All we know for sure is that being around Xehanort creates those symptoms, and that's how we should treat it. And that's why we should go through everything and fact-check it. We need to gain ourselves input from people who don't think the information is credible. If we can somehow get them to make a list of everything they see factually incorrect with this wiki, we'll have some idea of what we need to double-check. If it turns out we were either wrong or simply jumped to conclusions with the info. based on some other information, it should be removed. If we were right, we should explain calmly why they're wrong; we'll have a debate over it if there's enough disagreement. We need to change the name of this wiki to something other than "wiki". This is not something I actually expect us to do, but it would be helpful in making us seem more credible. Think about Wikipedia: it has tons of information, but no school or business would use it for 100% factual information. By calling this place a wiki, we're basically saying, "Anyone can edit us and post whatever information they want, so we're not credible!" Regardless of the truthfulness of this statement, that's how people actually see us. By changing our name to something different, we would therefore seem more credible. Please, don't dismiss this right away. If you don't pay attention to how people see us, we're doomed!

Chitalian8 Say... — Every Player had to give up something. Everybody makes sacrifices. It was me. All of it. — 03:18, 10 October 2011 (UTC) That's... actually pretty depressing. Anyway, some of those people are just being ignorant and not fully reading what's on our pages (I'm looking at the Magic Mirror one). I notice that we're also being lumped in with the Wikia, so we really do need to distance ourselves even more. This wiki's always been about presenting the full truth, and nothing other than the truth, so I don't see a need to change our policies to fit around "what sounds better". As for changing the name of the wiki, I would be up for a slight name change, we could just make it "Encyclopedia" or something along those lines. Also, very importantly, it's the internet. There will always be masses who disagree what's there, and they just happen to be much more vocal than the people who have no problem with our info.

ShardofTruth Once you believe, truth and lie are quite the same thing. — 08:20, 10 October 2011 (UTC) I think you're spot on with most of your points As if!, I have just a few additions and suggestions: Somebody: The "Somebody" debate will never die out as long we have no official term for them, "complete being" isn't a suitable replacement because it's clunky and not used a single time in the games or an interview. I think the best thing to do would be to replace the term on every page with a paraphrase like "original persona" (which is used on the original characters of the Organization XIII for example). But that shouldn't be a problem because we never put Sombody in any article, so all that should be left are the galleries which owe the sombody headline to our friend S071084, who is thankfully rampageing on the other wiki right now. But still, we need to categorize and the only place the term appears is in one image category and the enemy template, that shouldn't be a big deal for everyone, who visits the wiki just to read articles. Official names: Most of the translated FM stuff (enemies, weapons, items) don't have a official English names or get it very late due to reuse in other games like "Two Become One" or "Frozen Pride", on the other hand the same Japanese name gets different Englisch translations from game to game (the Energy synthesis item is the worst example: it's called Power in KH; Energy in KHII and Wellspring in KHBBS). It's a difficult terrain, but if we have evidence we should use it, it's not like we can't rename it later if we get a "real" translation. Credible information: Yes and the fact template should be used more often if an information may not be accurate and input from more people is always nice. Wikia name change: I think a change could achieve the contrary. "The call themselves "KH Encyclopedia" but aren't more credible than a wiki. The wiki will never be perfectly accurate, it's not possible with so many different editors with different background and perceptions of the games. But we can definitely make it better, so let's invite the gamefaqs forum writers officially and ask them, what they would change and if they can help us.