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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!
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