Complaints Dept.

[evkl]

What's wrong with Bulbapedia?

I wanna know.

So talk. If you don't feel comfortable saying it in public, PM me. If you don't feel comfy talking to me, PM somebody you feel comfortable talking to. TTE and Archaic are both Good Ideas for people to talk to if I'm on your bad side.

 

[Blazevoir]

Bulbapedia seems to be getting more Firefox-oriented. Some of the newer things on Bulbapedia ("roundy-corners", animated PNGs, etc.) won't work unless you have Firefox. Other than that (and the fact that we seem to be focusing on user-relations a lot), I don't see any problems.

 

[MAGNEDETH]

im getting tired of people not reading into our policies, and then making edits, getting reverted, and complaining about it. but, i dont think much can be done about peoples stupidity.

however, i am noticing that some people are disregarding, or outright ignoring administrators and bureaucrats alike. other users (you know) seem to make their own policies and enforce them.

 

[Blazevoir]

So Firefox users get an added bonus. That seems fair.

 

[evkl]

Er, to clarify, this thread isn't for responses to complaints (go TTE.) What can be done in Firefox, however, can't be done in IE. We aren't discriminating, per se--there's just an enhanced user experience for people who use standards-compliant browsers. But that's the last of responding to complaints that this thread is going to do.

 

[Politoed666]

I'll be upfront. Too many administrators. Bulbapedia is far looser with handing out administrative powers than most wikis. Every single one of our administrators should be an active contributor. Not a Bulbagarden "affiliate" or the like. Since Bulbapedia admin ≠ forum admin, the reverse should also be true: Forum admin ≠ Bulbapedia admin.

Now, people like Archaic and Zhen I don't mind. But users who haven't contributed since 2005? No thanks. See, there's this whole "division of power" thing. The more administrators we have, the less power each individual administrator holds. The entire administrative body can only hold a certain amount of authority, and when we have a lot of administrators, that authority is divided up into smaller and smaller chunks.

And the problem isn't just with inactivity. Here are my gripes, in order and abridged:

1. Power on the forums ≠ power on Bulbapedia
2. Inactivity = revocation of powers
3. Greatly declining activity since being granted adminship = revocation of powers
4. Assisting in vandalism cleanup = no powers in the first place
5. Repeated opposition to the E.B. = revocation of powers
6. Other repeated infractions = revocation of powers

So basically, we need a higher bar for our admins.

 

[DCM]

Specialized admins. You've got far too many inactive admins, when those spots could be filled by admins who know their stuff for their specific spot

 

[IIMarckus]

there's just an enhanced user experience for people who use standards-compliant browsers.

APNG is not a standard. In fact, it was summarily rejected by the PNG group because it violates the PNG spec.


One conceivable problem with Bulbapedia is the scalability of tables. Manual tables for stats and moves are a pain to update and have problems with accuracy, resulting in constant edits like this one. How are these lists made, and what can we do to keep things like that from happening?

 

[evkl]

Marckus, I was only referring to the "roundycorners" visible in FireFox but not IE. Those aren't APNG, are they?

 

[Mooites]

Having sprites correlate with the generation and all that. It just looks stupid, ununiform (is that even a word?) and tacky. For example, Silver's page using GSC sprites while Brennan's uses RSE.

 

[Luna Tiger]

The over-done-ness with it comes to sparkling up some tables and templates. I'm talking colors, color-codes, and unnecessary images. Example: the Gym Leader and E4 template at the bottom of their pages. They shouldn't be that huge, they shouldn't be that colorful, they shouldn't have images, and if it's two rows, it should be collapsable, because damn, they're huuuuge for just eight/nine people. Or their party templates. Do they really need to be bordered with the color of their specialty? They're eye-sores.

Less color, more simplified = less offensive.

...What? Everyone's tackling the big complaints. I can't throw in a small one?

 

[Metagross72]

This is a complaint that we can't fix: There's never anything to edit! Maybe that's why people excessively edit their user page.

 

[laoris]

I'm kind of unsatisfied with the lack of well-documented policy on Bulbapedia. Much of the time users have to figure out exactly how to do things by looking for examples, which can require some time. I find the Bulbapedia namespace doesn't always get the best treatment.

For instance, today I noticed TTE remove the 'previous' moves from Beedrill's page. I tried to find out if there was any official policy on learnsets before I went off changing other pages, and I eventually found Bulbapedia:Project_Pokédex/Learnset_standard...by searching on Google. There are no Bulbapedia pages that link to it--not even Bulbapedia:Project Pokédex. The learnset standard page didn't even end up answering my questions. Rather than detail the standards, it's more of a history and pat on the back about how great the learnsets are now.

Another thing that would be nice is a little more information on how to use various templates. Sometimes templates have a lot of parameters, and it's not entirely clear what are appropriate values. Just a description of what each parameter is for would be nice on a lot of the templates out there.

Example: the Gym Leader and E4 template at the bottom of their pages. They shouldn't be that huge, they shouldn't be that colorful, they shouldn't have images, and if it's two rows, it should be collapsable, because damn, they're huuuuge for just eight/nine people. Or their party templates. Do they really need to be bordered with the color of their specialty? They're eye-sores.

I concur.

 

[Mooites]

The over-done-ness with it comes to sparkling up some tables and templates. I'm talking colors, color-codes, and unnecessary images. Example: the Gym Leader and E4 template at the bottom of their pages. They shouldn't be that huge, they shouldn't be that colorful, they shouldn't have images, and if it's two rows, it should be collapsable, because damn, they're huuuuge for just eight/nine people. Or their party templates. Do they really need to be bordered with the color of their specialty? They're eye-sores.

Less color, more simplified = less offensive.

...What? Everyone's tackling the big complaints. I can't throw in a small one?

I re-concur (another non-existent word)

 

[DCM]

Yep, just because you can do something doesnt mean you should

 

[Martonimos]

We are starting to become ridiculously dependent on link templates. I understand and appreciate our need for specific ones like {{p}}, {{m}}, {{t}}, and the like. But when you have more generic ones like {{fi}} (which has been deleted) or {{OBP}}, it's almost as easy to write out the link--and that doesn't involve a template invocation.

 

[PAK Man]

My biggest gripe is users creating an article just so it can be created. It doesn't happen as much anymore, but back when we had over 1,000 pages in the Wanted Pages section, some people would create articles that simply said. "NAME is a character of the day who appeared in EPISODE," then categorize it, stubbify it and go on their merry way.

I also think people are a little too {{incomplete}} and {{cleanup}} happy when it comes to certain articles. There are hundreds of articles in the incomplete category, and nobody ever seems to want to touch them. Likewise, nobody wants to help clean up any of our articles that need improvement. I'd do it myself, but I have no idea how to improve any of these articles. For instance, this piece of work.

 

[Okido-Hakase]

The search feature. It's pretty hard to find more specific pages when you aren't really sure of the key words. Sometimes you have to know the exact title of the page. (actually I'm not sure if it applies as much, anymore)

Well I was searching for an example this moment, and the search seems better now (I probably meant a while back), but anyways I typed in "list of episodes", which led me to this page, when I was trying to get to this page. How is someone supposed to get to the latter page? Okay I kinda digressed from my original complaint.

EDIT: Okay I found an example of search difficulty. Let's say I'm a casual user of the 'pedia and I'm looking for a "list of Johto episodes," and I'm expecting a page approximately like the "list of original series episodes" linked above. So I search "list of Johto episodes" and get inadequate results (search keywords yourself).

 

[The King of Nidos]

Um ok heres a complaint I seemed to have gotten an infraction for my signature when I didn't even know why I got it and now I have 5 infraction points. All of which I have gotten because I have messed up and posted in the wrong forum or something but i still don't know why I got an infraction on my signature when there is nothing wrong with it.

 

[Sketch]

Um ok heres a complaint I seemed to have gotten an infraction for my signature when I didn't even know why I got it and now I have 5 infraction points. All of which I have gotten because I have messed up and posted in the wrong forum or something but i still don't know why I got an infraction on my signature when there is nothing wrong with it.

Your signature was too large, probably...sadly this isn't the place to complain about it...this is for Bulbapedia complaints. My advice to you would be to contact the staff member who gave you the infraction.