Project Pokédex

[Bleeding Thumbs]

Hey. Longtime fan. Not involved w/ the online Pokémon community. At least not in a long time.

I used to participate in the emulated early online battles back in the day.

Anyways: I've been bouncing this thought in my head for awhile...
And I don't know if it has been proposed or discussed before...

Now's a good time as any to discuss it--especially since you're having a sweepstakes for a DS.

How about a dex option that deals exclusively and caters to breeders, et al.

I use the site frequently as a resource for the games, base stats, etc. I don't care to know of the dietary habits of a wailord, or the migratory path of a pidgey.

How about a streamlined minimalistic interface that reveals pertinent information based solely on the games. And a renumeration of the dex interface that groups monsters based on evolutionary paths, types, equivalents, etc.

Not in a list, but a gridish design.

Something that lets hardcore players analyze, compare, and better synthesize data.

Monsters can be consolidated based on evolutionary groups to lessen articles. All to frequently, I only look at the data for the final monster rather than its origins.

 

[IIMarckus]

Sounds like Veekun.

As an aside, a wiki really is not the best place for this sort of data. Lack of good searching options (see also: the nightmare that is categories) combined with the fact that nearly everything has to be manually updated on each page is bad bad bad. Case in point: right now recent changes is filled up by a guy removing the Wikipedia link from the page of each Pokémon species. Notice that Veekun lists other sites in his Pokédex entries; no doubt those links are automatically generated, and to remove one from each entry would require removing maybe a few lines of code, or a row in a table.

Or take the new format for team tables as an example—unless I’m missing something, there’s no way to automate changing old templates to new ones, or even to find which pages contain the old ones to change them (bar manually tagging). And if someone makes a typo—say, lists Reflect as a normal‐type move—it’s impossible to find the error. For this sort of thing there is no substitute for a properly normalized SQL database… for raw data Bulbapedia is about as scalable as a bunch of static HTML files.

 

[FabuVinny]

Uh, our Pokédex links are also automatically generated. That's the beauty of templates. We also have Bulbabot to do a lot of the repetitive work, but raw data has to be added manually to any site whichever way you look at it. You really don't sound like you understand how wikis work at all.

The thing is, we're not what Bleeding Thumbs wants either. We are a general Pokémon encyclopedia, not an in-depth battling resource. We do have data on base stats and EVs and the like. We also often make use of ordering by evolutionary family but that isn't official numbering. But there are already sites for the hardcore players and that isn't the niche we are trying to fill.