A Study of Funkipedia Mods – What Can Be Improved
Updates are made as I learned more on the wiki. Please review the revisions page for any changes that I have made.
Within my English barriers, I fond of writing long texts just so my texts are in no way ambiguous or to be misintepret it. This includes this essay, because I wish to improve this by giving improvements based on what I learned on editing wikis. I would like to write this in small notes on your Discord server, on your Twitter, but it seems to me that it is not enough for me to deliver my message that I intend.
You can say that this may be a feedback, a rant, a criticism, a manifesto, an advice, or just an essay of what I learned so far, but I hope this can be something that is useful for each of you readers, regarding the technicalities of a wiki, especially for my humble recipient, the Funkipedia Mods staff team.
It is expected that some of the members thinking I am being interrupting the affairs related to the wiki. While this is not my intention, I will still apologize for the inconvenience. I wish that this is a constructive critcism, which is based on my knowledge of what I think is the best way, so if there are some parts that some of you disagree, you may wish to go with your discretion.
I wish a discussion/resolution can be made, and with the case of my activity on the wiki, everyone is free to look at my Special:Contributions page, and the staff team may warn my wrongdoings in a respectful manner.
In any case, all comments, feedback, and corrections are welcome. Please don't hesitate to tell me them!
Tabbers. It is supposed to be an effective way of putting things nicely, but I think the usage on the wiki is just too much. There are select offenders who a large amount of the content is just cramped on the tabber-pocalypse, mentioned below.
- It makes the table of contents not used effectively. Just like Wikipedia, the TOC can be used to hop into parts of the contents based on their subheadings more effectively than scrolling and searching those. It's not wrong when you have 100 lines of the TOC as long as the levels are being made right.
- You can't link into specific headings of the page. Hover at the headings on the TOC, copy the link, and visit it again. The browser will scroll to that specific heading to you. Got same headings? MediaWiki will make sure that the anchors are unique. You can't do those on the tabbers.
- "But it looks simple and short on my end!" Yes, just for PC users, but not for mobile users. They will be greeted with a waterfall of the page. Add that with the fact of the nearly useless TOC.
- You can CTRL+F the heck out of it. I usually use the find feature on my browser but since it is hidden on these tabbers, you would need to search it manually.
- Some parts may be hidden, especially those that use multiple levels of tabbing. There may be users who are just lazy and then think that the information can't be found on the page, only to realise that it is inside this tab.
- Did anyone tell you guys that it won't work on VisualEditor? You guys really liked the source editor, don't you?
With that being said, I think it's time to put this on stop and just avoid using it. Except in some small cases, like as a image gallery on infoboxes, but for content, I think you should avoid using it.
What if it is long? Read what I think on the later heading.
Here are two of the worst offenders of this. This really should be made without tabbings, just classic subheadings.
| This one on Music | This one on Vs. Dave and Bambi: Golden Apple Edition |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| It goes miles, and miles, and miles! | Three levels of tabbers for the Extras, wow! |
I wrote about this on Twitter, but there is room for improvement for the explanation.
Some of you may hate it when the pages are so long or just too long for your taste. Honestly, it's fine for me to have such long pages. It's not a rare occurrence to see meters of pages with descriptive information.
However, issues may arise on having long pages.
- Long, long, long load times. So long, it may just time out. With the scale of select pages, you need to wait a long time of page, and then a long time to upload your edit, if you are editing it. Even my scripts sometimes falling down because of the long pages.
- Tedious to edit. Along with the fact that you would more often use the tabber, looking at the source code becomes an eye sore, and finding it would be a unnecessarily tedious task
Here are some of my suggestions on dealing this.
The simplest answer is to just separate the pages. Now, I know some significant characters of a mod are separated, which is good to me, but there are some mods that are only made for one-off, that it is put on the page, cramped inside the tabber stuff.
Why don't we, let's say, just put it on the other page. Let's title it My Cool Mod/Characters. We put all of it on that page and put "Main article: My Cool Mod/Characters" on it. While we're at it, also move the dialogues to My Cool Mod/Dialogues (and songs on My Cool Mod/Songs?), and we got ourselves a page that is slim enough to be digestible easily. Isn't it cool?
Some examples:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Indonesia has a section that links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_Indonesia.
- https://spongebob.fandom.com/wiki/SpongeBob_SquarePants_(character) has these child pages:
- https://spongebob.fandom.com/wiki/Help_Wanted has these child pages:
I saw one part of a page that is already separated, which is the Scrapped/Unused Content part. This is close to what I wish, but something like "Scrapped/Unused Content/V.S. Whitty " can be renamed into "Whitty/Scrapped/Unused Content" to indicate more of the relation of the page.
Here's an unortodox method: using templates. Templates can be made for specific parts of the page and then can be transcluded (embedded) on the page itself. Observe the source of this page and you can see that it is basically made with templates.
There are some pages that for some reason only have the character of the song, but not the mod, or is it the other way around, or both at the same time, or what? My point is that some pages have this kind of ambiguity. Probably a due diligence, but sure it could make confusion for usual Fandom users, who expect separate pages of, for example, the series, the character, the franchise, etc.
Here's a good example. We got Hex as a character, and VS. Hex as a mod. Looks good and it is expected.
But then we got Tabi as a character, but no pages of the mod, or Garcello, but not the mod. And then it has links of the mod, which means it is also the mod page? Unlike your general mod page, there is no credits fields in the Mod infobox, so it seems quite unfair to me.
My suggestion: Separate, or differentiate, these kind of mods to have both the mod as a page and the character as a page. (ie. page with the mod can have its complete information of the mod, like notices, attribution, download links, and such, and the character can have its complete information as a character, like something written on the usual character section, only in a separate page)
Here are some issues that are not long enough to warrant it's own section on this essay.
- Resolved:
Templates can be used in some parts for consistency, such as for links of downloads (e.g.,{{Gamebanana|https://example.com}},{{GitHub|https://github.com|source code}})or these user/mod icons (those things where the icon is on the left and whatever the name is on the right). - I saw some template redirects are removed instead of being kept. I think this is bad practice. In fact, aliases are fine (e.g.,
{{LargePage}},{{Large Page}},{{Large page}}). It wouldn't hurt anyone, except if your argument is "technical debt," which it isn't, it would give same things in case we forgot the templates. Unless if you want to have a bot to fix these things 24/7. (See also: Wikipedia:Redirects are cheap) - Both {{SongInfo}} and {{SongInfoGradient}} can be merged into a single template with the power of MediaWiki logic functions. Not sure why it should be separate in the first place...
- Resolved:
You can separate documentation on templates (the ones inside the tags) inside the/docssubpage. Move the docs to the/docssubpage, and replace all of that with<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>. That way people can modify the docs, just in case the main template page is locked. See what I did on Template:Google Drive and Template:Google Drive/doc. - Instead of doing just docs, you can also do TemplateData. That way people can edit the values with the nice GUI, complete with information of what fields exists and does, all without going to the docs on the template page. See what I did on Template:Google Drive/doc.
- A template can be made for empty sections (and empty tab on the tabbers). See {{Expand section}} and {{Empty section}} in Wikipedia.
- I agree that some categories have no significant feature and should be removed. This is should be discussed in a case-by-case basis, though.
- Few categories that I would like to have. I know, it would be too much for some people, but at least it helps some...
The siblings of Category:Mods_that_run_on_FPS_Plus on other engines. (Do you guys remove them or is it just nonexistent?)Didn't noticed that it is inside Category:Mods and not on Category:Engines.- Category:Overhaul, as it is mentioned on Template:Mods. Or is it like on Category:Full Week?
- Want to save categories? If a page is on a child category, then it still makes sense to remove it from the parent category. For example, you don't need to give Category:Mods if an engine is on Category:Engines. See this example on Wikimedia Commons, especially the notice on the top.
- Some categories can be improved on its naming. "Mods on Funky Friday" is better than "Funky Friday" or some sort.
- Why do we have a storage page for songs when we have them on each mod? I mean, it would be a little bit useful when it is not in tabbers.
- Why do we have a storage page for mods when we have Category:Mods?
- For titles: Wikipedia-esque sentence case or title case? Choose one. Also look at the categories.
- Can we move the download links to the mod infobox? Like, why would it be on the very bottom? You can do something like this page, or just do it on one single field.
- Why is the Twitter link on the main page on a special tabber?
- Resolved:
The DiscordIntegrator on the main page links to the wiki server, but the sidebar DiscordIntegrator links to the general modding server, is this intentional, possibly to weed out unwanted guests? Hopefully not... - I'm ready to use Pywikibot just so I can update the TL;DR template automatically. Maybe also merging it with the scroller template.
These texts are more like a general opinions and have "weak advices".
NOT LEGAL ADVICE!
I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is a knowledge that I got from my experience on licenses, software or other works. Reach to a real lawyer if you want the real legal advice.
TL;DR: It's generally fine, but a mod is still a creative work, and both authors and users should learn (or at least know) about copyright of these works and/or what rights both parties have on the said work.
The Friday Night Funkin' mods (and by extent some creative works of the general audience) have this interesting detail where people seem to generally allow everyone to use their content, without having the proper clear texts to back it up. All things regarding of usage, performance, commercialization, derivations, etc seem to be informally stated. Even though Creative Commons licensed exist to support it, and can be implemented very, very easily (such as having a text of "This work is licensed under the terms of CC BY", which means using it only requires attribution), nobody seem to care about it, including those mods that is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND on Gamebanana by default.
This may be an liability for the wiki. It is debatable whether CC BY-NC-ND are accepted or compatible with CC BY-SA, but much problem arises on the case when a mod is uploaded exclusively on Game Jolt, without any other mention on the rights of the user. In a legal world, a work without any license would be assumed as "All rights reserved", which means the only thing that is allowed is personal use, and that's about it. This includes using the available assets as references on a CC BY-SA text, indirectly redistributing it. That is a liability, and it addition to lots of mods, and thereby lots of copyright holders, someone can just send a mail to Fandom, Inc. and bad things will happen (doesn't mean you should, "rouge patent holders" and such!).
And no, just because Friday Night Funkin' is open source and free to use, doesn't mean that the derivative of it have the same permissions. The fact is that Apache License 2.0, the used licensed on FNF, allows these derivatives to "be distributed under different terms and without source code" (Yes, these means that you don't need to also open source your mod, i.e. Indie Cross have rights to do that), and a derivative work of a public domain work (best case scenario, not even attribution is needed) is covered by those who did the derivative (e.g. A performance of a work of Tchaikovsky is licensed under a different copyright terms. Tchaikovsky scores are public domain, but you can still get a copyight claim on YouTube by using someone's performance.).
Now the question: What can a wiki do do limit this liability? Wikimedia Commons takes a safe bet, and just outright remove content that can't be used legally (i.e. files that are not public domain, files that are not lincensed under the right CC license, etc). GTA Wiki believe that screenshots are fair use and Minecraft Wiki has that template on lots of images, but these two are facing big companies. Wikipedia has 10 criterias whether a non-free content can be used, although it is debatable whether minimal usage is respected on the wiki in the first place. So, it's all gray area. If any of you are serious and worried about it, get a lawyer, not me.
In the end, I think it all comes down to my first sentences of this section. If an author is fine that their work is used in any way (aka. a general "yes, you can do it" on Twitter or something), then it's generally fine, but there will be people who still have doubts behind their minds about the copyright of the work. Overall, mod creators, or creative work authors in general, should give a safe gurantee for the general audience by using the appropriate license that states what can a person do to their works (it's really easy!). In addition to that, these audience should learn the basis of copyright, and by that, understand the rights and risks of someone when using a creative work.
Other links:
- While I have experience on copyright as a(n) (amateur) software engineer, there might be something that I miss about the world of copyright. Legal texts are hard, so please tell me if I got something wrong.
This response is for someone that wants to do styling on a heading, but this is also a message for everyone who does styling that is unnecessary in my mind. This may be edited in the near future for adjustments.
Read my message on https://discord.com/channels/954532398400417832/969713876847427584/1013032629949431818 for context.
Stylings are great, but there should be a considerate line between having it unnecessarily too much, and just enough, that we get the point.
I have to be honest that from my standpoint, I really dislike how much some of these pages are worked too hard, I'm not even sure whether the quality of the text itself is adequate.
Fandom is a wiki service that provides services for one-stop knowledge base sites for everything related to a topic. This wiki provides one-stop information about the game's mods. Such knowledge and/or information sites, in my opinion, should be easily accessible, properly written, and supports collaboration.
Users shouldn't focus on unusual, unorthodox stylings of certain parts, and to be more focused on how the written information is factual, accurate, and comfortable for reading, because that's how these kinds of site should be. Remember, this is not your average blog, not your Linktree page, not your Caard page, etc. This is more like an encyclopedia for FNF mods.
I'm not saying this to discourage your future contributions on the wiki. Last time on Wikipedia, I had a "super fancy" userpage, written with my new skills of HTML, complete with the bouncy Wikipedia icon on the bottom right. You are free to have your creative liberties on your user page, it is your space after all (though making it inaccessible due to the magnitude is also a problem, but that's yours). But, when it comes to the article space, which not only you who read it, it's time to be considerate, please.
This is also not a call to be serious or to be ultra-dedicated. Wikis like these are made by passion. I don't think doing this while being very serious or having a burnout counts as a passion, but more like a compulsion.
There some stuff that you may not known, such as accessibility issues (dark red and dark blue wouldn't be a good idea) and the fact it won't appear on the phones, but this is a topic for another time. Speaking of which, I wouldn't say long, long pages, that either got a timeout or just really take a really long time is "easily accessible."
A little bit off-topic: Now, if something in your mind is "I just want to have fun, and this is how I do it!" or "This is a childish game, please stop with your stupid stuff!" then I guess there is nothing I can do to stop you. I would say that "you might not ready to edit these wikis", but I'm not sure if that's even the case. I'm still pretty sure that this is what the general public want. The topic may be childish, but there's a reason why there are wikis such as Encyclopedia SpongeBobia that I think it has quality. Some people are really passionate to curate on the topics, and I don't think disregarding these criticism is appropriate.
okay