The Location Articles Reset
Important news! All articles tagged under ‘Locations’ have had their main article and citations reset. This is due to a majority of them not living up to the current standards of the wiki. Most of these were sped through by one person, who didn’t leave many citations. Location articles also leave a lot copy-pasted, which have made them rigid to any wiki standards changes.
Don’t worry though! We know there are still lots of location articles that do meet wiki standards. These can be resubmitted manually for moderators to fully approve, alongside making changes to them which will be discussed further below. If you need to access an old location article for reading or for resubmitting, you can view all of them here. Current pages also still have in-tact all their parameters, galleries, videos, ect.. Many of these were also updated before the wipe, as we pulled all of them into a spreadsheet to mass-edit things like opening dates.
What’s Changed?
First take a look at Cincinnati, OH (8801 Colerain Ave) as the guide to this new locations formatting. Note how most info is now displayed right inside the infobox, rather than spread throughout the article. Information such as arcades, animatronics, stages, remodels, franchisees, ect., are now parameters to use. Some of these parameters display in the infobox, while things such as arcades and animatronics, which could be a bit more lengthy, are automatically put inside the article.
In the best case scenario, the majority of important information should be directly in these parameters. The actual article should mainly consist of its short 1 sentence intro, and then a ‘History’ section that can go into more depth. This history section also shouldn’t just be ‘Opened, got this stage, got this stage, got this remodel, died’. This should be used to discuss special events the store took part in, whether any of its remodels/stages used early prototype or novel features, times the location made it in the news, condition of its stages over time, etc. Separating the copy-paste generic info and the in-depth unique history is important to making these articles easier to ingest.
Other New Stuff
Additionally, some small fixes to the site have been committed. A new ‘Loading. . .’ text appears when waiting for article lists to load (I know some users got confused seeing a blank list for a few seconds). Some css changes on location pages have also been made. Infoboxes also now don’t require an image to display properly. The parameterization of the locations articles will also let us in the future (whenever anyone gets around to it) generate tables or charts on arcade/remodel/stage pages to list where they were located or the trend of how long each lasted.