Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Not to bash on the site or anything, but are the articles featured in "todays featured articles" a bit too.. whats the word... repetative?

They all seem to take any character (x), briefly introduce the character and when they first appeared, and then say (observation1) and (appearentObservation1) and repeats it multiple times.

For instance:
The cheat. (introduce and mention origin) Strong bads right hand man and friend to strong mad, First appeared in Strongest man in the World contest, blah blah blah..

Now here comes the repetiative part:

The cheat likes making cartoons and appearently thinks pencil shavings are a legal tender. The cheat lives in a bbq grill and appearently stinks when he gets wet. The cheat is a dj at the local club "technochocolate" and appearently possesses explosive properties. The cheat likes to drink Sudsu (a drink made from skim milk and gummi bears) and appearently sleeps with a band aid covered sponge called "the denzel". The cheats screenname is Cheatachu72 and appearently has a secret addiction to cigarettes. The cheat has a gold tooth and appearently likes mushrooms/poptart pizza. The cheat is terrified of the bear holding a shark and appearently thinks "Fire Burt" is a good commando name.

Has anyone else noticed this somewhat obnoxious pattern? Is it getting on your nerves too?

Well, if you want to change it, go ahead. Go change every single one.

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hahaha...

but thats the problem. Change it to what? Its obnoxious but effective. Its a great collection of known observations when you need one but surely there must be a way to make it less annoying to read.

What are your oppinions people?

You can't change the main page, only the wiki head people can.

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Well I wasn't going to touch it anyway.

Well, you really can't do much. with all the horrid writers out there, you can't kill em' all.

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hehehe!

So you agree?

Yeah. I don't like people who can't write, but try.

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lol, I hope you don't mean me.

You can change the featured article though. Just not the template on the main page.

I went and looked at the The Cheat article. Apparently is said three times, and it's a fairly long article. The current featured article, Stinkoman, doesn't say it at all. Could you link to the article where it is said a lot? I'm sure it could be fixed.

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"Explain to me how drowning them would not ruin their date."

Anybody can edit a featured article write-up that is not currently on the main page. People who have a not-brand-new registered user account are also able to edit the current FA write-up. Even if you cannot edit something, you are always welcome and encouraged to propose/discuss any changes on the article's talk page.

This is the FA write-up for The Cheat, which was featured between April 10-16, 2006. This, and other page titles that fit the dating pattern, are what are used on the Main Page. Any edits you need to make to the current featured article write-up, you edit that page (not the Main Page). This is the current FA.

As for the articles themselves, if you don't know exactly how to edit them, again we encourage you to discuss any thoughts and ideas on the appropriate talk page. If you don't know which talk page to post this on, then ask yourself which articles you think need to be changed:

If there's a problem with just The Cheat, then post it on Talk:The Cheat.
If there's a problem with all character pages, post it on Talk:Characters.
If there's a problem with all featured articles you see, post it on HRWiki talk:Featured Article Selection.
If there's a problem with all articles on the wiki, post it on Talk:Main Page.

Just click on "+" next to "edit" at the top to make a new section.

Generally speaking, posting discussions on the Forum about Wiki content will not yield results, since most wiki editors do not read this. However this time around, if anybody who is primarily a Forumer has an outside opinion about whether our articles are obnoxious and what to do with them, I will personally see to it that opinions posted here will be seen on the Wiki talk page discussion if mikau posts one.

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dot dot dot

Apparently apparently apparently!

Woah.. That IS obnoxious..

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Owner of The PlaystaionThWii60

I'm not even sure what the purpose of 'apparently' is in those contexts anyways. All of those things are true, so why beat around the bush?

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I just took out 3 "apparently"s and 1 "apparent". Now there is only 1 "apparent" left in the article.

I do agree with you all on that part. I have always been on the lookout for too many uses of the word "apparently" in the same general area, and I have deleted/changed quite a few over the years.

I did notice one thing while skimming over The Cheat article. It definitely needs a copyedit. What happens is that people often patch together these character biographies one sentence at a time, so it results in some choppiness along with paragraphs that deviate from their topic.

We need people like you to read through these articles and fix the problems I talked about. It's not hard to smooth over some choppiness and make sure a paragraph stays on topic. You can't expect the normal wiki editors to take care of this for you. Please help us and fix problems as you see them as best you can. Thanks.

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dot dot dot

Well, it's what you get in a world full of people who never learned to write. They just want to sound smart, but they overdue it.

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Wouldn't that be "overdo," Eggs? I'm sorry, I'm just trying to play along with the topic.

I think it'd be a great thing if someone with lots of editing and writing prowess could take all the pieced-together character bios and edit them (completely rewriting them, if necessary) so they flow smoothly. I'd volunteer, but I'm really busy, and I'd be really nervous. The biggest edit I've ever made to the Wiki was editing the table on the "portmanteaus" page to add "entrangled," and even then I was nervous about messing it up.

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You look like you need a hug.
*hug*
There, now don't you feel better?

1. Quiet you!

2. Yeah, I'd like to help more, but I just am too nervous.

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Don't be nervous. As long as you follow the standards, you'll be fine. You probably won't get yelled at, anyway.

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"Explain to me how drowning them would not ruin their date."

I'm glad no one was offended by this thread.

I think the problem probably does come from lots of people adding to the article without trying to change it. So they just stick it beside a similar line, hence we get long strings of the same type of sentance.

The other thing that annoys me somewhat is when a single random event is used in attempt to describe a characters personality when it was only said once and didn't even make any sense. For example in the Coach Z article: As Coach Z himself is not afraid to admit, he's got more than two problems.
None of us know what that means, including the writer of the article, the brothers chaps and most important of all, coach Z.

Despite being a coach, he doesn't know what a basketball is, as indicated in secret recipes.

Here's another example where coach z says "what is this thing?" and its written down as a known fact about coach z. Isn't that jumping the conclusions a bit?

This also reminds me of how often the words "as referenced in toonX" appear which usually means "actually we only saw this once HERE but we're assuming its true."

As far as fixing it myself, i don't feel qualified. I'm not a writer or a grammer expert. I'm not saying the writers of the article are idiots, I just wanted to see if anyone else thought the articles had a somewhat obnoxious pattern and thought we could discuss what could be done to avoid it.

My only idea was to quite trying to write it in sentance form and instead use a list:
Fun facts:
The cheat has a gold tooth
The cheat is an amateur flash animator
Appearent Facts:
The cheat thinks pencil shavings are a legal tender
The cheat has an addiction to cigarettes

and you get the idea. Not as good as a well written article but far less annoying.

Well, I guess that the part about the amatuer flash animator part is important, because it spawns the powered by the cheat videos, and the music videos, but other than that, I mostly agree with what you are saying.

Still, tohugh, I kinda like it that way. It almost makes it entertaining to read the wiki, because I can be reminded about lots of funny stuff as I go through each article.

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I'm not sure what you're saying. That Coach Z wondering what a basketball is means that he doesn't know what a basketball is doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me. If you can't trust the source material, what can you trust?

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"Explain to me how drowning them would not ruin their date."

I just think the brothers chaps throw random stuff out to be wierd and forget about it. But we're eternalizing it.
Besides, maybe coach z figured it out by now.

No.


That line is even more speculation than the line that you say is jumping to conclusions.


This is sometimes true. We sometimes take out content that seems to be eternalizing a throwaway joke, but it probably doesn't happen as often as it should. It's very difficult for a few experienced editors to control this runaway train. How does anyone determine objectively what is good content and what is bad content?

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dot dot dot

Hey, how about we make a team of good writers, and search the Wiki for bad paragraphs! We will be called the Punctioiers! (Er, something.)

We could have our own thread.

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who gets to decide who's a good writer or a bad writer?
(dun dun DUN DUN!)

In trith, many wiki articles are stretching for information. You don't have to put every fact we know about a character in there--otherwise there's no reason to watch the toons! Let people find out for themselves that the inside of dungeonman's nose smells like meat.

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I could use some salve.

Yes, a lot (if not most) of the wiki's articles need some serious copyediting to bring them up to a higher standard. It's one of my long-term projects.

But to say that we don't have to put every fact there that we know? What? That's the whole point of the wiki! And reading a transcript or article is never a good substitute for actually watching a toon, so I don't think we'd ever been in danger of having too much information as far as that goes.

He's got a point, Revenge. The point of a Wiki IS to collect as much information as possible about a single subject in one place. It's not a light summary, it's a comprendium. However, I do agree that the info could be much more neatly organized, and maybe we need "spoiler warnings" of a sort. XD

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You look like you need a hug.
*hug*
There, now don't you feel better?

The only thing it really could spoil is the hunt for easter eggs, because it's not like there is a story going on or anything.

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What about the cliffhangers/Missing Lappy/retirement arc? That could conceivably be spoiled. It's not as though the cliffhangers article says "The captors were revealed to be the Tandy 400 and the Compy 386 two weeks later in retirement," or anything like that, but that's not the point. It could've said that.

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"Explain to me how drowning them would not ruin their date."