Meta-PokéBase Q&A
13 votes
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Lets face it, a lot of parts of the DB is still incomplete. The ItemDex, Maps and Puzzles, etc. Pokemaster, since you are only one person, its impossible to be able to do everything, and still juggle real life and the supposed forum. We have threads like the Minor Errors and Location Guide Correction threads, however, they both have 20+ posts, which already implies a workload of fact-checking and updating the pages. Then, with Gen VIII coming out this year there'll be even more stuff to add including items, pokemon, locations, etc.

I have a list of both small and large suggestions that might help:

  1. Let Mods/Editors edit the grey box in the main pages of the 3 pokebase sections. This would be useful for advertising news for tourneys and such (under the greeting text of course) for users who don't go to Meta often.

  2. Also give Mods/Editors edit minor pages with missing information, ie. Item pages. As long as I could remember, these pages are always said to be done in the future, but afaik the only items with locations are TMs.

  3. An alternate way which is more complicated but is more community involved than simply letting mods edit it themselves. Basically, for any page which has missing locations, users can submit a form, which is put into a queue which mods can fact check, review and edit them, and when approved the pages are automatically updated. The mods can still edit directly. If possible it could also apply for location guide errors.

  4. Idk if anyone still cares about it, but we could revive/reboot the Maps and Puzzles contribution thread. Low priority since I doubt anyone comes here for that nowadays.

  5. Let trusted and capable people here help you code/design the forum. Or let its development be more transparent with us.

    I'm not sure what the current situation is with the forum, if it is already being worked on or still on a drafting phase, but you could accept some help, even if it isn't someone from the DB but still someone you trust.You probably already do and I have no idea but thats the other thing, it would be really cool if you could let us know what the status of it is and what is happening.

  6. Sync the Useful Posts and Help Out between the 3 sections and let the mods edit them.


Of course, you don't need to do any of these things and I'm not sure if some of these are possible, but I hope you'd at least acknowledge these issues and suggestions.

If anyone else has any other suggestions please comment.

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Allowing users access to the code or ability to update pages outside of Q2A might be a little hard, but I think we could just make corrections or improvements in a form and just submit it to PM so it's quicker for him? The suggestions are good it's more about how practical they are to implement.
I think Pokemaster once said something about how giving editing power to anyone else might make Pokemon DB less secure and easier to crack. As for making corrections and sending to him to implement, isn't that what we're already doing in our "report site errors" thread?
My 3rd suggestion is automatic, and applies on pages without data yet. For example for the Everstone's page it could say something like "Sorry, we don't have location data just yet. If you happen to know where, you can go fill this form and if its approved this page will update.". The form will probably ask for locations for each generation by drop-down text boxes.

As for the security of the site and practicality, yeah that's a big problem. I just don't see any other solution than letting another person help out other than just waiting Valve Time™. But considering that items aren't that important to this site we don't *need* to complete it, we can ignore the items' locations problem altogether.

I'm still curious about the forum though.
Wiki sites manage alright with security. If we get a good thing going here, I don't see why we can't be more user-submitted as well.
I think it'd make Meta super interesting as well. We could potentially collaborate on getting content and database listings together for the site. There's not much we do for the main site around here and it'd be cool if that changed.
Definitely agree. PM tries his hardest but he can't update everything

1 Answer

4 votes
 
Best answer

Yes, allowing users to contribute more is on the radar. I started drafting a discussion thread a while back about the best solutions. I’ll dig that out in the next few days so we can get started.

The forum is also a work in progress. I made some behind-the-scenes changes a few weeks back which will help but still a lot of tweaking to do. Been quite busy with work & life as usual but still ploughing on when I can.

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Can't wait to see how this all turns out!
I can personally write the locations of all items in every game after HGSS. I can also give better descriptions and extra uses for certain moves as well as common trivia