Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2009-09-07

WikiProject Anime and manga

The Anime and manga WikiProject, founded in November 2004 by the now inactive Pyrop, covers the intertwined topics of anime, manga, visual novels, and the various individuals involved in creating them. Over the past five years, the project has grown to include almost 10,000 articles—including three featured articles, 60 featured lists, and 58 good articles—and nearly 800 members; it has also adopted the increasingly common "task force" model for managing smaller topics, and currently includes 11 work groups.

Today, we've asked four members of the project (Dinoguy1000, Jinnai, KrebMarkt, and TheFarix) to answer a few questions about their experiences there:

1. What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?

Farix: It is hard to really put a finger on anything specific. The project has been quite dynamic since its inception in late 2004. During that time, anime and manga related articles were a jumble of plot summaries and loosely associated facts. Most of us who joined during those first couple of years had little idea what a proper encyclopedia article should look like and naively thought that better coverage meant documenting every single anime and manga that was ever published, aired, or released. Since then, the project has matured and now vigorously enforces the notability guidelines. Currently, several editors from project are working on the Gundam series of articles in which many individual character and mecha articles are being merged into lists with details trimmed to give just the essential details. In the past, Naruto, Bleach, and Dragon Ball have also received similar attention from project editors. This often does not sit well with many fans of the series who believe that more plot detail equates to better encyclopedic coverage. But so far, the project has been successful in holding the line.

Perhaps the project's most memorable contribution is Wikipe-tan. When I first started editing in 2006, the project was using a fan-drawn image of Midori from the manga series Midori Days as its mascot. However, due to the increasing restrictions on copyrigted material in non-article space, the image was no longer viable and the project had to find a new mascot. Several replacement images were suggested before Kasuga presented Wikipe-tan as a solution to our mascot problems. After the project decided to adopt her, the whole thing just snowballed from there. I am still not quite sure how she became so widely adopted by Wikipedia as a whole.

Dinoguy1000: I would have to agree with Farix here - perhaps our largest contribution to Wikipedia as a whole is Wikipe-tan, which as Farix said has been adopted by the entire community as a mascot, and the original image has spawned dozens of derivatives, both by Kasuga himself and by other users, as well as mascots for Commons (Commons-tan), WikiQuote (Wikiquote-tan), and other projects (Uncyclo-tan, anyone?). Other than that, the project is focused on cleaning up non-notable character and other articles, mostly by merging, as Farix and Jinnai point out, and we tend to be quite successful in this regard wherever we focus our attention.

KrebMarkt: We have a GA article on a series that has not been published in English, which is probably a first for fiction articles. In some way, it's a contribution to the fight against systemic bias, proving again that good articles can be written on subjects with limited English coverage.

2. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?

Farix: Perhaps the most unsuccessful initiative was the Anime and Manga Collaboration of the Week (AMCotW). Part of the problem was the the selection of article was largely a popularity contest. Editors voted on which articles they wanted to see improve instead of the articles they were willing to work on. It also suffered from the fact that no one had a clue as to what content was necessary to make the article encyclopedic. But it finally failed when no one was willing to maintain the nominations, much less work on the articles selected. In hindsight, the project should have waited until it had several Good Article promotions under its belt before starting a CotW. While the idea of resurrecting the AMCotW has been bandied about, lack of interest and lack of participation continues to be a problem.

3. Anime and manga topics in Wikipedia have sometimes been criticized as being too concerned with trivia and plot details, and there have occasionally been efforts to have significant numbers of these articles deleted. Do you believe such criticism is justified, and how has it affected the project? Have you developed any special methods for dealing with such issues?

Jinnai: I belive much of that critism is rightly justified as there have been a lot of articles with just plot info on people's favorite character and still are. However, I believe the GNG does not handle elements within a work (not the work itself) well for modern items as allowing too few vs. older classical/antiquity works which tend to have too many. This isn't a problem with only our project, but it does affect it and has seen some otherwise notable characters in world bestselling series merged even when work on providing real-world impact was done.

Farix: The criticism is sometimes justified. However, there has been a lot of progress over the years and there is not as much trivia or excessive amounts of plot details in the high-profile articles as there used to be. However, with almost 10,000 article tagged as being within our scope, it can be a difficult problem to deal with. We still have a huge backlog of articles whose notability we have not checked, which are still just a infobox, a lead sentence, and a plot summary. Most of this is the result of naive fans who think, like most editors in the project once thought, that better encyclopedic coverage means documenting every single plot detail.

KrebMarkt: The criticism is partly deserved because for fiction articles the most intuitive and easiest edit one can make is to add plot and trivia, leading if not kept in check to situations such as presented in the question. Editors have good reasons to be wary of fiction-related articles, and particularly anime & manga articles because of the "scary" potential of spin-out articles that could be created regardless policies, guidelines, and good sense. Fortunately our project is on the one hand reducing, at its own pace, the daunting number number that need to be trimmed of excessive plot & trivia, along the way merging articles that can't stand on their own and sending to Afd articles that fail to assert a modicum of notability. On the other hand, our project is trying to encourage creation of articles & spin-out articles for which the relevance & notability won't be contested. We don't need more items in our to do list.

4. Your project has partially adopted the task force model for subsidiary groups. Do you find this model to be effective? How might it be improved?

Jinnai: Task-forces are better for large groups of articles with a clear set of devoted fans. Rather than a seperate wikiproject I believe most of them are very focused on a small number of articles at a time, possibly with Gundam one being among the larger ones. For such focused groups task forces are often better. The only real thing I can think of is that in the future some of the task forces could adopt their own importance level system, especially when all of their own articles are rated low/mid by our project it doesn't help them determine what's most important to focus on.

Farix: WikiProject Anime and manga's work groups have not been that successful. Part of the problem has been the lack of participation and interest. But also the scopes of the work groups are simply too narrow. A work group that focuses on a single series is going to attract fans of that series. While this may not seem to be a problem, these fans historically have the same naive preconceptions about what encyclopedic coverage means that I have mentioned before. This naturally creates friction between the fan editors and the more experienced editors, and editors begin leaving out of frustration. But in most cases, when there is a problem with a set of articles, editors are much more likely to bring the issue to the entire project's attention instead of the work groups. On the other hand, task-oriented task forces tend to be more more successful, an example of one was the article assessment drive. But these task forces are generally short-lived.

5. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Are they useful collaborators, or do you feel that they have little to offer you? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?

Jinnai: The only one I have had is with the video game wikiproject. The few others I've tried, like WP:Albums on occasion to help with article assements have been met with no response generally unless I ask them a generic question that doesn't apply to anime. For WP:Video games, mostly this has been more positive, but visual novel it still seems better to ask here than if I want a large body of response their main page (they do have a task force WP:WikiProject Video games/Visual novels which I am a member of, but the numbers are very low (although our output is high) so asking there helps, but does not get me the large response if I'm seeking a broader consensus as what to do).

Dinoguy1000: WP:ANIME is closely related to a number of other projects (Television, Comics, Films, Video games, and Novels would probably be the main ones, with Japan and Media franchises being additional parent projects), but in my experience, we really don't tend to reach out to these other projects much or have very close relationships with them. I'm not entirely sure why this is, perhaps we just happen to be self-sufficient and observant enough that we can easily reach consensus and keep tabs on the current practices of other projects. Other than that, individual editors more than the project as a whole tend to work with other projects - as Jinnai says, he tends to work closely with WP:VG; Collectonian, one of our main contributors, is also one of WP:FILMS' coordinators; and Nihonjoe is the founder and still an active member of WP:JAPAN - as a result, we tend to be kept up-to-speed on issues these projects are currently facing, and vice versa. A few of the related projects tend to do their own thing, largely ignoring the articles in our shared scope - WP:COMICS seems to focus almost exclusively on American and some European comics, and I suspect (never having observed very closely myself) that WP:NOVELS tends to focus on European and American novels.

6. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles it shepherds, developing over the next year? The next five years?

Farix: I would like to see our two main articles, anime and manga, finally reach Good Article status within the next year and eventually become Featured Articles. I am also hoping to see more of our articles promoted to Featured Articles. Unfortunately, experience with the Featured review system has proven that it is a moving target whose standards are constantly shifting and entirely arbitrary. Some of the articles promoted to Featured in the past would not be promoted under current standards. This isn't a particularly desirable environment to develop articles in.

One task the project will need to do is a comprehensive review of all of the anime and manga articles for their notability. This will be a difficult task as most sources are only available in Japanese. Most of us in the project are still unfamiliar with which reliable Japanese sources can be checked for information relating to development and reception. And as far as the biographies that are within our scope go, we still have a lot of room for improvement.

Dinoguy1000: The nature of anime and manga means that generally, people are far more interested in editing articles about certain series or characters than about core topics. As a result, most of the articles on our core topics are largely ignored, and we still have several gaps in coverage in this regard (we didn't even have a central navigational template of any type for these topics until just a few months ago!). Therefore, I'd like to see more focus on these articles, and share Farix's hope that we can get the two main articles up to Good, or even Featured, status. On the other hand, when aiming for Good and Featured content, editors in our project tend to focus on lists (especially chapter and episode lists), which tend to be much easier than articles to get passed, and when articles are focused on, there only tends to be enough drive to get them to GA status, after which they are set aside to work on another article. This is generally fine - we have all sorts of articles that could be taken from Stub or Start-class to C or even B class with a bit of attention - but it would still be nice to see the occasional editor attempting to get an article to pass an FAC.

Jinnai: Another thing I'd like to see is some character lists and actual articles as featured in addition to anime and manga. Right now we have only two featured character lists and no character articles featured. Part of this is due to the continually changing requirements for featured articles. We don't have many good character lists (just List of Tokyo Mew Mew characters and List of Naruto characters) mostly due to the inability to have character lists be brought to either FLC or GAN since they both think the other should handle them. For character articles themselves it seems more to do with the changing targets Farix mentioned above.

Beyond that, as well as those listed by Farix, some of the major historical figures like Hayao Miyazaki being brought to GA-class or even FA-class would be nice as well.

Finally, what I'd really like to see is some copyediting resources. Anime and manga lacks any quality copyeditors. Beyond the basics of copyediting (spellchecking and fixing obvious grammatical problems), we don't have good skills in that department which I believe keeps the number of featured and GA content down. I know this has been an Achilles heel for us, however given that most of our group are fans, usually younger, we don't have the resources to correct this easily so perhaps trying to forge relations with other groups that do (such as WP:VG does with WP:MILHIST) might be our best way forward.

KrebMarkt: Like Farix and Dinoguy1000, I hope to get Anime and Manga to GA or, better, FA as we will have difficulties similar to those encountered to improve the Vital articles. I also wish that Scanlation and Fansub could be improved and balanced NPOV-wise to get them to B class. A last point is we had yet to see an anime soundtracks article reaching GA/FA or FL. From a non-initiated view, CDs related to a series franchise aren't a big issue but many of those CDs ended into the Japanese chart Oricon, sometimes in the top 10 (man, must start thinking hard on how to handle them accurately and properly).

Reader comments