Forum:Wikia Anime (and Manga?) Project

I'm interested in starting a semi-large project on Wikia. Earlier I posted and have decided to adopt the English Anime, Naruto, and InuYahsa Wikia and I've been doing taging and editing to improve content while I'm waiting for the status so that I can do the proper cleaning of things (Forum:Anime Network) but now that I think of it, there is a potential for Wikia to be the best place for community wiki driven anime documentation.

Currently there are different Wikia for many of the different Anime there are. But there is an issue with some of the smaller anime. There are two categorys of anime to think about. Small and large, for example I'll use Chobits as an example as small, and Naruto as large. Naruto is an anime which is still running, and has many characters, episodes, and such. And because of this, it is large enough that we can give it a Wikia for itself. But unfortunately other anime such as Chobits only last a total of arround 26 episodes and because of this, don't have enough to them for them to be given their own Wikia. But does that mean they shouldn't get full documentation on every detail of them like the larger anime series do?

Currently the Anime Wikia is merely used for listing of anime, and may possibly have a few articles about it's characters. A big factor contributing to that is a limit in naming. Many anime characters may use similar names, and because of this they can't all have a single article in their name. Instead they either must have the name of the anime placed after them, or be placed in subpages. But doing that changes the title, and can also make linking to the individual pages tricky.

My idea is one which will allow easier ways for linking to individual anime pages within the anime wikia and the other individual anime wikia. And also let the title of a page better reflect the content.

Currently if you place a character page in a subpage of it's anime you end up with a odd title which can sometimes distract from the page (eg: Chii from chobits would be 'Chobits/Chii', but some anime use longer names and the combination of anime name and character name can be longer than the width of the normal page.) And because of this, that also means the same long title must be used to link to that individual page. You also half to take into consideration the fact that individual anime may either be in a seperate wikia, or in the anime wikia.

The idea is to setup a special system for linking and title display within the Anime Wikia and participating Wikia in the Anime and manga category. The idea is the use of a Specialpage, a table, and a special alteration which allows special linking in a way similar to interwiki. The specialpage would allow individual anime to be added to a list in a table. The information on this would comprise of a id for the anime (eg: naruto for Naruto, inuyasha for InuYasha, gundam seed for Mobile Suit Gundam SEED), the full name of the anime's main article, and a specification of the id of the Wikia it has, or none for anime which are only documented within the Anime Wikia.

With this system special linking could be done in which links would be made in the form Anime: animeid:articlename. This means that the formerly mentiond article on Chii from Chobits would be Anime:Chobits:Chii and because the table would list Chobits' main article at w:c:anime:Chobits, the link would direct to w:c:anime:Chobits/Chii and this could possibly work from all the different anime wikia. The other type of link would be for Uzamaki Naruto which is not located in the Anime wiki but instead in the Narutopedia. Linking to this article would look just like before and would be Anime:Naruto:Uzamaki Naruto. But this time, since the id of the Wikia for Naruto is naruto this link would instead lead to w:c:Naruto:Uzamaki Naruto. Also to note making a link without the name of a subarticle (eg: Anime:Naruto) would link to the Anime's page in the Anime wikia. And a blank page(eg: Anime:Naruto:) would lead to the Main Page of that wikia, or would stay at the Anime's page if there was no Wikia for that anime.

The last but simplest change would be that the title for pages in the Anime Wikia which have a main article listed in the table would display the name of the subpage, without the name of the mainpage. So 'Chobits/Chii' would only display 'Chii'.

In total, this would allow every large anime to be documented in it's own Wiki, and all small anime to be documented in the Anime Wikia. All without conflicting on naming, or on whether or not an anime has been given a wiki for it. That also means that links in a page on the anime wikia could link to the individual articles in a seperate wiki about the show and not be rewritten if the anime moved from the Anime Wikia to it's own wiki. And that individual anime wikia could link to references from other anime without even knowing if there was a wikia about the other anime or not.

It's also possible that the Manga wikia could be included in this because I notice that it to is inactive.

I'm not saying this is something to lay on the devs to do as another project, because if this idea is liked, it's quite possible for me to do the brute work of creating the code and changes needed to make this work. So this dosen't half to destract from the other projects going on at the moment. I've worked with the MediaWiki code before, and I know that this is quite possible. In fact, It's possible that to make the interwiki portion work, the only code edit needed would be the addition of a new parserhook into the interwiki link creation function.

Dantman (Talk) 09:44, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

You know, I completely forgot to note that I've been getting tired of the people at the forum I usualy visit (Gaia Online). And while I would still pay enough attention there to keep up with working at The Gaiapedia, I'd probably continue watching through different anime so that I can further the documentation on them. Another thing I forgot to mention, is that a small image that flashed in my head while I was thinking of the system, was a way of having the theme of the Anime wikia change when the user went to a page on an individual anime. I could probably code that to. If I did, I'd probably have it added to The Gaiapedia to, because I've got something done in JS there that isn't that great. And if you're wondering, the reason I picked Chobits out for the example is because that was the latest anime I finished watching. I'm onto Elfen Lied and Death Note and when I get my status I'll probably go back and write up full documentation on Chobits for the Anime wiki. Dantman (Talk) 09:53, 4 February 2007 (UTC)