Thoughts on Zelda Wiki's Quality Decline
I think it's time to air out some grievances towards what used to be one of my favorite fan wikis out there. The three days prior to this post, I stumbled upon the most esoteric set of pages on the Zelda Wiki.
I shout into the void at no-one directly to complain about the wiki's quality, and I get blocked in return by the person who runs the Zelda Wiki twitter and bluesky accounts.
Admittedly, I probably could have been a bit nicer about it, but I'm also not keyword-searching my own name to see if people are talking shit, so that one is on them.
I don't know how they usually handle criticism, but I don't think this is the way to do it. Especially since it seems the person managing their twitter/bluesky socials logged back into the inactive twitter after 6 months just to block me there too. I think that comes off as a bit petty.
Normally I couldn't care less, I never followed those accounts in the first place. But this ultimately emphasizes my growing disappointment towards the overall quality of the site over the past decade and a half. I have disliked the (at the time) separately managed Zeldapedia because of this exact reason; esoteric and meandering articles, separating pages because of minuscule name or localization differences, needless clutter out the ass etc. And it turns out my fears were not unfounded, as that exact problem bled right into Zelda Wiki after their merger. I had hopes once they went independent from Fandom that the quality would improve, but alas.
For some examples of the clutter on their site, they have pages for every level variant of monster from Echoes of Wisdom, pages for characters with single lines of dialogue. Is there any reason why we can't put these on singular pages? It's getting to a point where you start seeing stubbed pages out the ass, pages with missing images, more red links than a Four Swords game (at least 8107 red links as of this post), etc.
A visual representation of their Wanted Pages.
Don't even get me started on how they handle the Barba/Volvagia and Wart/Arrghus pages and how they prioritize English sources over the original Japanese, because the Encyclopedia by Dark Horse Comics, known for "borrowing" fan conjecture from fan wikis as sources, deemed them "canon"
Oh well, what can you do. I'm just yelling into the void. I only hope I'm not the only person who notices a problem, I feel like there should be some sort of civil conversation about this on their discord.
I am not in-the-know in the larger Zelda community as a whole, but I have heard no-so-fun things from an artist friend of mine who used to have some actual reach in the Zelda fandom spaces that this community tends to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to criticism. Not to mention how those fandom spaces seem to treat artists, such as cropping their signatures from social media posts, and ghosting commissioned artists. But as this is second-hand knowledge, I think that is a discussion for another time, preferably from someone with more knowledge and bigger reach.
No hard feelings towards the rest of their staff or contributors though. They're only doing their job. I only want to see the site get better, not worse.
The one thing I miss the most from the olden days is when they had a news feed on the home page that gathered blog posts from their various partnered sites. I used to check it every day before school to see if anything neat pops up.
Also fun fact, my one and only contribution to Zelda Wiki was uploading the original un-rotated image for the Lokomo Sword back when Spirit Tracks was new. Which I cropped from someone's direct-feed screenshot I found on google images. Sorry I was like 15 at the time.
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