Current Events > More on the story of Wikipedia fucking over pro wrestling fans

(+) Yeah! (+)

As you've probably heard from the dozen posts about it in the last week or two, the most active members of the Wikipedia Pro Wrestling Project have made the decision to remove the "In wrestling" / "Professional wrestling highlights" section from all wrestler's posts. This section generally contained movesets, entrance music and managers.

The brief history is that at the end of last month, a generalist editor proposed that the section, particularly it's title was too vague. This at first lead to the section name change from "In wrestling" to "Professional wrestling highlights", which was put into place about a month ago now. All is well. However, somewhere throughout the sea of horrendous wikipedia talk formatting, the idea of removing the section entirely was proposed and gained some traction.

On the 25th of June, a public albeit generally unpromoted (although I'm unsure of exactly how this vote could be made more known) vote was held. The options, as proposed by who I believe to be the defacto leader of the whole project were to call the section "Pro wrestling details", "Pro wrestling highlights", or to eliminate the section entirely. Eliminating the section won out, 7 votes to 1.

The closing comment read as follows:

Overwhelming consensus is to eliminate the "in wrestling"/"professional wrestling highlights" section in general from biographies and articles on teams/stables. If content is important to the article subject it should be worked into the prose, potentially in a "wrestling persona" section.

Which brings us to now. Frequent debate continues on the aforementioned Talk page, but the project will undoubtedly stand it's ground. I would say that it's not necessarily the editors' faults so much as the problem with Wikipedia as a whole. Their motto is "guidelines and policies", and these are far more important to them than whether the articles are useful / practical / important to people because of the perception they seem to have of these guidelines as a totalitarianism ruler that must be obeyed to the dot.

The new idea gaining traction is to include information in prose - An example from Daniel Bryan's page here (*post 2) - but the problem, in my eyes with this approach is that it's still impossible to list signature moves that perhaps have little character relation - take Okada's tombstone piledriver or Sami Zayn's blue thunder bomb. These could only be detailed by "this move is done by this person", which would no doubt be removed by one of many other guideline addicted editors.

By no means is this post intended to offend those editors. I only say that their faith seems to be placed more in guidelines, policies and rules; more than it is in creating good, informative content. The original complaints about this section came from its unsourced and overwhelming amount of trivia on an extremely broad level ("Chop, vertical suplex"). It needed trimming, not removal. It really seemed like the people who wanted to remove this section were the same people who had maintained it for several years - doing something for the sake of doing it, not because it ultimately provides any benefit.

Anyway, it's not going to change. It's been set already and there's going to be a whole lot of usurping drama if someone really, really wants it back. Many editors over there have recommended Pro Wrestling Wikia, but if you briefly read through Pro Wrestling Wikia yourself you'll realise that it is primarily sourced from Wikipedia. Other databases with moves (Cagematch, Wrestling Data, etc.) have extremely brief descriptions, and as far as I know (other than the top 50 moves of x) videos there are no other easy sources.
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So I guess the next step here may well be creating a new place for moves (perhaps entrance music and other """trivia""" too), whether it'll be a Reddit wiki or hosted someplace else. I might look into making it happen soon, but I'll need a whole lot of help if I do ultimately do so.

tl;dr -

They're trying to save space so they deleted a huge section of important information from Wikipedia about them, mostly their move sets, entrance music, ect.

Well, it's still there, but it's really, really bad now. Fucking so idiotic.
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Bad_Mojo posted...

They're trying to save space so they deleted a huge section of important information from Wikipedia about them

Well, it's still there, but it's really, really bad now.

Huh? Then what exactly are they doing? Or rather why are they doing it. How is it saving space if all of it's still there just moved around?
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JustMyOpinion posted...

Nobody cares.

I follow wrestling and nope I don't care
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Well, here are some people that do care -

https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/8w6z5b/summary_of_the_whole_wikipedia_situation/


Hey apparently all the wrestlers movesets from the 1980s don't exist anymore because there's no "sources" online to verify them. It's so fucking stupid, I've had some articles in the early 2000s get ruined because the original sources for them have went down many years ago.

Their pages just feel empty and pointless now. The In Wrestling section was always the first thing I checked on someones page

So TLDR is that these wikipedia contributors don't know shit about wrestling and don't want to bother looking up the details of what they're amending? At its core it seems like the entire thing is just laziness by some unpaid volunteers thinking they're not paid enough to do a thorough job on wikipedia and the prose section seems like a shitty attempt at discouraging people from readding the details in a horribly cumbersome way.

For the record one of the things I loved in that section is wrestlers entrance music being listed, that was a very hard to find list covering entire careers and it was just nuked with no thought process.
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JustMyOpinion posted...

This board spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about reddit. Why should we treat reddit as valid now?

Valid? This is a real news story, and people are upset. There is nothing to validate. And nobody is complaining about Reddit, what the fuck? We're complaining about Wikipedia.
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This is a stupid change, but I can't say I really care. It sucks for wrestling fans that do, though.
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Why isn't there just a section that says "signature moves"? How was that not one of the proposed solutions to begin with?
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Howl posted...

Why isn't there just a section that says "signature moves"? How was that not one of the proposed solutions to begin with?

There used to be, they deleted it.
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I do care and it is sad to hear about this. It would be as if the "popular paintings" section for artist pages was removed.
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And BTW, this was supposed to be posted in the WWE section, lol. I know CE doesn't give a damn about pro wrestling. Even if there is an awesome wrestling show this weekend, for Free* (Got to have access to the AXS channel on Cable or Satellite) from New Japan with the main event being Omega vs Cody, and the match of the night will be Dragon Lee vs Takahashi
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Bad_Mojo posted...

Howl posted...

Why isn't there just a section that says "signature moves"? How was that not one of the proposed solutions to begin with?

There used to be, they deleted it.

Not according to what your op says...

They were listed under the "in wrestling" section, then the proposed sections offered up were "pro wrestling details" and "pro wrestling highlights."
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Bad_Mojo posted...

This is a real news story, and people are upset.

*puts stoogie in mouth*

This isn't news.

*throws papers across room*

Now get outta here and get me something we can sell.
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Does this effect any other children's television show on Wikipedia?
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Howl posted...

Not according to what your op says...

They were listed under the "in wrestling" section, then the proposed sections offered up were "pro wrestling details" and "pro wrestling highlights."

I think we're talking about different things, but I don't know how to explain it without a screen cap of what it used to look like.

There used to be a section here that said, "In Wrestling" that listed all the moves. That's what I was saying, there WAS a section, but now it's gone


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It's not like wrestling fans can even read, who cares?
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Bad_Mojo posted...

Howl posted...

Not according to what your op says...

They were listed under the "in wrestling" section, then the proposed sections offered up were "pro wrestling details" and "pro wrestling highlights."

I think we're talking about different things, but I don't know how to explain it without a screen cap of what it used to look like.

There used to be a section here that said, "In Wrestling" that listed all the moves. That's what I was saying, there WAS a section, but now it's gone

What I'm saying is that the people who were concerned about the move lists etc. being listed in the wrong category who voted on this did so because they were actually listed in the wrong category and the category that would have been correct was never actually offered as a solution. This is the reason why this happened.

A section titled "signature moves" was never even proposed. This is why they voted 7-1 against the proposed solutions.
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I wondered why I didn't see Foley's moves on his article

Wikipedia has always been pretty stupid about these things though.

JustMyOpinion posted...

Pictures of Spider-Man?

Yes
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Howl posted...

What I'm saying is that the people who were concerned about the move lists etc. being listed in the wrong category who voted on this did so because they were actually listed in the wrong category and the category that would have been correct was never actually offered as a solution. This is the reason why this happened.

A section titled "signature moves" was never even proposed. This is why they voted 7-1 against the proposed solutions.

Got it
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