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User:On Sober Reflection

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Mission

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Hi. I'm On Sober Reflection. You know how lots of current-event Wikipedia articles include up-to-the-minute breaking news? The main purpose of this account is to revisit such articles to remove news that was once breaking but is now unimportant or irrelevant in the broader context.

Enthusiastic editors do Wikipedia a service, on the whole, with incremental "news of the moment" edits; but it is easy to lose perspective and add material that's interesting today but not notable next year, particularly on articles about countries and organizations that have a very long history and are in the news frequently.

On Sober Reflection (talk) 13:42, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Candidate articles and work tracking

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This user is a participant in WikiProject Video games.



Candidate article: Atari (many articles)

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Main new parent article: User:On Sober Reflection/Atari

Atari is a confusing mess. Our readers must be appalled. Incremental "news of the moment" edits are at fault for the worst excesses. Some thought is needed on how to really present this well to readers in a clear way, as opposed to doing what the articles do now, which is to throw readers into a swimming pool full of razor blades. We currently have articles:

  • Atari, allegedly about the corporate brand but actually a series of company histories, with incremental edits having muddled the focus of the article over time, and confusing the reader up front by adding ", SA" to the name and claiming without context that it's a French brand.
  • Atari, Inc., history of the original Atari through the sale to Warner in 1976 up until Warner in 1984 sold a bundle of stuff, said to be the "consumer division assets" of Atari, to Jack Tramiel with the name "Atari Corporation", while Warner retained the arcade division under the name "Atari Games".
  • Atari Corporation, the Jack Tramiel company that flushed out all the game console inventory, launched the "2600 Jr" and 7800, did the Atari ST line and some other products, released the Lynx, lost the less famous Nintendo lawsuit, released the Jaguar, and then got sold to "JT Storage", where apparently all Atari operations ceased. JT Storage then sold the Atari name and assets to Hasbro Interactive in 1998. 18 references.
  • Atari Games, which started in 1984 as "Atari, Inc. minus Atari Corporation" - the coin-op division of Warner's Atari, which in 1985 Namco bought a majority (?) of; Namco then sold their interest (?) to a group of employees (who and why?), then started selling NES cartridges in 1987 under the Tengen brand, lost the more famous Nintendo lawsuit; then, a controlling interest (how much?) was bought by Time Warner in 1993, then in 1994 the group was combined with a couple other groups and renmaed Time Warner Interactive; then in 1996 Atari Games (corporate entity? Brand? What about the rest of Time Warner Interactive?) was sold to WMS Industries (Williams/Midway), then Midway Games apparently renamed it Midway Games West in 1999; then in 2001 it stopped working on arcade games (?) and then was "disbanded" in 2003; in 2009 all Midway's IP was sold to Warner, where the rights may still lie. 8 references.
  • Atari, SA, the Infogrames article. This has become a grotesque sea of mind-numbing noise. It's almost entirely a detailed incremental list of company acquisitions and closings and divestitures. It barely talks about video games. Most of this ought to be a single checklist. It starts as a 1/3-page Infogrames history from 1983 to 1996, then goes through the acquisitions of 1996 to 2002 in detail without really talking about video games that were actually released, backtracks to talk about a few now-forgotten games that were deemed important at the time, and more company acquisitions. It then says in 2003, a new Atari Inc. was created as a separate NASDAQ listed company, and then some group was named Atari Europe, some other group was named Atari Interactive, Inc., and then there were 3 other companies with "Atari" in the name. Thanks a lot, Infogrames. Then there's talk of selloffs starting in 2003, a buyback of Atari Inc., more selloffs, then Infogrames changed its name to Atari, SA in 2009 apparently. Then finally in 2013 Atari (but how much of the entire Infogrames structure?) filed for bankrupty in the US, most of the IPs were sold, then bankruptcy ended for "all 3 Ataris" (dammit) in 2014 with a staff of 10 people, and continued to sell IPs to other publishers. There is an unenlightening list of 13 subsidiaries and a big ugly table of 20 former subsidiaries, and a great big bullet point list of game franchises, important and unimportant, owned by Atari, SA - but is this still true? Surely this has not been audited. This article has 85 references. This article might be the poster child of fatal incrementalism on Wikipedia: 326 revisions since this page was created, under this name, in October 2009; 521 revisions on the page "Infogrames" before it was turned into a redirect to "Atari, SA". 16.5 pages on my monitor.
    • I imagine there was some sort of vote to close down the Infogrames article and redirect it to this. Today I think this should be reevaluated, with an emphasis on extending some mercy to the reader. The bulk of this company's achievements occurred when it was called Infogrames, and my opinion this minute is that it would be a net benefit to readers to call the company Infogrames, despite the name it bore toward the end.
  • Atari, Inc. (Atari, SA subsidiary), another awful example of fatal incrementalism, starting as a history of GT Interactive, then zooming into more breathless lists of acquisitions and divestitures, revenue numbers, and much repeating of the same from Atari, SA after Infogrames bought GT Interactive in 1999.
  • Atari Interactive, a refreshingly short article that nevertheless doesn't do much to enlighten the reader. Maybe I just can't read straight after reading the above articles.
  • Atari (disambiguation). Of course.

This is a lot of work. Tasks:

  1. Take a look at Infogrames (the original) and Atari, SA to see if a vote existed at some point to understand why Infogrames was made into a redirect
  2. Assess the original Infogrames to see whether its content would be a win to present again
  3. Find out: What is Wikipedia's most complex similar set of articles about a business? How did they present this to readers? The freaking General Mills article is a compact 7 pages on my monitor, to cover the much more complex history of a much larger and older corporation that has to have had many more acquisitions and divestitures. They all just happened before Wikipedia, so people didn't add a note about every little addition and subtraction and newly created division.
    1. Was there a flowchart for this "most complex company" article? Can we present a flowchart or timeline?
      1. The Federal government of the United States is the most complex organization in the world, so let's look at that. 9 pages on my monitor. It is the master article, and has sections like "Legislative branch" with a neat "Main article: United States Congress" beneath it, that then describes it. "History" is 3 paragraphs, ha. I like the idea that it is the main article and that there are separate articles going into detail about each section. I think the captioned picture at the beginning of each section does a good job of helping make the sections visually distinct.
      2. 28-Mar-2019: This is in fact what the "Atari" article does. It just needs some cleanup.
      3. "For those considering entering into the Brexit flowchart game, Mr. Worth has some salient advice: have a clear objective before you start drawing, and think about what you’re trying to achieve. "My aim is to see Brexit decisions as predictable and see these decisions flow from one to another," he said." - NYT article 29-Mar-2019
  4. A quick task could be to repair the "Atari" article first. But it should not claim it is an article about a brand. Atari was the critical pioneer in the first age of arcade and console games, and then became important to different groups of people with its later arcade games, its computers, its later consoles and games, and maybe its software. Let's present a clear chart of some sort to readers so they can recognize which Atari they're looking for and jump to the article about that.
  5. Consider whether the North Star for this mission should be to have a single Atari article, for readers' benefit. What would that look like? Probably all the newly branded companies exist in articles named after their pre-Atari-branding names, and the subsidiaries that in the end are going to be footnotes in 20 years - let's make them article sections in the appropriate article.

Candidate new article: International Consortium on Landslides checkY

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Title page

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  • Needs video game title page checkY

Scandals

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Ooh, Category:2018 scandals

Category:2017 scandals

May 2019:

June 2019:

Update template

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Ooh2,

Related, Template:Show by date is brilliant - say A if the article is being viewed before a certain date, say B if not


RECENT

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Candidate article: Casual game

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Fix candidate: Game classification and Game genre

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Right now game genre is a redirect to Game classification which is a very academic approached that is not used by any players, developers, or publishers. (I fixed this by just changing the redirect to Video game genre, which I had not noticed.) checkY

p-value

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p-value intro is not written for the layman. User test area: User:On Sober Reflection/p-value

Matilda the Musical

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Matilda the Musical's Production section lists many cast member changes and details on special performances. I added a toomuchdetail tag for now.



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