Thought I'd throw up a thread here for us to hi-light major revisions, or additions to the Transformers wiki -- Tfwiki.net.

Wikis already have a pages that recount ALL changes to them. But they can be a little bit hard to follow. Especially for casual observers, since they don't really differentiate well between major changes that are worth reading, and minor typographical corrections.

Basically the idea here is that if someone makes a major new page -- or a major revamp of an old page -- they could throw it up here for the general public to peruse. Not only that but to provide a forum for people to discuss changes (you CAN also do it on the wiki... but I'm thinking more, "Wow! Do you see what they did there?" type discussion, than actual page-construction mechanics), and to generally talk about how awesome our fan community is.

Also hoping a thread like this could get people excited about editting in general -- and about seeing how much there still is to do on the TF wikis.

While I'm biased towards Tfwiki.net, I wouldn't discourage links to other wikis. Well, I would -- but I probably shouldn't because the Allspark isn't directly affiliated with either.

Anyway... hope this thread is in the right place.

To get things kicked off here's my first contribution to the newly moved Wiki.

DEATH'S HEAD'S PAGE
Link
Death's Head
Revision/Addition
Basically this page was pretty terrible before -- I completely re-wrote it from scratch (Well more or less) to compensate for DH sort of overlapping TF in a strange way that's unique to his character... and to put the whole thing into Death's Head's voice. Also uploaded and added a bunch of pics of Death's Head from various artists. Check it out and tell me whatcha think, guys.


--Boltax
(I need to change my Avatar sometime.)

I like it being in the style of his speech. However, I don't think it works being in "first person". It just feels a bit off to me, especially when other articles (Like, say, Wheelie) do follow the particular speech patterns of the character without writing it as if the character was composing their own article.

Other than that, I do like it. Feels like there's a bit more meat to the article.

A few months back I went and did an episode synopsis for the Armada ep "Tactician."

Problem is, I can't find the part of the site where you are actually supposed to register in order to make edits.

If I posted it here, could you copy it over there?

Registration link is in the red box in the upper left corner.

I discovered a Dungeons and Dragons character.

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/A_Decepticon_Raider...llaneous_trivia

I don't think you did. They're just both wearing similar archetypal medieval outfits.

I have a question for those of you who know a lot about the wiki. is there a page that lists all known "reproduction" KOs, and how to differentiate between them and the real thing?

If not, that may be a worthwhile thing to do.

We're not a collector's guide, we're an encyclopedia.

There are external links on the Knockoff article where you can find the information you seek, though.

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Bootleg#High_Qualit..._1_Counterfeits

That's about as close as the wiki will probably get, as we avoid articles on unofficial product.

http://www.tfwiki.net/wiki/Beastformer

Since I seem to be the only person on the planet who owns every issue of the Battle Beasts comic book, I added the longest and most thorough series description to be found anywhere on the Internet (including Wikipedia and every single BB fan site that listed on Google).

Granted it's still at the "blurb" stage, but when I get the time there will be an issue-by-issue breakdown. EXCLUSIVE CONTENT, baby, mwahaha!

Until some loser at Wikia copies and pastes it into the Wikia Transformers wiki.

: (

Tactician

It's really crude, some of the links aren't working right, the formatting is all shot to slag, and I can't even figure out how to get it displayed as an active link on the other relevant pages.

Could someone mind going over it for me?

Thanks.

Basic wiki coding:

Internal links:
[[Optimus Prime (G1)]] links to "Optimus Prime (G1)", and displays "Optimus Prime (G1)"
[[Optimus Prime (G1)|truck]] links to "Optimus Prime (G1)", and displays "truck"
[[Optimus Prime (G1)|]] links to "Optimus Prime (G1)", and displays "Optimus Prime"

Headings:
=heading text= gives a 1st level heading.
==heading text== gives a 2nd level heading. for 3rd level, use three = sighs.

''text'' displays text
'''text''' displays text

A ":" is an indent, and a "*" is a bullet point

Thanks.

I got the internal links fixed, and someone set up the "clean-up" tag and got it listed on the other pages.



You'd think that with the entire series out on DVD someone other than me would be trying to flesh out the episode summaries.

We've found that on some levels, the types of fans that edit the wiki are not the types of fans that were overly enthusiastic about the Unicron Trilogy cartoons and their lousy US releases.

Completed the guide for the Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers manga. Now the storylinks in Murdered puppy finally work!

I had an especially amusing time writing up the article for issue #7 and Wrist-communicator, trying to figure out an in-canon reason that Makoto would have a device that allows him to communicate with and summon Galvatron before Galvatron even existed.

Thanks to Hirofumi Ichikawa's retcons, all likelihood points to Makoto's wrist-communicator being a representation of Galvatron II. That means that a small Japanese boy had the power to communicate with and summon back-up from the most out-of-his mind psychotically insane Transformer in the entire multiverse.

So much story potential.

I've been working on doing full-blown, top-to-bottom articles for the cast of Masterforce, most recently Sixknight, Godbomber and Grand Maximus. Also completed are all six Headmaster Juniors, Hydra, Buster, Lightfoot, and our current featured article, Ginrai. I shall, of course, not hestitate to use this thread to pimp the hell out of future ones.

I once put in the Japanese titles to the Cybertron episode list long before the move but that got yanked for some reason. If Car Robots/RiD and Superlink/Energon has their Japanese titles, then why were the GF titles pulled? Because of the episode ordering issue? Or because of fans that aren't enthusiastic with the UT?

I was wondering, is information printed in the IDW and Dreamwave MTMTE and Sourcebooks official for the Wiki then? For instance, the way MTMTE or the Beast Wars Sourcebook calls certain characters Triple Changers.

Also, there are two commercials for G2 Dreadwing, one has him calling himself "Triple Changing Dreadwing" and the other has the announcer saying "Dreadwing is a Triple Changer!" Do Commercials count as official, or is that too removed from the fiction?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiOD7SoF6iQ

Any chance of the Wiki actually denoting the lyrics of the G2 Transformers rap songs? You know, stuff like Aerialbots vs. Combaticons song?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h18AG_Y33CY...feature=related

So that's where "Big bad battlin' dudeicus" came from...

Well, how many things can you come up with that rhyme with "Bruticus"?

I've been trying to translate the lyrics of these G2 commercials.

I noticed there are 2 versions of the Combat Heroes commercial, one with rap, and one with traditional Transformers music and an announcer. The lyrics of the rap have left me reeling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6IYAnMLLts

Kid - Battle Tank!
Optimus Prime - Battle This!
Rap singer: "It's heavy metal crunching time with Optimus Prime, goes toe to toe with power pack Megatron. Prime is one tough dude, but underneath this hood, he's a transformin - missile firin pheneneom!"
etc. etc.

I think it has more to do with the fact that it's a very crappy comic than anything. Cause there's several collectors I recall having them on the BF collectors forum. One or two guys even have runs of the foreign comics, which are interesting, but no better quality then the U.S. comics.



Yeah, but it doesn't make up for having errors in other parts of the BF section.

You could always be point out what errors those might be, instead of unhelpfully sniping at everyone who contributes to the fandom.

That's the thing about Wikis, anyone can fix things. By golly, even you!


On another topic, I dug up further toy concept related weirdness. Check the Pretender or Twin Twist pages' trivia to see it.

I'm being half-sarcastic; obviously SOMEBODY on Earth must own the whole comic run, just because it was so brief and relatively recent. At the very least, the writer's mother must own copies. But, seriously, I looked and looked for anything on them in the English Internet, and found nada.

And I don't know that I'd call it significantly worse than average for a toy-based storyline product. Which means, yeah, it's not very good, but since we're talking within a certain context already it's not abnormally bad. If it were a "real" Transformers comic in and of itself, it probably wouldn't stand out from the crowd in terms of badness.



Feel free to fix 'em.

I wanted to add mention in the TransTech section about how designs were used elsewhere, but I didn't know for certain if official sources have said that Armada Megatron came from the TransTech Megatron design, or if it's just vaguely similar. On the other hand, I'm fairly certain Armada Scavenger was said to be from a TransTech design, and that one looks about as similar...
Also, I was too lazy to try and find if it was officially mentioned.

then again, I'm guessing you guys aren't as anal about "citation required"... do you even have those?

I did notice that in the TransTech section it mentioned how the design for Cheetor was partial inspiration for Animated Blurr.

We're both better and worse than Wikipedia about reliable sources. We are better in that we're not as stringent as them on what can be considered admissible. We're worse than them because we're very focused on Transformers subject matter and so we tend to catch dodgy stuff (leaks, stuff that's too nonspecific, stuff that is probably tentative) earlier in the edit process.

We're getting better at explaining the wonky way we vet info to new folks, though. Stuff like this ought to help you figure it out.

this has probably been asked before, but, will the featured article of the day ever be randomized, so i don't have to read about ginrai everyday?

The 'Bruticus' commercial brought me back to '92. I was in 3rd grade back then.

1992. When Jurassic Park was king of the box-office and the toy isle, when a blue hedgehog ran rampant on tv and on the Sega Genesis. A time when Nintendo and Sega were rivals....

Goood times. Goood times.

We usually do a different featured article each month, shortly after a big improvement drive on that article.

Yeah, featured articles aren't random. They're picked out for being the most complete and informative.

Galaxy Force manga index article.

May not look like a lotta work, but I DID have to translate the titles for all those issues. Had to break out the Kanji Fast-Finder for a few of em, too, which was annoying. Still not too comfy with "gekisou" as "race", but none of my encyclopedeas, both tangible and online, have ever heard of it. The kanji literally translate to "violent run" individually.

Any of you other Japanese speakers out there better acquainted with this word?

Anyhow, it's too bad Mission 7-12 are a mystery (unless any of you guys own the 2006 issues of Comic Bom Bom they were printed in), since leaving their titles blank looks so fugly.

Jurassic Park came out in 1993, and its toys clogged shelves horribly, IIRC.

"Intense Race Planet" might work as for "Gekisou no Hoshi". "Furious Race Planet" COULD work, but it's in the case of "furiously typing away" context rather than "he was so furious". "Gekisu" means to "to intensify", "to be excited".

"Saisoku" 最速 I got is "fastest", so wouldn't Mission.5 be "Fastest Dream"?

Hydra does but like he said back at here, it's in storage. Shame there's only one used bookstore in Downtown LA... Or we could be in Jinboucho and going gaga like Yomiko Readman.

Not sure if this counts but according to the Japanese Wiki article on Comic Bom Bom, GF ran Feb. 2005 - October 2005, although that doesn't quite match it up to 12 chapters. That should've made it eight chapters...?

EDIT: Ya know, I just noticed something while poking through Cybertron's franchise article... This pic? Correct me if I'm wrong but was that done by Tsujima Naoto, the same person who's doing the Henkei mini-manga?

You're right about the Mission 5 translation. Thanks. "Intense Race Planet" sounds reasonable to me, so that's cool, too.

Now as for the number of issues, I dunno. I'd heard that there were 12 chapters, but I trust the Japanese wiki over my own memory. Having only 8 issues would make the fact that it was never completed and collected make more sense, certainly.

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Category_talk:Images

Something I've got cooking, which we should have done a long time ago... is finally getting down to categorizing images. It'll be nice to be able to answer semi-quickly "hey, do we already have an image of ______ I can use?" by checking out sub-divided categories of images. And finding them via image type (toy pic, boxart, screen grab, etc) or subject (G1, Cybertron, etc) to make it even easier to look em up.

And while it's a buttload of work... a lot of it can be done semi-quickly simply by perusing articles. Click the image, tag it with the appropriate category, make sure it's tree'd properly, and boom. Not a lot of dedication involved, do a few a day.


M "Lots of Little Tweaks..." Sipher

ok, that actually makes a lot of sense.

Oh, we know the ones! See here:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Commercial#1994


As for recent changes, I've been working on the Micromaster accessories. There's still a few missing, but:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Category:Micromaster_vehicles

I'm particularly proud of Greasepit's gas station:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Gas_station

Jim Sorenson has likewise been taken up the banner for the Action Master accessories:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Category:Action_Master_Vehicles

This one's especially amusing:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Stratotronic_Jet

Sipher's kicked in some help on all of these, too.

S:

Or sometimes for various other reasons, like being about Rorza, the Rocket-Cycle Racer from Rigel III.

(To be sure, that article is complete by definition, since it contains pretty much everything we know about Rorza.)

Nice. The Stratotronic jet could use a little clean-up visually (something I personally suck at), but I reads wonderfully. Nice stuff to be working on too. *grin*

EDIT: Heh. I couldn't resist adding a little information to some of the Micromaster accessories pages. Yay. This thread has done its work. At least for me.
--Boltax
(I love Micromasters, love to see them getting some love, too.)

And now, the mainpage has a "This day in history" bit, where events from TF history are cataloged. Yeah, right now it's pretty embryonic, but as we go on, it'll feature comic release dates, episode premiers, movie stuff, BotCon/Club dates, creator birthdays...


M "A Nice Lil Daily History Lesson" Sipher

Which is darn neat. I had my doubts, but now that there's a decent calendar system to track which days have pages already, it's pretty easy to edit.

I've been going on a major "This day in history" tear. Lotta VA birthdays (and some death days). And I'm starting in on episode premiers in different countries. Tossed in some BotCon/Club notes, need more BotCon stuff. Need more creator birthdays too, not just the VAs.

I am finding, though, that our notes on when episodes aired in certain countries is... lacking. Like, the whole time-displacement issue with late season-2 Animated between the US, UK and Canada? Little to no mention. I think that needs fixing.


M "I'm Just Glad I Got A Full List Of Japanese G1 Cartoon Air-Dates" Sipher

Been working on a standardized template for doing toy writeups:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Template:Toybox

On the way to that eminently sensible destination, I made a toy!
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Template:Techspecgraph

Is that one open to use yet?

The toy writeup template probably needs some other folks to establish consensus on its use and format.

The silly little tech spec graph template I offer freely to whoever wants to use it, but it's unlikely to see official use on the articles themselves.

I may go through and start tech spec-ing articles if a decision is made as to where on the page it would go.

Well, if you look at the talkpage for the toy writeup template, I've gone with Sipher's suggestion of a numeric readout without the graphs. It's just invisible unless you fill it out, but an example of how it looks with that feature active is on the talkpage.

Okay, the "This day in history" thing is going pretty damn well. There's something listed for every date in October so far (except the 12th... something of note had to have happened then!), and I'm sure as we go on, more information will come up...

Which is where some of you can come in. This is a pretty quick and easy thing to update. We're missing basically the whole run of comics; if anyone here wants to go in and start filling out comic release dates even for recent stuff, that would be awesome. Or even announced upcoming stuff where we know the date.


M "Every Little Bit Helps" Sipher

One the Transformers Club fiction forum site I recently asked for clairification on the Shattered Glass Predacons and Whisper. Pete stated that they are small in size, the earlier bits where they are depicted as full sized is a scale error in the comic. He also states that the Predacons and Whisper are Micromasters, not Mini-Cons. If Pete says so, I guess this is official, doens't it?