Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20100106/Interview

WikiProject Video Games Newsletter

Volume 2, No. 6 — 4th Quarter, 2009

Changes to Featured and Good content | News items and announcements | Feature | Featured editor

Featured editor: PresN

This issue we continue our regular feature, profiling a "Featured editor". This is a chance to learn more about the various editors who contribute to the Video games project and the roles they fill.

PresN is a long time video games editor that has been contributing to the project since 2006. He has contributed to two Did You Know? facts, 30 Good Articles, 1 Good Topic, and 1 Featured List. Most of his accomplishments have been Square Enix- and video game music-related articles.

What drew you to Wikipedia, and what prompted you to begin editing?
I noticed Wikipedia sometime in 2005 while in college, and really liked the idea of aggregating data from everywhere into a cohesive whole. I also liked the idea of creating something that people from all over would read, and sometime in the summer of 2006 I had enough spare time that I decided to jump right in and start editing.
How did you become involved with the project?
Like most people I started editing articles that related to things I enjoyed, and so I quickly came to video game articles. After noticing a "Computer and Video Games WikiProject" banner on a talk page, I looked in on the project and liked seeing the level of discussion that went on. Like today, there were dozens of threads on the main talk page with tons of people discussing themes and issues affecting hundreds of articles. I felt that if I wanted to spend a lot of time editing articles, I should get involved in the project that was running them. I then spent almost a year and a half mainly WikiGnoming around the project— tagging/assessing thousands of talk pages and running the deletions page, the new articles page, and the assessments page for a couple of months each before leaving them to other editors. It wasn't until the start of 2008 that I began to seriously write articles.
As a very active member, what do you think you bring the most to the project?
I think the biggest skill I bring to the project is, for lack of a better term, polished content generation. I don't just write articles, I write "good" articles (though generally not "great" (featured) articles), and as many of those as we have its a tiny percentage of the ~24000 articles in the project. I prefer to make a dozen more Good Articles than two dozen stubs or start-class articles. I also know how to write good music sections in game articles, as I know how they should look, where the sources are, and which sources will fly at a Good Article or Featured Article nomination. This means that I can write a music section in at least half the time of most other editors in the project, which in turn frees them up to write sections and articles that they are better at than me.
What article(s) are you most proud of writing or exemplifies your best work?
I'm the most proud of the Music of the Final Fantasy series Good Topic, especially its lead article Music of the Final Fantasy series. This topic is what initially kick-started me into writing articles—I was annoyed at how all of these articles on these famous songs and soundtracks were so poorly filled-out, and decided that I was going to be the one to fix them. 15 months later, I had written 16 Good Articles, compiled a (very prose-filled) Featured List, and rewritten a prior Good Article to make the topic. There's not too many people who can say they've done that. I'm honestly proud of all of the articles I've worked on though, which might explain my obsessive cataloging them on my user page.
The Music of the Final Fantasy series Good Topic was quite a daunting effort. What roadblocks did you encounter and how did you deal with them?
The largest roadblock I had was figuring out how to write the articles in the first place. When I started, Music of Final Fantasy VIII and Music of Kingdom Hearts were already Good Articles, but other than that there weren't really any articles I could look to for guidance for what structure and references the articles should use, and I wasn't totally sold at the time on the way those articles were set up. I pretty much just started writing, looking around for sources and adding information as I found it into a structure that was similar to that of FF8's. With each article, though, I learned a little bit more and got a few more ideas about how to write the articles, so I think each article is a little bit better than the one I wrote before it. I also was in my senior year of an electrical engineering degree during much of the project, so finding the free time to write was difficult—I've noticed that since graduating, my rate of output as increased dramatically.
What do you think is the most difficult part of editing on Wikipedia?
For me it's definitely copy-editing. I have very few articles I've ever written that didn't have some other editor or a reviewer stop by and fix some poor sentence construction or spelling errors that I couldn't see when I re-read the article. I think that's a problem that we all face—at least, it seems to be a theme in these "featured editor" interviews.
Are there any projects you are working on right now?
The Final Fantasy music topic pretty much made video game music articles into my "thing", so I've been on a more vague project since then to improve other articles related to the subject. I started with the music of other video game series, then moved to video game music composers. Recently, though, I've branched out to non-music articles, saving a few video game articles at Good Article Review and trying to get to Good Article status a few video game articles like Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy IV.
What else would you like others to know about you?
For some of the articles I've written—like Music of the SaGa series—not only have I not played the games, I've never even heard any of the music. It makes it a bit harder to get motivated at first, but I think it also helps ensure that my personal biases don't creep into the article. I'd also like to note that, obscure as these articles may seem (an article on the music of an obscure series, many games in which never left Japan? Really?) 15 people a day read that article, so since it was promoted to Good Article status about 450 people have read it. That may pale in comparison to Music of the Final Fantasy series (180 a day, ~5000 a month), but I can't think of a single non-wiki thing I've ever written that got read by 450 people in a month. So just remember that no matter how obscure a subject seems, there are plenty of people out there who are interested in it.

Also read about our previous Featured editor: Kung Fu Man