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Contents 1 Internationally available video game? 2 Watermarked Images 3 Search suggestions 4 25,000 page celebration! 5 Video policy 6 Our 25,000th article 7 Archive

Internationally available video game?Edit

I saw this tweet on the Spanish Muppets twitter page, and what I'm guessing is that it's announcing a new video game. I Googled "Divertion Muppets" and came up with nothing signifigant. I tried the website link on their Twitter page and it looks as though the URL is incorrectly typed or something. Can anyone guess what the tweet means?--The World's Smelliest Onion (The World's Smelliest Message Wall) 20:05, May 24, 2012 (UTC)

Watermarked ImagesEdit

Hey all! I'm bringing this topic back in the hopes of deciding upon a new policy that works for everyone. Previously, we've had a few discussions about the use of watermarked pictures; particularly the Red Book stuff. I see some of it as helpful but a majority of it has been just copy and paste that anyone can do, and the general consensus from past admin discussions has been to not re-post every single pic they have. There's also watermarked ones like this and this from eBay that really don't look good, and I think should be removed altogether.

It's clear that a limit needs to be set on what and what not to include, and a lot of it, I think, is a matter of how interesting or notable a picture is, especially for the Red Book images. Pictures of memos and scripts aren't visually interesting to include on pages (though we can use them for reference), in comparison to this image Casey added to the Empire State Building page. It's a nice archive photo, and it's better if a caption is given (which I added). So, I think we should have an official policy listed that covers all of those boundaries; keeping watermarked images to a minimum, again depending on if an image is sufficiently interesting and essential to the Wiki in any way. Thoughts? -- Jon (talk) 21:31, May 20, 2012 (UTC)

I'm kind of okay with some of the watermarked Red Book pictures, especially for pages where there isn't another decent picture available. "Hip Hip Parade!" is an example -- the watermarked picture provides a lot more information than the page would have without it. I don't think those make us look bad -- we're Muppet Wiki, and to have some pics with a "Jim Henson" watermark on them makes sense for who we are.

I'm also okay with a watermark that's out of the way, if it's the only pic available. Sometimes I'll find some merchandise pic that has a little "LoveAToyShop.com" kind of thing in the lower right corner, and it's either that or nothing.

But those are the only ones that I think are acceptable -- stuff that says "Getty Images" all over it are not okay. The one that you linked to on the Simon Soundman walk-around page -- it breaks my heart, because if it wasn't watermarked, it would be perfect. Where else are you going to find the Simon character as the focus of the picture? But that watermark just doesn't work. Same for the Chicago Tribune pic on Around the World -- at least there we have another pic, and I'll post some screenshots from the TV commercial that's posted there. -- Danny (talk) 01:29, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

I sort of agree with both of you. Hip Hip Parade!, watermark aside, is similar to cases where we've used a newspaper article for lack of anything else. But it's not a memo or script. I think Jon meant those cases where Redbook images of Jim's memos or scripts and so on were uploaded, sometimes almost randomly. Most have been trimmed now, but as an example, there's stil The Witches. The letter on the Redbook page about the ending was uploaded, when we don't need to host that scan. What we need would be to actually work the *text* of that letter into the article, either quoting or summarizing and otherwise explaining Jim Henson's decision about the ending, and that concern came not from the studio but from Penguin (Dahl's publisher). That's all more interesting to anyone who wants to know than just slapping the document up there. (I'll try to work on it later, but not surprisingly, Witches hasn't been my main priority). The same goes for The Cube, which currently has an awkward image farm look and four Redbook images (only one isn't watermarked, the one of the cast and Jim Henson). The first two, of the documents, really aren't needed at all, even if one has part of a Henson doodle (the link to the relevant Redbook entry isn't even there; there's one, but the pics come from three different entries). The other two, we can caption and maybe better clarify where they come from and move down (since the one of Jim huddles is kind of neat). And there may still be other pages with that kind of thing, script pages, typewritten letters, scrawled memos, etc. which are interesting to us as hardcore fans, sure, but if Redbook is giving them a home, we don't need to re-upload them. Plus they're interesting to us in terms of the *information* they have, so if there's anything new or worth noting on the page in them, then we should write it out. Sort of like how way back we decided not to upload images of canceled checks or payroll letters just because Jim Henson signed them. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 03:16, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

I think a good rule of thumb for us using watermarked images is that we should only use them if there is no other visual representation of the subject available. A good example is this picture on Come Together and The Ed Sullivan Show (where we have no other image of the song); a bad example is this photo (where, although a unique pic, we have other Muppet Babies images). I know that the Red Book (and other sites) sometimes have really cool, rare, and unique photos; but simply being "cool" isn't enough. This behind the scenes picture is neat, but we have other images of Mirinda Craver so I'd rather we just link to the Red Book for it. This color picture of Jimmy Dean and Rowlf is unique, however we have plenty of other non-watermarked pictures for our The Jimmy Dean Show article. With few execeptions, I think the only time we should use a watermarked image is when the alternative would be using noimage.png. -- Brad D. (talk) 11:49, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Brad. Only use them if there is no other visual representation of the subject available. —Scott (message me) 14:42, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

That makes sense *and* is a simple, easy to state policy. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 16:09, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

Exactly what I was looking for. It's a reasonable limit to set on these images (though that could mean the image I brought up earlier will be removed). I'll go ahead and add a note to Policies and Guidelines. -- Jon (talk) 20:00, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, it's good that we think about this stuff as generally not-optimal. I totally agree with Andrew that it's better for us to write the interesting stories rather than just posting a script page as an image. Happily, the rhythms of working on a wiki support that cycle of improvement -- one person posts the pic, other people add and improve, we end up with an awesome page. -- Danny (talk) 23:35, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

In this case though, the other thing I wanted to stress is that we should make sure to link to the actual Redbook page in any case where we use images (which was not done in the case of the documents, and the Cube ones, such as here and here, have no info we can add at all, they're just neat for us hardcore geeks to see, but don't add much for our visitors). Actually one of the not-linked Redbook Cube articles (which a different image was mined from) had a different image, a cast list, which *had* some info (revealing actors and characters cut or recast from the final screenplay as filmed), so that's another reason I'd really like us to be sure we link to these Redbook entries properly (especially in some cases, like for Fraggle Rock stuff when I was using it as a source for my own book essay, there were so many by now it took some digging to find the specific ones I needed). So for document mining (ones with which are straight documents, not a newspaper article with a pic), I still think it's better to link to the site or mention it on the talk page (when we're talking outside docs, not stuff we actually have ourselves, and even then we usually talkpage it) than upload an image.

A better use is storyboards (with final camera images pasted over) ron Wilkins Coffee, for two missing commercials for Red Diamond which fits our "no other visual representation" rule and allows for more complete coverage. (Although I'd be fine with summarizing the storyboards as well, those have both info and visually represent the subject, it's not just names; possibly trimming to just one image rather than the whole board, and linking to the Redbook image where the commercial title is, but that's just general Wiki musing and fixing, as Danny said). And in part, watermarks aside, this is a general reminder to us to, whenever possible, cite sources (in cases where the pictures *are* the info, that's just as vital; same thing as we're starting to make better use of official online videos and so on) -- Andrew Leal (talk) 01:13, May 22, 2012 (UTC)

Search suggestionsEdit

Hi, folks -- just a heads-up about the search suggestions dropdown in the search box. The Search team is working on a bunch of improvements to our search results & experience. Yesterday, they released an improvement to the search suggestions dropdown that ended up breaking -- and they replaced it with a stop-gap version. The current version of the search suggest is not very good -- it's using redirects, but it's not weighting the most-linked-to pages, so the suggestions are pretty wonky.

I showed a bunch of examples to the guy running the Search project, and he agrees that this isn't a good solution... They're going to try to fix it as soon as they can. I just wanted to give you guys a heads-up if you noticed it. :) -- Danny (talk) 19:30, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

Someone linked me to the Wizard of Oz Muppet Babies episode on YouTube yesterday. I wanted to get to the page on the wiki, and all I knew was the episode title. I did a search for By the Book but it didn't come up until the 9th page of search results. I sent a bug report and got a response from Dopp saying they were working on making it better. —Scott (message me) 21:37, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah. It's in a funny stage right now -- I know what they're working on, and it'll be great (when it works), but it doesn't work yet. Search is complicated. They're working really hard. -- Danny (talk) 22:36, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

25,000 page celebration!Edit

Thanks to the Wikia Marketing team, we've got a really nice splash page celebrating our 25,000 pages! Check out Muppet Wiki:Milestones, which links to some of our best pages and categories. Feel free to share this with the people you know, and spread the word about the phenomenal wiki that we've built... and that we're gonna keep on building! 25,000 pages and still counting.... -- Danny (talk) 20:03, May 10, 2012 (UTC)

Yay! Where will marketing be posting the link? I see one on Facebook already. —Scott (message me) 20:09, May 10, 2012 (UTC)

Video policyEdit

Hi, folks! Scott's been doing some major clean-up of embedded videos today, part of which is due to changes in how Wikia categorizes it. But another problem is dead or duplicated or just poor quality links. We've discussed this way back and have it mentioned on the policy page, but not as fully as we should. It's the second item there and here's what it currently says: "Due to the frequency with which videos are removed from YouTube, we try to keep links to that site at a minimum. Some exceptions include accounts owned by regular contributors who are keeping an eye on their own links or cases where wiki information is being sourced. We also never link to anything that's commercially available. "

So here are some reminders, and also threshing out some ways to perhaps clarify or expand on that, since I know we've had a lot of users join since then.

• NO commercially available links. Bolded since this still happens. Scott deleted several today which were complete uploads of home videos which are still commercially available, and it's a common trap for new users as well. If the item is commercially available in any way (DVD, Blu-Ray, and now we have to include The iTunes Store and other digital vendors), do not duplicate. The obvious exception is select clips or if the whole item has been made available by the distributor or copyright owner (Lionsgate has done so with at least one or two Fraggle Rock episodes), but that's immediately obvious.

• Keep an eye on the links. We mention that, but it's often forgotten. YouTube videos can be and are deleted. If it's not your account, try to be aware of what you've embedded and where, especially if you know or suspect it's something that could raise copyright issues. Also, I strongly advise one to look not just at the neat Muppet clip, but at the *account* attached to it. Is it someone who's also uploading a lot of recent TV episodes or obviously pirated stuff or even just music video stuff? When a YouTube account is deleted, everything attached to it is gone, as well as if the user just decides to make it private. Some videos in fact are already that way.

• Avoid duplication. This is a big one. Somehow we wound up with two Green with Envy trailers, and I see we have a ton of videos uploaded to the international The Muppets (2011) pages. But many of the latter duplicate the OK Go and Forget You music videos, already on those pages, just under different names.

• Commercials. This one may be a "your mileage will vary" but I'm seeing multiple videos uploaded on Sesame Street Live pages, advertising local tours. When Elmo Grows Up has two right now, and originally had three. Do we even *need* those at all? It seems that commercials *with* Muppets are worth uploading, but we don't need every commercial or promo for a Sesame Live show, toy, or what have you, unless it's the only real documentation we have for a subject.

• Finally, and this is probably the biggest one after the commercial issue? Videos should *never* replace pictures. A video died on Sunday NFL Countdown and none of us took a screengrab, so the page now lacks illustration. A video is a nice supplement, but make sure a representative screengrab is included as well, for exactly that reason.

I think that covers the main reminders, although I'm not sure yet how to make all of this more concise for the policy page. If anyone has further suggestions or comments on video usage, please join in! -- Andrew Leal (talk) 01:38, May 10, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, this is good to talk about, because I think there's a lot that's changing these days with how the entertainment industry is thinking about video distribution. Wikia has a team that's working on making videos on the site better, and some of those people sit next to me, so I've been hearing a lot about videos lately -- not just about Wikia stuff, but generally about how things are changing.

One thing that's changing is people's expectations about where they'll see video content, and it's changing in the direction of: everywhere. Almost every website that has print content also has video content -- The New York Times, NPR, IO9 -- even the Disney Store's Muppet products page. :)

If you're reading an article or a blog post and there's relevant video content, you expect to see it embedded on the page, and not a link sending you somewhere else. (P.S. It's also not a great long-term strategy for a website to send its readers somewhere else to see a video, because then they'll start watching another video and they won't come back.)

But -- the thing that makes this work better for us is that there's suddenly a lot more "official" video out there. Like, a LOT more. Remember back in 2009 when we thought it was a good idea to make a list of the clips on the Sesame Street Video Player? We pretty much stopped updating those pages around the middle of last year, and the Sesame Street YouTube channel adds about 6 new videos a week.

Plus there's the classic episode collections on iTunes... It's still a crazy idea to think that they would release all 4,300 episodes on DVD, but making all 4,300 episodes available through one of the many streaming-video services? That's a lot less crazy than it seemed a couple years ago.

So, let's say we made a policy that we encourage contributors to embed videos that come from official sources (Muppet Studios, Sesame Workshop, Henson Company, NBC.com for Tonight Show appearances, whatever) -- and we won't allow anything else. If we made that policy back in 2006, it would have been the same thing as saying "No video on the site at all". It's still too early for us to actually do that -- but I think we could be heading in that direction.

There are a lot of big companies that are struggling over the streaming-video market -- Google/YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Apple/iTunes, Amazon Prime, all the TV networks. It's not clear right now who's going to win, but we're definitely going to see more official, licensed, embeddable video content coming our way soon. Some of it might come with commercials. (I'm hoping that Hulu figures out that it's not okay to show someone a 30-second ad before they watch a 3-minute Sesame Street clip.) But it'll be good quality stuff, legally and morally unambiguous, from sources that won't suddenly disappear.

So I'm okay with us getting more strict about bootleg videos, if we can also be more open to embedding official video. What do you guys think? -- Danny (talk) 04:01, May 10, 2012 (UTC)

I think that makes perfect sense. I know at one point I would have thought, "Why include a video link to C is for Cookie? It's on tons of DVDs and videos." But it *is* nice to have it at one's fingertips, and since we can do it with an official source and so give hits to Sesame, that's to the good. As you can see, I'm mostly concerned with the non-official stuff, duplications (regardless of the source), and trimming stuff like someone's home camera video of a TV The Muppets ad (I deleted that) and so on. Plus for myself, so much official stuff comes out that I can't keep up, and wouldn't be able to without the Wiki. Though for the record, on disappearing, we did have to clean up quite a bit of official Disney stuff for The Muppets, but that's because it was time-sensitive promotional stuff and they dumped it when they were ready for the next big push (the music videos, trailers, most of the major stuff is up; it was the interviews with the cast, director, and some of the Muppets which has gone, and which sadly included Uncle Deadly). -- Andrew Leal (talk) 04:10, May 10, 2012 (UTC)

Another guideline I'd like to include is to use some naming logic. Try to avoid special characters and name the video something relevant. With the new search feature, videos are coming up under the Multimedia tab, so this will be helpful when searching and managing. —Scott (message me) 01:51, May 11, 2012 (UTC)

Our 25,000th articleEdit

...was "Poems, Prayers and Promises" :) —Scott (message me) 06:26, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

=) Nice. Great to have that as the 25,000th page, and before May 16th as Ken predicted! Yay team! -- Jon (talk) 06:36, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

What a sweet way to do it! Only a billion more to go! - Oscarfan 10:49, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

Lovely! Hard to believe a couple of that special's beautiful songs weren't covered yet! Happy 25,000th, everyone! — Julian (talk) 11:36, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

Aw, thanks for noticing my note, Jon! And thanks to everybody who helped put us over the top! -- Ken (talk) 16:23, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

ArchiveEdit

12/05	01/06	02/06a	02/06b	02/06c	03/06a
03/06b	04/06	05/06	06/06	07/06	08/06
09-10/06	11/06	12/06	01/07	02/07	03/07
04/07	05-06/07	07-09/07	10-11/07	12/07	01-02/08
03-04/08	05-06/08	06/08	06/08a	07-09/08	10-12/08
01-06/09	07-12/09	2010	2011	2012