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| '04?
| This user discovered the H*R website in 2004 or so.
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| '06?
| This user discovered the H*R Wiki in 2007 or so.
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Been a fan of H★R for years and years, and it has had a nigh-incalculable influence on my sense of humor and speech patterns.
Also: I've made it onto yonder website twice times!
[edit] Contributor-ing
A great deal of my earlier contributions to the wiki were gnome work, and to this day I stil like to hit "Random page" until I find something that has gone uncorrected since the Bush administration. But I have moved on to more advanced edits as well —
- Improve article ledes
- A lot of articles consist of a giant lede followed by the "appearances" list. These thick 'n' nasty ledes are often just a single rambling paragraph, a blow-by-blow of appearance recaps, caused by editors just appending a sentence when a new incidence occurs. I like to break those up into paragraphs and add headers so articles can describe the subject more clearly.
- Add headers and sub-bullets
- Wiki formatting lets us use headers, so I say embrace it! Navigability and readability is nice to have.
- Avoid over-reliance on in-universe rationale
- It's fun to try and rationalize every inconsistency in a Marvel No-Prize sort of way, but a lot of times the answer is just "the Brothers Chaps made it up and then changed their minds". Sometimes DVD commentaries are improvised jokes, not hard-set canon. It's a neat thinking exercise to try and rationalize Homsar as suffering from receptive aphasia, but at the end of the day he's a cartoon man doing something that the writers thought would be funny and you should really just relax.
- Reduce use of "Apparently"
- Not to get all Giraffedata up in here but in the vast majority of cases such weasel-wordery can be avoided. It seems for years there was a trend to avoid being presumptuous, but it went too far to the point where tons of articles have annoyingly vague wording along the lines of "the Compy is presumably Strong Bad's computer, which he apparently uses to check emails". It's not a huge leap of logic to make the sort of assertions that are being elided; just drop the "apparently".
- Reduce use of "However"
- As fun as it is to play "Name That Inconsistency", don't lose sight of H*R being an extremely loose-canon collection of one-off cartoons. Overly rationalizing inconsistencies can lead to a bunch of awkward "however, it could just be..." sentences appended to statements - sometimes even right after another sentence starting with "however"! It's better to rewrite to say something like "There is inconsistency in [x]: in [y], [1]; in [z], [2]".
- Provide historical context
- As we approach 20 years from the peak of H*R activity and a full decade from the crucial hiatus, increasing amounts of the body of work may require historical context. Something like the Weekly Fanstuff may have been obvious and well-known in 2007, but in 2024 it's been so long since a true update to it that new fans may be wholly unaware of how it worked ("Were you there 19 years ago? (Were you born?!)" as SB puts it). Putting more detail to explain something from the '00s or '10s — site function or general culture of the era — can be valuable.
[edit] Might-Coulds
Various elements of wiki editorship that I feel vaguely strongly about.
[edit] Articles
Things that the wiki could potentially have an article about someday. Or not.
- Cosplay
- Strong Bad being called "Strongbad" (b/w Strong Badia being called "Strongbadia")
- Multiple exclamation points!!
- This is a minor but distinctive writing gag on par with Lowercase i's with how much it subtly shows up when one exclamation mark will do (see: Strong Bad Email Page Titles). Probably too hard to search for and document, and not that notable.
- The Far Side
- The Cheat being called a "yellow dog"
- This does happen semi-regularly, but it's almost always a direct quote from army so I doubt it's really a running gag.
- Interviews that mention South Park
- Too trivial for an article or category but, especially in the early 00s, interviewers loved to make the comparison.
Rename "Twitter" articles to "X"
- Just kidding. That would be dumb.
[edit] Disagreements
Things I disagree with Wiki consensus on but don't feel like fighting about. Don't feel obliged to make edits based on these on my behalf!
- The King of Town was made before Marshmallow's Last Stand
- Its production style is much more rudimentary.
- KOT makes heavy use of captions (like the kid's books, or Pom Pom, Too) and canned sound effects rather than narration. Apart from credits, MLS is fully voiced.
- KOT has a noticeably slow pace, most of the cartoon is characters standing still while a sound effect plays. MLS is much more dynamic, with little "dead air" and characters moving and emoting even when not speaking.
- KOT has a very simple art style, with next to no shading and very minimal broadly-colored backgrounds. MLS uses gradients, patterns, and much more detailed drawings and motion.
- It makes more sense for the King and Poopsmith to have originated in KOT than MLS.
- "But the disclaimer calls MLS 'the first cartoon we ever made'!" Sure, but elsewhere it'd been qualified as the "first full cartoon" or "the first cartoon we did for the site", both of which add ambiguity. "The first we ever made" obviously doesn't mean MLS predates First Flash, perhaps they didn't consider KOT as a full toon?
- Both claims of KOT or MLS being a "first cartoon" come from the same DVD release. Maybe in the 6 years leading up to it, dozens (if not hundreds) of toons later, the production order of earliest things on the site got a bit fuzzy.
- I suspect In Search of the Yello Dello predates MLS as well (in addition to the writing style again using a lot of captions and having that slow pace, it would make sense for Marzipan to debut here and then be a crowd-filler in MLS), but the Oldest Toons Menu implies that this isn't the case.
- Transcribing Diamonocle's pronunciation of "Dangeresque"
- Writing his line from stunt double as "Danger-skew" may be phonetically correct but it does a poor job of illustrating the joke: that he's saying "Dangeres/que" instead of "Danger/esque", breaking the word into the wrong syllables. The subtitles for the game write it as "Danger-sque", and sometimes I've tried "Dangeres-queue", but neither of those are particularly good either.
- With the introduction of Dagger Skew, it seems "Danger-skew" has been 'canonized', so to speak. Oh well!
- Sightings — especially user-generated subsections like "skins" or "web" — has outlived its usefulness and should be retired, locked as a historical archive.
- In 2003, back in the days of webrings or banner links, learning that something referenced Homestar was novel and could lead to discovering a new time-wastin' site. Twenty years later, a vast majority of the sites have link-rotted away and a new sighting is, like, "a youtuber said jorb". I think it has value as a historical artifact, but... what's the point nowadays? Is anyone going to scroll through the 190+ Web Sightings, clicking all the way? When "Sightings" was created, sites like YouTube/Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr were a year or less old; nowadays if anyone's looking for H*R fan creations (or sightings!) they're gonna just search those platforms, which are also more conducive to sharing links or images!
- Incidentally, School Sightings might could fall afoul of HRWiki:Youth protection... even if a lot of them are universities there's an "encourage kids to say what school they go to" thing goin' on there.
- Generally I favor fewer articles for one-off gags.
- All of the "Decemberween Pageant" character articles could be deleted and merged into one of those tabled list pages.
- I don't like a lot of the band articles where their only "appearance" is seeing an album cover in an easter egg but there's no musicians shown, songs named, or music heard. Why have an infobox if every field is "[unknown]"?
- Get rid of the Tom Servo article, or at the very least merge it with MST3K. An unmoving silhouette sight gag does not a "character" make.
- "Pizza trolls" in pizza joint could be a reference to Logical Journey of the Zoombinis
- I actually have greatly cooled on this over the years to the point where I think it's more unlikely than likely. When I first joined the wiki (!!) I remember being annoyed that it had already been discussed and rejected before I could contribute, plus I had not encountered the slang term "troll" before.
- FOR: (1) the phrase "pizza troll" is very distinctive and seems to have exclusively been used by the game at that point (2) TBC have previously referenced Brøderbund's Carmen Sandiego games (3) both Zoombinis and Virtual Pizz are pixelated computer games
- AGAINST: (1) the "trolls" look and act completely differently in VPdB and LJotZ (2) Zoombini's 1996 release date is a little late for TBC who primarily reference mid-80s/early-90s software; it's a children's game and by the time it came out in they were both in their twenties
[edit] Wiki features
A semi-fantastical wishlist, but since the MediaWiki version hasn't been updated in forever I don't see the wiki getting any appreciable backend updates (unless something seriously breaks).
- SVG image support
- The vast majority of site elements are vector drawings. SVGs are often smaller file sizes and scale much better than raster images.
- Collapsible elements
- Multiple images in a single caption box
- So I don't have to use the side-by-side span
- Ability to view filmographies in chronological order
- It's very difficult tracking history or evolution of something when I have to either rely on my memory or open their entire filmography one tab at a time then manually sort.
- Wikipedia-style references, with automatic numbering of a reflist.
- It'd be nice to avoid writing "In [toon]..." over and over again, and references could even include a relevant quote in a tooltip.
- Even something as simple-ish as the Chapman articles, it quickly got annoying manually numbering refernces.
