Improving the quality of boss battle pages/articles

Greetings.

I feel like several articles of this wiki, especially the ones dedicated to bosses, are in dire need of help.

They suffer from a lot of flaws, I will try to mention the most important ones, along with examples:

1) Misinformation: Some tips are sadly misinformed, and spread incorrect rumors and wrong strategies to new players and older players alike.

"Seath is blind, as noted in the description of the Helm of the Channelers. Use the Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring or the sorcery Hush to make it harder for Seath to detect you."

Or, about the Centipede Demon "Stay beneath him as much as possible."

Or on the Bed of Chaos "Be careful as a minor appendage will appear in attempt to knock you away from making the drop" "Note that the heart is a small insect like creature that can damage you. Deal with it swiftly."

2) Overly subjective tips or strategies that are too specific to a certain build/item or are not really relevant to the boss as a whole.

"Pinwheel is vulnerable to pyromancy, which can be a good strategy choice for any player. Equip your pyromancy spells, and be patient and wait for Pinwheel to settle down after teleporting. Eight fireballs from level one pyromancy should take it down to 1/3 its health. Combustion, Great Combustion, or one of the area of effect firestorm-type pyromancies can also be extremely effective"

"TIP: Ornstein is weak against fire, using a +5 fire weapon in this fight will be significantly easier. However, if you do not have easy access to the Fire Ember located in the Demon Ruins (After Queelag's domain) needed to upgrade a weapon to fire attribute, Queelag's Furysword is also a good alternative"

On Moonlight Butterfly "If you have the Sunlight Spear miracle, a few strikes will make this fight easy as pie."

These are just not relevant. Fire is not specifically powerful for any reason, they're just not resistant to it. If a boss has a specific resistance (for example, Ceaseless Discharge being immune against fire) it should be noted, but are these things really worth mentioning? They bloat the articles with useless information.

3) Strategy bloat in general. Our Bed of Chaos page has no less than 3 strategies in it, for a boss that only leaves room for one, and maybe a couple of tips.

It is my personal opinion that most strategies should be removed in favor of more general things. For example, writing down all the attacks, and how to dodge the more tricky ones, or noting which ones create openings, make for a more universal, better "strategy". Our current system of strategies just encourages people to write whatever they used to good effect against the boss in question, and our game has so much variety, which leads to our problem number 2.

4) General disorganization: If some of the very specific tips and strategies are to stay, they should be moved to a separate subpage/tab or something, also all boss pages should have at least a similar structure to make them easy to read. Some are too filled with videos and several versions of the same strategy, hiding the essential information in a sea of redundancy.

In another note, pages should have a more objective and serious feel to them. Many are filled with what feels like personal comments from various editors, or have formatting errors. Our Bed of Chaos page I linked above even links to the Other Dark Souls wiki which I believe should not be right.

----
----

Afterword:

I have been meaning to make this thread since a while, but not knowing if I had the required time/effort to help on this myself made me stop the previous times.

Sorry for being (maybe?) overly critical, but I believe it's the best way to improve these articles and rescue them from disrepair.

The plan would be to go one boss at a time, revamping their pages into more refined ones.

I will post in this thread again if I want to start making big changes to the articles in question (with the specific changes), so don't worry about me going and altering the articles in a radical way.

If anyone has any opinion about this it would be nice to hear, especially if you disagree!

Farewell.

I wish I had a +1 to give, and I'm sorry but I don't edit the Wiki. And though I hold that in general it is a superior resource there are certain things I'd like to see changed. For instance, in the Capra Demon page it says that having a high stability shield like the Knight Shield is useful for fighting but this isn't even really good advice when the Knight Shield is a bad shield and doesn't even offer that much stability. Now, it's been a long time since I've looked at the page so it may have already been changed, in which case, I apologize.

But it's just these niggling things that could be improved.

+ given, nice post. And backed up with some decent evidence/examples so cheers for doing it right.

On a personal note, the minutia that makes up the strategy sections doesn't really bother me, as I use wikis mainly for numbers etc. but I whole-heartedly agree that a more generalised overview of the ins and outs of specific bosses: unblockables, blockables, AoE etc. would be better than a handful of very build/equipment specific strategies.

This is a very much appreciated post. Even though I've never really used the boss pages as preparation for my own battles, some for reasons noted for here, and mostly because I've never really needed it.

In any case I consider these relatively necessary changes, since better organized Wiki content would lead to more visitors.

I, personally, am not allowed to edit any of the Wiki content, but I would of course help if I had.

((Guys anyone who wants to edit the wiki can - just make a wikispaces account and click "join this wiki" on the front page. ))

Thank you to the OP for the thoughtful post. I agree that quality could overall be improved but I would not take out the strategies of the bosses, just organize them better so people can chose what resonates with them.

As with everything on the wiki, it is a community project and as such it is up to the users to propose and see changes through - I am personally open to assisting with formatting where needed but I am afraid I already have too much on my plate and I cannot promise to personally take charge of making this happen.

"Opinions" and "Subjective" are aspects that I doubt we will ever be without, and in all honesty in the past two years a lot of that has been seen in a positive light by the community. It demonstrates the pages are edited by regular users and incites dialogue. Of course misinformation should be addressed.

We can add an "Attacks Patterns" to the template for the DKS2 wiki so hopefully it will get edited in from the get go.

Regarding links:

Links to other sites have been inserted into plenty of our pages by users from other sites hoping to redirect traffic that way - we cannot possibly revise and edit the thousands of wiki pages in detail link by link, so please whenever you spot this edit it out.


So overall, go for it whoever has time and let me know if you need formatting assistance.

I'll begin editing the pages soon.

EDIT: http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/page/diff/The+Bed+of+Chaos/465070672

How do these edits look for the Bed of Chaos? I removed a supposed Fire Ball attack, which I've never seen in my hundreds of attempts on the Bed of Chaos. If someone has seen it can they inform me, or maybe show it in a video?

I think I'm also going to quickly go back and add in that the Fire Pillars are a somewhat rare attack since I just realized I removed that from the previous information.

I like the edits Tolvo. Seems much better to me. But bed of chaos has a fireball attack, it's just extremely rare and I don't think i've ever seen her do it myself.

https://youtu.be/6EfnUN-wUxs?t=2m19s

Ah thank you very much Fin, I'll edit that back in.

I'm done with BoC, Asylum Demon, and Taurus Demon. I'm going to just go through every boss today editing things while also working on a Fextralife article. So if you are also going to be editing it might help to post here so we aren't accidentally butting heads without realizing it in the editing.

I did massive edits to the Bed of Chaos page.

Changes:

1) Edited the introduction a bit as the lore is not clear enough about if the Bed of Chaos is a deformed Witch of Izalith, a being that she accidentally created that absorbed her soul, or what. The previous iteration simply called it a creature that the Witch created, which is misleading, as from Quelana's dialogues we know that either the Bed of Chaos IS the Witch of Izalith, or she's somehow trapped within.

2) Removed the strategies in their current form because they were redundant and obscured the mechanics of the fight too much (for example, they talked about the elements of the fight with different and misleading terms like "target-able roots", while the glowing roots cannot be targetted). So to learn the mechanics you had to wade into them. Also the 2 or 3 strategies basically said the same thing with different words.

I rewrote the strategy and put it above the attack patterns, and it now consists of just the mechanics of the boss and the universal things.

Different methods and tips at tackling the mechanics are now included in a "Tips and Notes" section below.

3) Rewrote several things to make them clearer, but kept the actual information (a tip in one of the previous strategies was good so I included it on the Tips and Notes section, and also the attack patterns were all mostly well written)

4) Removed that "Weaknesses" thing at the top of the article because it made a grand total of zero sense.

I kept the videos.

Everything I removed was redundant, and I even added some stuff, like the usage of bows.

Criticism is welcome, however, as I may have made a mistake.

Check it out!

---

An unrelated thing: When I search for articles using the Search function, discussion pages often come above the actual articles. I know that you can then click on the article itself from the list or un-tick the little boxes that say "Messages" and "Files" and search again, but having the actual articles appear always first would be a nice little change in my opinion...

Why did you remove the part about Knight Kirk being there while leaving the mention of the Daughter of Chaos? He is even closer to the boss Fog from his spawn point.

Edit: I just didn't feel Kirk was affiliated with the BoC enough to bear mentioning in her page. The Daughter of Chaos is well, her daughter, while Kirk is just an NPC invader. To conclude that he is actually protecting the BoC is too much of a leap, he is most likely there because it is close to the Fair Lady. It's not like Kirk is protecting the Gaping Dragon, for example.

It could be readded with a different wording, however. It's something minor anyways.

Alright, seems like good enough reasoning.

I remade the Taurus Demon article. Hm, where to begin...

I made the article more readable overall and better organized, with clear parts:

A short introduction, the attacks list (which I rewrote trying to make more clear, but I didn't delete any sensible information), a general strategy, and a tips and notes section with more specific stuff, with the videos all found below.

In the previous version the introduction contained part of the strategy in it, then there was a video, then the attacks section, then the strategy again, and it was all just quite disorganized.

I expanded on the tips provided and removed some that were hilariously contradictory, like these two gems:

" The falling attack off the tower seems to count as a critical hit. The Hornet Ring does not boost this damage. "

" Note: If you wish to farm Hellkite for souls, you cannot skip this boss, as the fog gate in the room leading from the bridge shortcut to the Undead Burg bonfire will be blocked. You can skip this boss and still farm the Hellkite. Walk toward the bonfire in the Undead Burg for the first time to "trigger" the Hellkite. Then take the shortcut mentioned above.Walk past to where the Greatsword Black Knight is and the three rats are, behind the spear Hollow. This will let you face the Hellkite without going through the fog. "

I also added some more links to other parts of this wiki that were relevant and removed some links that didn't work.

---

As a sidenote, I talked with some people and they also agreed that the actual articles should take precedence over the discussion links and such when you make a search, to make finding the right article less confusing. 90% of the time you're searching for something you want the article, not old discussions about it (that sometimes also contain misinformation). I feel making them appear first on the search would be an awesome change.

You can disable comments and discussions when you do a search so it only searches by page - I will include the discussions on changing the defaults to do this when I have the upgrade demo with wikispaces.