What Happened to Marth's Wikipedia Page?

[Randoman]

So today I noticed that Marth's page on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marth_(Fire_Emblem))  no longer exists, and it instead directs to the wikipedia page of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. What's even more strange is that the wikipedia pages for Roy, Ike, Chrom, Robin, and Lucina are still available, and Marth is the only Fire Emblem character who used to have a wikipedia page that was straignt out deleted/unavailable, and not even fused into a general character list page like Corrin's page was for the Characters of Fire Emblem Fates page.

Could someone look into what happened to Marth's Wikipedia page, see why it got taken down, and potentially get it back up again?

[Fire Emblem Fan]

How in the world does the page for the Pikachu of Fire Emblem get taken down? That's silly as heck. I hope someone figures this out and gets it back up.

[lenticular]

Looking into it, Marth's article was discussed in Wikipedia's "articles for deletion" section back in February, with the consensus in that discussion being that there isn't really enough coverage of the character to warrant an independent article, and that any relevant content should be covered on the article for SDatBoL. Which, honestly, I think is probably fair. If you look at the latest version of Marth's article before it was redirected it seems to have a lot of padding and trivia. Stuff like "Marth's character designer is currently unknown" or "in 2013, Complex ranked him 36th among the 50 greatest soldiers in video games" is pure padding, and then there's a bunch of stuff about all the games that he's appeared in, which is fine for a dedicated gaming wiki, but kinda trivial for a general encyclopedia.

It has been a couple of years since I edited Wikipedia at anything above an "occasional typo fix" level, but going from memory, if people would like to see the article restored, your best bet is to hunt down a bunch of good sources for information about him. If you can find significant articles from prominent/reliable sources that discuss Marth in detail, talking about, eg, his character arc and characterisation in the story, the motivations about his creation, etc. then that would probably be enough to warrant revisiting the discusion and potentially restoring the article. But short of that, I don't think it's likely.

[Randoman]

That explanation and reasoning reeks of double standards, especially considering that characters like Roy, Petra, and especially the Gatekeeper are in similar boats or even worse ones, yet they still have their own wikipedia pages. If they're going to delete out Marth's wikipedia page for those reasons, at least be consistent and fair by deleting the other Fire Emblem characters' pages who have those same issues. And comparing the aforementioned characters' pages with Marth's, Marth's page was far more thorough and complete, especially in terms of how in detail his creation and development section is. I'd even argue that Marth's page is more complete than Ike's and Robin's pages. And Marth is the only Fire Emblem character who had his page deleted? I smell blatant hypocrisy and biasedness.

As for the complaint regarding Marth's list of appearances showing up in a wikipedia page, wikipedia literally does that for practically every fictional character that has their own wikipedia page, so that complaint should be directed at wikipedia's format, rather than Marth's wikipedia page. Though personally, I think an appearances list for a fictional character is a valid and important section to have for something as general as wikipedia. Also, most fictional characters with their own wikipedia page also have a creation and development section for them, or some variant of it, so if you feel like that's filler, that's a complaint you should be directing at wikipedia's format as well, not Marth's wikipedia page.

...I hope it doesn't sound like I'm lashing out at you. I'm just really ticked off at the hypocrisy of this situation.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

It's honestly really crazy that this happened, but for the most part, I'd echo @lenticular. Think about it - what would make a journalist write about Marth? He's a known quantity at this point, and kind of a boring one. He's not "the next big thing" that's gonna get a lot of ink spilled over him. And if people aren't writing about him, then there won't be enough external sources to write an article off of.

I do disagree with the idea that removing his page was appropriate, in light of his importance to the series. Plus, a respectable few crossover appearances. But any future version of his page will need to present a better, out-of-universe argument for his relevance.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

No pants? No wiki page. Them's the rules

[SnowFire]

Wikipedia editor here. 

1) All of the information is still there if you want it.  Lenticular already linked the last version of the article above.  It's not hidden or deleted or anything, you can still read it if you like.

2) Why are you saying "double standards"?  There's one standard, it's just maybe not the one you want to hear: sourced, reliable commentary.   The old article verifies Marth's existence a lot, and some basic facts like appearing in Smash, but not much beyond that.  The commentary is all listicle crap like "the 50 greatest soldiers" which was probably whipped up in 3 hours by a recent college graduate with access to Google.  Gatekeeper, believe it or not, has sources talking about him - mostly as an Internet meme, sure.  But Wikipedia has articles on memes like Nyan Cat or whatever too.  So Gatekeeper bench presses poor Mars on the commentary scale.

3) But...  there is hope.  Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  All of that information in the old article can be brought back with the press of a button, if the case can be made in-depth sources exist now.  So, if you really feel passionately about it...  find those sources.  My suspicion is that if you speak Japanese, or know a native Japanese speaker, and you're down for diving into random old Japanese magazines from the 80s and 90s, there might be something salvageable here - Marth always was more popular in Japan, after all.  I would be happy to take a look at anything you dig up, or you can just edit the "Talk" page directly and offer your sources & new content.  Wikipedia is pretty "inclusionist" all told - if you can reach Gatekeeper-level, you're probably good!  If Marth is really so "important"...  prove it.

[Jotari]

10 hours ago, lenticular said:

Looking into it, Marth's article was discussed in Wikipedia's "articles for deletion" section back in February, with the consensus in that discussion being that there isn't really enough coverage of the character to warrant an independent article, and that any relevant content should be covered on the article for SDatBoL. Which, honestly, I think is probably fair. If you look at the latest version of Marth's article before it was redirected it seems to have a lot of padding and trivia. Stuff like "Marth's character designer is currently unknown" or "in 2013, Complex ranked him 36th among the 50 greatest soldiers in video games" is pure padding, and then there's a bunch of stuff about all the games that he's appeared in, which is fine for a dedicated gaming wiki, but kinda trivial for a general encyclopedia.

It has been a couple of years since I edited Wikipedia at anything above an "occasional typo fix" level, but going from memory, if people would like to see the article restored, your best bet is to hunt down a bunch of good sources for information about him. If you can find significant articles from prominent/reliable sources that discuss Marth in detail, talking about, eg, his character arc and characterisation in the story, the motivations about his creation, etc. then that would probably be enough to warrant revisiting the discusion and potentially restoring the article. But short of that, I don't think it's likely.

The best route to go down for Marth specifically would be to source how his appearance in Super Smash Bros. Melee influenced Fire Emblem's popularity in the west. And I think there are Iwata asks interviews that directly attest to that. That's really the most significant thing about the character from a more objective (ie less Fire Emblem biased, which we'll inevitably have because we socialize here) view point.

[lenticular]

11 hours ago, Randoman said:

I'm just really ticked off at the hypocrisy of this situation.

I'll largely just echo everything that SnowFire said, but I do want to add one more thing. Wikipedia can be, and often is, inconsistent, but that inconsistency isn't usually the result of hypocrisy. Rather, it's just the consequence of a very decentralised administrative structure without a single decision-maker. Instead, there are or have been hundreds of thousands of different editors over a period of over two decades. And while there definitely have been hypocrites (and all manner of other bad actors) among that number, the vast majority of Wikipedia editors are well-intentioned and doing the best that they can.

There absolutely are articles on Wikipedia that are worse than Marth's article in pretty much every way: worse writing, worse sourcing, less notable subject, everything. And yeah, it's definitely easy to look at those and see unfairness or hypocrisy, but I really don't think it's actually there. Instead, there are a few different possibilities:

1. It might just be that nobody who has seen the article has thought to nominate it for deletion, and if it ever was nominated then it would be deleted too. There's a pretty low bar for creating new articles, and some articles that get created probably shouldn't be.
2. If it has been nominated for deletion but kept, it might be that a different group of people were the ones discussing. Different people are going to have different opinions, different standards, and different ways of interpreting Wikipedia's rules. If you think of it less as "Wikipedia decided that..." and more as "these specific individual editors decided that..." then it can still be frustrating when there is inconsistency, but it doesn't seem malicious or hypocritical in the same way.
3. Sometimes standards change over time. What was a reasonable article in 2001 might not be a reasonable article in 2024. And given how large and lumbering a beast Wikipedia is, change can happen slowly, and somewhat inconsistently.

So, overall, I don't think it's particularly productive to look to other articles and say "but if [bad article] gets to exist, why doesn't Marth?" Instead, it's like SnowFire says. If you're passionate about this, then you can try to hunt down the sources and commentary that would justify the article.

[Armchair General]

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

There absolutely are articles on Wikipedia that are worse than Marth's article in pretty much every way: worse writing, worse sourcing, less notable subject, everything.

 Well, the worst that I've seen was the simplified version of the site. But other than that, I've rarely came across something that was explicitly half-assed.

As with Marth's page, it's surprisingly decent for an video game character. But at the end of the day, Wikipedia is ruled by an labyrinth of inconsistent policies and stuff like this might get pruned because the main character of an game that was mainly released in one country isn't "notable" enough on an international scale. It's not really worth losing sleep over, in my opinion.

[Cukie Gherkin]

Hopefully, the article will be back before too long.

[Magenta Fantasies]

On 6/8/2024 at 9:53 PM, Fire Emblem Fan said:

How in the world does the page for the Pikachu of Fire Emblem get taken down? That's silly as heck. I hope someone figures this out and gets it back up.

I second Fire Emblem Fan. If any Fire Emblem character should have a Wikipedia page, it’s Marth. He’s the face of the franchise. How many times have you seen people who played Super Smash Bros. ask “Are Marth and Ike in this game?”

On 6/9/2024 at 1:16 AM, Randoman said:

That explanation and reasoning reeks of double standards, especially considering that characters like Roy, Petra, and especially the Gatekeeper are in similar boats or even worse ones, yet they still have their own wikipedia pages. If they're going to delete out Marth's wikipedia page for those reasons, at least be consistent and fair by deleting the other Fire Emblem characters' pages who have those same issues. And comparing the aforementioned characters' pages with Marth's, Marth's page was far more thorough and complete, especially in terms of how in detail his creation and development section is. I'd even argue that Marth's page is more complete than Ike's and Robin's pages. And Marth is the only Fire Emblem character who had his page deleted? I smell blatant hypocrisy and biasedness.

As for the complaint regarding Marth's list of appearances showing up in a wikipedia page, wikipedia literally does that for practically every fictional character that has their own wikipedia page, so that complaint should be directed at wikipedia's format, rather than Marth's wikipedia page. Though personally, I think an appearances list for a fictional character is a valid and important section to have for something as general as wikipedia. Also, most fictional characters with their own wikipedia page also have a creation and development section for them, or some variant of it, so if you feel like that's filler, that's a complaint you should be directing at wikipedia's format as well, not Marth's wikipedia page.

...I hope it doesn't sound like I'm lashing out at you. I'm just really ticked off at the hypocrisy of this situation.

Agreed, this idea of “significance” that has been mentioned in this topic is very arbitrary. 

For comparison, I took a look at the Wikipedia pages created for Sonic the Hedgehog characters. I noticed that several character pages have been removed from however many years ago I had last visited a Sonic-related page on Wikipedia. Cream, Rouge, the Chaotix and a handful of other B-tier and C-tier (in importance) characters used to have Wikipedia pages. The only one I’m surprised was removed was Amy Rose. I’d even say I’m shocked. Amy is a character I would solidly count among the main cast, even more than Shadow (though he had his own spin-off game, so I suspect that is largely why he got to keep his Wikipedia page.)

Another question worth asking is, “Why are so many Wikipedia pages getting purged/merged into other pages in the first place?” Is the server running out of bandwidth?

[SnowFire]

15 hours ago, Magenta Fantasies said:

Agreed, this idea of “significance” that has been mentioned in this topic is very arbitrary. 

For comparison, I took a look at the Wikipedia pages created for Sonic the Hedgehog characters. I noticed that several character pages have been removed from however many years ago I had last visited a Sonic-related page on Wikipedia. Cream, Rouge, the Chaotix and a handful of other B-tier and C-tier (in importance) characters used to have Wikipedia pages. The only one I’m surprised was removed was Amy Rose. I’d even say I’m shocked. Amy is a character I would solidly count among the main cast, even more than Shadow (though he had his own spin-off game, so I suspect that is largely why he got to keep his Wikipedia page.)

Another question worth asking is, “Why are so many Wikipedia pages getting purged/merged into other pages in the first place?” Is the server running out of bandwidth?

The answer is already posted in this thread.  None of these articles have ever been created, kept, or deleted because of "significance."  (Which is a good thing!  Do you trust other people's significance-o-meters?!  What about people who think gaming culture as a whole is insignificant?  Trust me, you don't want that fight, holding a poll on how significant Joe Random Internet Guy thinks Marth is.)  They are created / kept / merged / deleted because of the depth of reliable sources.  It's nothing to do with server size limits, it's just the exact same reason you can't make an article about your garage band or your high school's Thanksgiving football rivalry without finding good sources first.

You'll find that there are still plenty of "insignificant" articles on video game characters / concepts.  MissingNo. and W. D. Gaster are weird bugs / easter eggs, but they have Wikipedia articles, because they have sufficient sources.  Amy Rose is a borderline case - she HAS had an article sometimes, but it's a threadbare one, and she still has a section in a list with the main highlights.  So maybe not the best example there.

When FE Three Houses came out, it was a huge hit, and Gatekeeper was meme'd on, so we ended up with sources like this Kotaku article: https://kotaku.com/fire-emblem-hacker-makes-the-gatekeeper-playable-and-h-1837484315 or this Polygon article: https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/5/20755325/fire-emblem-three-houses-gatekeeper .  When Shadow Dragon came out, it was kind of underwhelming, and Marth did not have articles published on him in the English-language video game magazines of 2008 (which, considering SD's threadbare script, is not surprising).  And don't get me wrong, you'll find plenty of sources talking about Marth-the-Smash-Bros character, but generally from a gameplay perspective, which isn't really Wikipedia's thing - that's been outsourced to Fandom & YouTube.  Convince Kotaku / IGN / GameSpot / et al to make articles about Marth, and he'll get his article back.  Nothing arbitrary to it at all, the number of in-depth sources is quite measurable. 

So we're back to what I wrote before.  If you really care about this - be the change you want to see in the world.  Go find in-depth sources about Marth - not Marth's stats, not Marth's matchup with Mewtwo, but Marth-the-character.  Not just random blogs, either, but published journalism.  Per above, I agree that these sources probably do exist...  in Japanese.  But who knows, maybe there's a few missed English source in some non-digitized European gaming magazine or the like, or stuff that came out after FEH and Marth winning a CYL contest.  I would be happy to help assess them if you find them!  And once they're found, then Marth's article will come back.

[Jotari]

3 hours ago, SnowFire said:

The answer is already posted in this thread.  None of these articles have ever been created, kept, or deleted because of "significance."  (Which is a good thing!  Do you trust other people's significance-o-meters?!  What about people who think gaming culture as a whole is insignificant?  Trust me, you don't want that fight, holding a poll on how significant Joe Random Internet Guy thinks Marth is.)  They are created / kept / merged / deleted because of the depth of reliable sources.  It's nothing to do with server size limits, it's just the exact same reason you can't make an article about your garage band or your high school's Thanksgiving football rivalry without finding good sources first.

You'll find that there are still plenty of "insignificant" articles on video game characters / concepts.  MissingNo. and W. D. Gaster are weird bugs / easter eggs, but they have Wikipedia articles, because they have sufficient sources.  Amy Rose is a borderline case - she HAS had an article sometimes, but it's a threadbare one, and she still has a section in a list with the main highlights.  So maybe not the best example there.

When FE Three Houses came out, it was a huge hit, and Gatekeeper was meme'd on, so we ended up with sources like this Kotaku article: https://kotaku.com/fire-emblem-hacker-makes-the-gatekeeper-playable-and-h-1837484315 or this Polygon article: https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/5/20755325/fire-emblem-three-houses-gatekeeper .  When Shadow Dragon came out, it was kind of underwhelming, and Marth did not have articles published on him in the English-language video game magazines of 2008 (which, considering SD's threadbare script, is not surprising).  And don't get me wrong, you'll find plenty of sources talking about Marth-the-Smash-Bros character, but generally from a gameplay perspective, which isn't really Wikipedia's thing - that's been outsourced to Fandom & YouTube.  Convince Kotaku / IGN / GameSpot / et al to make articles about Marth, and he'll get his article back.  Nothing arbitrary to it at all, the number of in-depth sources is quite measurable. 

So we're back to what I wrote before.  If you really care about this - be the change you want to see in the world.  Go find in-depth sources about Marth - not Marth's stats, not Marth's matchup with Mewtwo, but Marth-the-character.  Not just random blogs, either, but published journalism.  Per above, I agree that these sources probably do exist...  in Japanese.  But who knows, maybe there's a few missed English source in some non-digitized European gaming magazine or the like, or stuff that came out after FEH and Marth winning a CYL contest.  I would be happy to help assess them if you find them!  And once they're found, then Marth's article will come back.

Just throwing out ideas here. The first piece of Fire Emblem media ever localized into English was the OVA (of which Marth was the protagonist). There might be some sources from back in the day that discussed that which could be useful for...uh... something. Idk, kind of feels significant. Another thing could just be to find some offical way to translate Japanese sources. Marth probably does still have a Wikipedia page in Japanese that likely has Japanese articles talking about his design and legacy ove the years and what designers have done to make him appealing and interesting.

[Acacia Sgt]

4 hours ago, Jotari said:

Just throwing out ideas here. The first piece of Fire Emblem media ever localized into English was the OVA (of which Marth was the protagonist). There might be some sources from back in the day that discussed that which could be useful for...uh... something. Idk, kind of feels significant. Another thing could just be to find some offical way to translate Japanese sources. Marth probably does still have a Wikipedia page in Japanese that likely has Japanese articles talking about his design and legacy ove the years and what designers have done to make him appealing and interesting.

That he does:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/マルス_(ファイアーエムブレム)

And indeed, it looks quite thorough. Just look at the number of sources at the bottom. Even having what his amiibo unlocks in games. On that subject, had no idea they had done this:

And yes, that includes a Marth costume for one of the Straw Hats.

Also, I noticed that the Japanese certainly have more unique articles. Manaketes have their own article, and even the Kingdom of Altea does!

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/アリティア王国

---

Honestly, I agree with the sentiment of questioning the English article's removal, but perhaps indeed, if the Japanese one were to be translated to English, it would have better chances of staying over the old one.

Edited Saturday at 01:43 PM by Acacia Sgt

[Jotari]

11 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

 

 

Wait until they release this as Martha's fallen alt in Heroes XD

[Acacia Sgt]

5 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Wait until they release this as Martha's fallen alt in Heroes XD

I mean, guitar user skeleton Marth would've fit more TMS, pft. lol

[DarkSage861]

The "is Marth a girl?" allegations got to him.