User blog:Nausiated/Almost There...... A recollection, a rant, and TMI

It all started on November 3, 2007. I had been dabbling on the Marvel Wiki here and there since 2005 adding the odd thing and updating some of the more popular characters when curiosity began to strike. I was curious to know about certain characters earlier appearances.

I don't exactly recall what character -- since 2007 there has MANY night of drinking... These were days where me and the girl I was dating at the time would polish off an entire bottle of Jack Daniels together in a night... But I'm thinking I was probably looking up information about the Absorbing Man (Why I look this stuff up and still manage to ever get laid is something tantamount to some ungodly force at work in the universe, I assure you).. And so I'm looking through his list of appearances and after a few I hit nothing. Nada... Ziltch.

So I'm like okay, well how about elsewhere on the internet? Who lot of eff all as well.

It seemed like unless you were interested in knowing what a character has done in the last 10 years, there was never a good source of information to find it.

I am an internet old schooler, I've been online since 1995 and there is something I've noticed about any website about any given comic book character: They're too limited. In any case. Why? Because they usually only focus on one character or team or whatever, and the VAST majority of them only focus on what's current. Because that's pretty much all most people had access to. You could also find a LOT of outdated information. Before all the "free" websites like Geocities went down, it was easy to stumble upon an old Marvel Comics fan page that hadn't been updated since 1997 (Still gushing about Heroes Reborn! Ha! Ha!)

This made me discover two things: (1) The internet was making me feel old. And that realization made me feel even older, and in need of a drink (Thankfully, at the time there was still a quarter bottle of Ol' Jack on the floor from the alcohol fueled sex romp from the night before) and (2) There was no central place for information on just about everything Marvel.

Except for three places: (1) The Unofficial Appendix (A GREAT GREAT RESOURCE! READ IT! EMBRACE IT!) (2) This here wiki and (3) Marvel's own fledgling Marvel Universe wiki on their official website.

As I took a chug out of the room-temperature bottle of sour mash, my eyes gazed upon my bookshelf at all the graphic novels that I had amassed by that point and then I looked at the page for Journey into Mystery Vol 1 106 that said "No Synopsis Written" and I thought.. Okay, this just won't do.. It won't do at all. At this point, the Watcher appeared to me and told me of a different universe, where I just said "fuck it", called my girlfriend and had another Whiskey fueled sex romp. I told the Watcher that was a good idea -- and had to try and recall if me and the miss did drugs the night before -- and picked up the phone.

48 sweaty hours later, I got back to thinking and it's the second time in this story I said "fuck it", and decide I was going to write the summaries for these. I slammed through the first volume of Essential Thor and updated all the issues that were collected in that volume. Then I decided to look around.

Frankly, the state of a lot of the summaries on this site were pretty pathetic. Which is understandable. First of all, the wiki was going through one of it's first major format overhauls, the templates we all use now were just being implemented and as I recall, there weren't bots that swept through and updated things for you (aye, these were but primitive times.) Often times the summaries were lifted off other sites. Comics.org, Comicvine.com, and I cannot count the number of X-Men related books have a link to a summary at Uncannyxmen.net.

If it wasn't that, it were simple summaries that don't tell you a whole lot about what happens in the story. A lot of "Wolverine goes to the store to buy some milk and then totally beat up Sabretooth" sort of crap. That had to change.

So I started piling through, initially I was kind of lazy there was a learning curve. I also jumped over to do the DC Wiki which suffers from what I think is an even sloppier editorial base (That is a rant for another day, and probably for a DC Wiki blog post) and started updating summaries there as well.

I'm an articular writer, I'm all about details, and I used a lot of vocabulary, and I felt that I was adding some life to these drab and boring issue summaries. I started with my collection of Marvel Essentials and DC Showcase Presents. Working myself from A-Z, flipping from company to company as I needed to change things up (re: my OCD about doing things alphabetically, I can't go from Avengers to Captain America without doing Batgirl and Batman first!!)

Now some 6,925 (Marvel) and 2,316 (DC) edits later, I am just about done my collection (thus far, it'll grow, in fact I got another Essential Wolverine volume coming my way). The last additions I'm making are for Essential X-Men Vol 5 Through 9.

By that point, I am going to take a break from the issue summaries and do some regular article updates -- I have a knack for alternate reality characters (Seeing how I covered almost everyone on Earth-9997, Heroes Reborn, a lot of Earth-295 and a bunch of What If universes) for a bit, before I switch over and start doing my regular graphic novels. I'll be compiling a list of stuff I intend to go through..

The summaries won't even stop there either. If I haven't gotten sick of it, I have 9 or 10 filing boxes FULL of comics and a lot of them aren't even stuff I've already or will cover in graphic novels.

That's a lot of summaries.

Why am I doing this? Someone has to. It's what I do.

I am a very analytical person, and there is nothing more frustrating than when you're pursuing information and there is one bit missing. It might not be some vital plot point to the life of Spider-Man, but damn it, curiosity kills me. What happened? And don't give me none of that "So and so fights so and so" horse crap, give me the god damn details.

I was mentioning the different resources earlier, and this is what I have to say about them all: The Wiki's are a great tool for the everyman.

As great as the Unofficial Appendix is it's totally Web 1.0. You have editors, and I am sure that it takes an eternity for them to sift through things and update stuff. That sort of thing drives me crazy. But it's what they do, and I have respect for the wealth of information they have brought together.

Marvel's own Wiki? Well as great as it is that Marvel has it's own online resource for information that the fans can go an update, there's one huge problem with that: Moderators. And I'm not bitching about this in the fact that they're censoring me or whatever. It's the fact that you could spend hours upon hours updating a profile for a popular character like Cyclops. Updating everything, citing appearances and everything and click submit. And they could reject it. Why? Because they can. Then there's the issue with licensed characters that were part of the Marvel Universe. Marvel won't touch them.

If you want to be a legitimate encyclopedia friends and neighbors, you've got to touch that stuff. There are no exceptions.

That is why I like the wiki. It's not associated with Marvel, so we can write about these things for people who are interested in reading about Conan, or Fu Manchu, or even the Shogun Warriors (Ask your parents). That's the point. The Marvel Wiki is more flexible and people can add stuff that requires some good old fashioned research and effort and not have to worry about it never seeing the light of days.

Sure there will be disagreements about length (my side of the argument: It's Spider-Man, the profile is SUPPOSED to be long! If you can't be bothered to be interested in his entire history, go read one of those aforementioned fan pages that focus on one subject).

If I were to air one gripe, it's that people forget what a wiki is. It's a end user encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is, as said by dictionary.com, "a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge or, less commonly, all aspects of one subject."

The Marvel Wiki is a "book" covering all aspects of one subject -- Marvel Comics. I think that should mean EVERYTHING. In my perfect world, an article about Cyclops is going to have every single appearance where he did something listed. From his first appearance in 1963 all the way to the present. Is that going to be something everyone is going to want to read? No. But with the proper presentation people will be able to find the information they're looking for easily.

The arguments about making things confusing, or that the pages will "take too long to load" are absurd. The first argument, I would crack it down to the fact that the reader is just not focused or should work on their reading skills. The load time? We're in the 21st century here. High speed internet connections are the common place, if you're having troubles loading a page that is mostly text, then you're on dial-up or on a piece of crap computer. Either way, I don't know how you survive on the internet at all let alone this site.

What I see this place becoming is a Web 2.0 version of the Unofficial Appendix. Not an exact copy (plagiarism is the literary version of rape as far as I'm concerned) But something in our own words that is just as detailed.

Anyway.. If you haven't guessed, I'm an outspoken person. Who has a taste for hard whiskey and fast women.. oh and I'm Canadian (No I'm not Wolverine. Good guess though) It's just the way I see things.

Anyway, it's almost 1:00 in the morning, I have no whiskey, and there is work tomorrow. I will end this rant as abruptly as Stan Lee would drop a plot climax in the first two pages of the next issue. G'night kids!