Forum:Merchandise Section Revamp

.*blows the cobwebs away* Right, so I think it's about time someone addressed this. Our merchandise section One Piece Merchandise is a mess. It's incomplete and unorganized in terms of content. A fresh coat of paint would be nice especially. Also, there's no clear cut procedure when adding certain merchandise such as figures. For example there is official merchandise for Film Gold found here http://tinyurl.com/j3eq885 ,yet no standard way to add them. Should we create their own page for them? Some people have suggested personal infoboxes for them as well. If you take the time to visit the Merchandise FAQ you will find this message on the page "Sorry for the mess, this section needs to be cleaned up due to some parts being irrelevant or wrong" That's a sign that we need to make a serious change. We're an encyclopedia and people might come here to actually look certain merchandise up. Perhaps we could make a merchandise team to add to our existing wiki crews. Surely, we have people on this site who are experts when it comes to this. So leave your thoughts on the matter below Roranoa Drake II (talk) 18:58, July 15, 2016 (UTC)

That page has been a mess for years and nobody has seemed to care enough to sort it. Some of the actually merchandise pages themselves aren't to great either. 19:23, July 16, 2016 (UTC)

Not sure if that many people care about the merch, to be honest. Since most of it is Japan-only anyway. Making a crew would be useless since the crews always die. 19:28, July 16, 2016 (UTC)

I don't know much about merch. I don't know how much there is, what types, etc. But I would assume that reason clearer guidelines aren't out there is because the types of merch are just too varied for one clear format. I think it would be possible to maybe get something more official out there.

Honestly, I'm willing to basically let whoever wants to organize these pages do whatever they want to reach that goal. I don't think any kind of major decisions need to be made by a group of people for this. It's just so disorganized that the act of organizing it is just basic editing in my eyes. Drake, were you thinking you needed input, or approval from this forum? 21:22, July 17, 2016 (UTC)

@JSD The point of this forum was to come with ideas to clean up and organize this mess and come up with some more uniform guidelines in the future. As far as making pages for this stuff goes it's already pretty flexible. Maybe a bit too flexible 20:06, July 23, 2016 (UTC)

The first problem here is that the merchandise is Japanese-only and isn't easy for non-speaking users to research.

Hi, my name's Ryu-Chan. I important One Piece merch from Amazon Japan. They have a handy 'translate to English' button, and they automatcially convert yen to dollars. Why today, I bought 4 soundtrack albums that released in the year 2000. They are called Music &amp; Song Collection 1, Music & Song Collection 2, Music & Song Collection 3, and Music &amp; Best Song Collection. Notice how only two of them have pages?

There are lots of soundtrack albums for One Piece, and about half of them have pages. And I thought maybe I would fill in the rest that don't have pages. So I began researching them. But unfortunately, as an English-only user, there's no easy way for me to find out this information. Even if I were to record the track listings and timestamps, I can't read those Japanese titles, nor can I list an English translation. I'd only be able to put up half the page and it'd be a half-assed mess.

There are some merchandising companies like MegaHouse who list their products on their site. But if you don't speak Japanese, good luck. I have a lot of good ideas on how to organize games, toys, songs, etc. but it's no use if I can't read the information I'm trying to add. So that's problem #1. 19:24, July 23, 2016 (UTC)

Hello guys! Yeah, I think it's a great idea to revamp the merchandise sections since a lot of pages are not just a mess but also out of dates. I might be able to help a little. Would be great if we have like someone to make the design and layout for the pages so that the other contributors can help fill in the contents. Sorry, my english not that good.  Dark M clowN  http://images.wikia.com/miracle9/images/0/0b/Jibanyan_20.jpg  Talk  08:24, July 27, 2016 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that we are attempting to lump all of the merchandise by one standard layout. Figures are different from soundtracks, and you wouldn't try to give both the same standard layout. We have to figure out the right layout for various merchandise and I doubt anyone want to do that, considering just how much One Piece merchandise there are and how little knowledge we have on it.

@Drake, I'm fine with having the merchandise article layout being flexible, since there's just so many different kinds of merchandise with few people willing to help out. But if you really want one, go ahead and make some prototype layout on one of your subpages and show us.

Personally, I suggest making a loose guideline on merchandise article layouts and be done with it, since it's far easier than making a strict layout for each kind of merchandise. 03:40, August 8, 2016 (UTC)