This month, our Community Spotlight features Wikitroid, the largest wiki for the Metroid series on the internet, and a vast source of information. We asked two of its most active users, PeabodySam and RoyboyX, to share their experience with editing Wikitroid, and feature their favorite articles.
Wikitroid
Hello, I’m RoyboyX, and I’m the deputy creative director of Shinesparkers. I’ve also been an editor of Wikitroid for over eleven years. I joined Wikitroid in March 2009, shortly before my birthday and months before Metroid: Other M was revealed. On the home page, I saw that there were over 100 “Wanted Pages”, which are links to articles that don’t exist yet. Some were typos, some were meant to become articles, and some were not meant to. I set myself a goal of clearing out the Wanted Pages entirely by the release date of Other M, out of a fear that things to do relating to past games would be neglected once the game came out. I managed to achieve “extermination” of the Wanted Pages by the self-imposed deadline despite some setbacks due to a referendum on whether certain pages should be allowed on the wiki (said pages were allowed on a case by case basis). Since then, I’ve become an almost daily editor, writing nearly three thousand of the site’s almost six thousand articles as of this writing.
A huge focus of the articles I’ve written from 2016-2020 have been for developers on the Metroid games, and then rooms in the games. Not every staff member had a page, and I sought to resolve that, in several cases uncovering new information about the installments they were part of on social media and other websites. All rooms in the Prime series are named on the map, and we completed writing articles for every single one of them from 2009 to 2010. Certain rooms in non-Prime games would also be written every so often, if an official proper or descriptive name could be found for them. In late 2019, I decided that rooms from the main Metroid series, particularly Other M, should also receive pages regardless of whether they had an official name, and began to create them. This led to another referendum because some users were concerned about the scope of this project, and whether we should be using made up names for unnamed rooms. Eventually, we came to a compromise: the most important rooms could receive pages, and unimportant rooms (such as “filler” corridors between larger rooms) would go on a list summarizing the rooms of the area. As of July 2020, every room in Other M has now been documented in an article or a page, a project I completed practically all by myself.
Contributing to Wikitroid has been rewarding personally as it has given me a creative outlet to document the game series I love most, and it has instilled in me a passion for research and investigation. I’ve greatly enjoyed working with its users, such as Peabody, to increase our coverage of Metroid. Additionally, working with both Wikitroid and Shinesparkers has allowed me to find answers to questions that have long been asked on the wiki about the lore of the series, and preserve and spread obscure information. As of this writing, there are still many more articles and lists to be written for rooms in the original Metroid and Zero Mission, Metroid 2 and Samus Returns, Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion.
Fun fact: the fish-like creature you see in this spotlight’s header is Wikitroid’s mascot, Bob! For a long time, this enemy (from Metroid 2 and Samus Returns) was the only creature without a name, until the Samus Returns guide named it as “Rock Icicle”.
Hello, I’m PeabodySam, and I’m an article editor at Wikitroid. Since the mid-2000s, wiki-editing has been a hobby of mine, as I contributed information to a wide variety of wikis including BIONICLEsector01, Dino Attack RPG Wiki, TV Tropes, and SmashWiki. I got my start on Wikitroid shortly after the release of Metroid: Samus Returns. When I checked Wikitroid as a reference, I saw that its coverage of Metroid II: Return of Samus and its new remake was incomplete, even containing several errors (e.g. misidentifying Area 5 as a remake of Phase 6 when it is actually based on Phase 7). Rather than simply sitting idly, I chose to step in and offer my own knowledge of the games to amend and improve these articles. Before I knew it, I was editing Wikitroid almost every day for a while, racking up thousands of edits in the past few years.
One article that I’m proud to have contributed to Wikitroid is “Black Ridley”. It’s a temporary powered-up form of Ridley canonically seen in Metroid: Other M where his skin turns dark while glowing with purple aura. It’s never been given an official English name until the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U 50-Fact Extravaganza video, which calls it… Meta Ridley, despite having nothing to do with Ridley’s cybernetic form in the Metroid Prime Trilogy? For years, the Smash and Metroid fandoms just accepted this as an odd fact. But, when I looked for the source, I found the original Japanese version of the 50-Fact Extravaganza, and I discovered that this video actually referred to this form as “Kuro Ridorī”, which is different from Meta Ridley’s Japanese name. Google Translate told me that “Kuro” meant “Black”, which fit this form’s darkened appearance. It turns out that “Meta Ridley” was just made up in the English localization of the video. Now that I knew this form had a unique Japanese name and wasn’t originally meant to be Meta Ridley, I wrote up a new article for Black Ridley in hopes of making this obscure fact more publicly known. Since information on this form was already fairly scarce, I continued my research by watching various YouTube videos of the Other M Ridley boss battle (even including some blind playthroughs to see what happens if Samus never shoots Black Ridley with a Super Missile), so that I could write a more comprehensive article. The result? The Black Ridley article was nominated as the November 2019 Featured Article of Wikitroid.
I’m always happy whenever I feel useful, and contributing to a public resource such as Wikitroid makes me feel like my time is spent helping others in a valuable way. In this day and age where everything seems so accessible on the internet, it’s shockingly easy for information to be lost forever, as I have learned the hard way. Therefore, I’ve become highly focused on the documentation and preservation of information, and editing wikis such as Wikitroid gives me the opportunity to do so. I enjoy “the thrill of the hunt”; looking through online scans of official guidebooks and Nintendo Power issues in search of obscure facts, or struggling to piece together Japanese words and plugging them through Google Translate just to validate our unofficial translations… it’s rather like finding hidden secrets in a Metroid game!
Our Thoughts
Darren
Wikitroid is a great place to find information, and somewhere that I often turn to when I research a variety of Metroid topics. It’s a vital resource that Metroid fans are lucky to have, and something I feel we all need to support, because without it, our knowledge of the Metroid series would be significantly reduced, and it would be a huge shame if newer fans to the series couldn’t learn more about Samus and her many adventures. I find it amazing that I can search for the most obscure of Metroid references, and the website likely has a page on it! My hope is that many people will do their bit to contribute to this growing database, and support and appreciate the great work the team is doing to keep a record of data that we can all turn to when we need it.
Image Gallery
For more content on Wikitroid, please visit the link below: