Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20200105/Interview

Featured editor: Alexandra IDV

Interviewed by GamerPro64

We are pleased to announced that in this issue, we are bringing back our Featured editor segment of the Newsletter. And to celebrated the revivial of the feature, let me introduce to you today's interviewee: Alexandra IDV. Alexandra has been active here on Wikipedia since February 2010. Since then, she has contributed to over forty Good Articles and helped with the promotion of Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward to Featured Article status in 2016. With these achievements under her belt, now its time to ask her what is on her mind, among others.

1. What is the significance of your username and how did you select it?

   Alexandra is just my real-life name, so that's simple enough. I don't consider "IDV" to stand for anything anymore, but it has a silly origin. I'm a big fan of animation and comics, always have been, and used to be part of NAFS(K), a Swedish Donald Duck comic fan organization as a kid... and their motto was the Latin phrase "In Donaldismo Veritas", "the truth is within the study of Donald Duck comics". I thought it was funny, and would use it as a display name in chats, or append the acronym IDV to the end of my name, and it's just stuck around since then.

2. How did you become involved with the VG project?

   I can't even remember at this point... I'm assuming that either someone mentioned it to me after seeing me edit video game articles, or I just found it on my own, but it was pretty early on. I looked through my early contributions to WP-space pages while answering this question, and it turns out I signed up at WPVG in March 2010, just around two months after I joined Wikipedia. I wasn't very active on enwp yet at that point, and mostly just edited svwp, so this is actually a little surprising to me.

3. How much of a gamer are you and toward what type of games do you tend to gravitate?

   I have a lot of interests, and tend to engage with them in waves, sometimes reading a lot, sometimes watching films a lot, sometimes playing games a lot. So it varies. I'm open to trying most stuff out – my girlfriend is visiting me over the holidays and will be introducing me to Path of Exile, a game that seems a little intimidating to me – but I typically enjoy narrative-focused games, like RPGs and adventure games. Play Ghost Trick, you all! Games you can just pop into for a bit, like Tetris 99 or Pokémon TCG Online, are great, too, and I enjoy playing them while listening to podcasts to relax.

4. Which article(s) are you most proud of writing or do you believe exemplifies your best work?

   Hmm, this is tough. There is the featured article Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, of course, which I worked on together with Famous Hobo and ThomasO1989. We did a pretty good job with it, but I would for sure want to go back to and do some further work on it – but then again, that is the case with most featured work I've done after some time has passed. I would say that I'm quite happy with my work on the first three Infinity series articles – Never 7, Ever 17, and Remember 11 – where I managed to gather a substantial amount of production information despite how Never 7 and Remember 11 were never officially released in English, and how Ever 17 only received a very limited print run in English in 2005.

5. What are your plans for the immediate future? Are there any projects with which you are currently involved or which you are thinking about starting?

   Currently I'm working on bringing the articles for the World of Darkness video games up to featured status after falling in love with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, the tabletop game it is based on, and the world they take place in. A lot of the work was already done when I started, with two articles at FA level, so the project is mainly about bringing the remainder up to GA/FL and keeping Bloodlines 2 up to date as new information becomes available. For the future, I would want to make a push toward getting the Ace Attorney series up to snuff – I already got the articles for the first five main games and first two spin-offs up to GA, but have not done much work on the articles about games released since then – and making a Zero Escape Good Topic.

6. What is the most difficult part of editing Wikipedia?

   The most difficult thing is definitely motivation. As you may know, I'm a trans woman and suffer from gender dysphoria, something that at times just absolutely drains you of motivation to do even things you want or need to do. Who has the energy to make dinner, anyway? It was really bad before I started hormone replacement therapy in 2018, and it still affects me from time to time, to varying degrees. So my advice is, take breaks to avoid burn-out, and if you're trans and able to, transitioning may help. Other than that... It's just really challenging to write articles about Japanese media and having to find and parse Japanese sources, particularly when they are only available in print. I'm lucky in that I have a few friends who have studied the language, who sometimes can help me out when it gets too difficult. Writing plot summaries for games is also a living hell, and I always hope that some super fan will come around and write a 5,000-word plot summary that I can trim down to 700.

7. What advice would you give a new editor interested in working on video game articles?

   Okay, so, here's Alexandra's top tips to working on game articles for new editors:

   • Look at articles similar to the one you want to edit, that are more developed than yours. Look at their structures, specifically, and try to create your article in a similar way if possible. For reference, here's a list of Good Articles, and here's one of Featured Articles and Lists.
   • Don't rely on what you personally know about a game. Look for articles, reviews and interviews on websites and in magazines listed at WP:VG/RS, and base everything you write on what's written in those – and make sure you actually cite those sources.
   • Information about the game's development and critical reception are among the most important parts of a game article – don't spend all your time on describing the gameplay or characters in extreme detail.
   • Start out with editing already existing articles, rather than creating brand new ones – this is easier, and means you don't need to know as much about how everything on Wikipedia works from the start.
   • Ask people at WikiProject video games for help if you need it; it is one of the more active WikiProjects, so you will likely get a response before too long. Then again, if you're reading this newsletter, you probably know about wpvg already...

8. Anything else you want to say?

   Play Ghost Trick; be nice to each other; trans rights are human rights; cite your sources; Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has yet to be surpassed as the best video game of all time even after 16 years; if you've played Steins;Gate 0 and want to write a 5,000-word plot summary for it, I'd be happy to trim it down to 700.

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