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Pokémon Standards Initiative

The problem is lack of a good place to communicate, and as far as I can see not being methodical with trying to include every major Pokemon site. If a new forum specifically for this is not practical I would suggest a forum is created by Arty2 on his forum, so long as the other leaders are ok with that, and that they are invited to it. Decentralized debate will be near impossible to follow and we will almost certainly not reach a consensus on any issue.
 
I agree with eric. It looks like a good amount of the major sites are on board, or at the very least chaos and Serebii are. I don't think chaos has the time for this, so we can have someone who's interested and involved with the technical side of the site represent us. All there needs to be is a central place for this to get worked out. I don't think anyone is particularly attached to their own style of output.

chris is me, I currently have four Pokemon battle simulators installed. Even being able to import from any one of those to another would be a help.
 
Personally, I think the biggest gain from this would be establishing a place for inter site communication at a fairly high level, which would allow standards for many more things to be easily established. Being able to easily import everything to anywhere would be great though.
 
Firestorm said:
I agree with eric. It looks like a good amount of the major sites are on board, or at the very least chaos and Serebii are. I don't think chaos has the time for this, so we can have someone who's interested and involved with the technical side of the site represent us. All there needs to be is a central place for this to get worked out. I don't think anyone is particularly attached to their own style of output.

chris is me, I currently have four Pokemon battle simulators installed. Even being able to import from any one of those to another would be a help.
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Pokemon Online and Shoddy support Importing and Exporting to a text format, which you can use to go-between, if that helps.
 
Eevee said:
I see we are all very committed. 8)
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Well of course :nerd:
Sorry for that, just busy with uni lately. This proves that IRC may be a little problematic. Well, we can start with a forum where we can keep things written down and move to direct chat if convenient.

eric the espeon said:
If a new forum specifically for this is not practical I would suggest a forum is created by Arty2 on his forum
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Consider it done if others agree, but I'm fine with any place really. It'd also be nice If we could also nudge people writing for the emulators into it; the more people we get involved in the first phase, even in selecting a proper discussion place, the more support these "standards" will see.
 
I think setting up a small free forum might work, so everyone can talk. I am on board for this, since I find it annoying to make a team and spread it out on multiple computers too.
 
maybe it's just me, but i think there are several other things that could be standardized too while we're at it. for example, "D/P" vs "DPP" vs "DPPt".
 
Umbreon Dan said:
maybe it's just me, but i think there are several other things that could be standardized too while we're at it. for example, "D/P" vs "DPP" vs "DPPt".
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Haha, yes. Maybe a board in Policy Review with the members involved given access if Arty2 isn't up for making his own? We just need a rep from each site involved.
 
May I suggest that if a neutral forum is needed, the UEPC forum (http://uepc.eu/) would be the most appropriate. It's already a shared forum between a large number of sites, while at the same time not being closely associated with any of the large major sites.

The biggest problem I personally see with this initiative honestly is that, if you don't have every single major site buying into it, than anyone who is outside of the group but who knows what the standard is could take advantage of it for their own gain at the expense of everyone else. Bulba's experienced exactly this sort of thing happening before. We've had iPhone apps (both paid and free) parse our pages in real time, extracting the info and presenting it in their own format, while at the same time stripping the adverts, etc, that pay for our hosting. Locking us into a standard would make that and similar things a whole lot easier.
 
I would be for this. (Sorry, don't check my PMs on Smogon often, apparently.) However, I've got to study for 4 Microsoft Certifications (.NET 4.0) for work over the next 5 months, so I don't know exactly when I'll be able to convert everything over. There is a lot of stuff I need/want to add to my site, but I'm just bogged down with other stuff. (Silverlight is something I also want to try out.)

I don't really mind what the consensus ends up being for IV output as long as the Pokemon, Nature, and possible IVs end up as part of it (National Number is up to you guys).

The one thing that would be awesome, but I know won't happen, would be to have a sort of "global" database/large XML file for all Pokemon related data that we can all maintain from one spot. We can then pull that into whatever database our websites use. Though, its probably just a dream...
 
uepc could well provide a good neutral forum.

The biggest problem I personally see with this initiative honestly is that, if you don't have every single major site buying into it, than anyone who is outside of the group but who knows what the standard is could take advantage of it for their own gain at the expense of everyone else. Bulba's experienced exactly this sort of thing happening before. We've had iPhone apps (both paid and free) parse our pages in real time, extracting the info and presenting it in their own format, while at the same time stripping the adverts, etc, that pay for our hosting. Locking us into a standard would make that and similar things a whole lot easier.
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I followed those problems you had, and I doubt that this form of standardization would have similar problems. It would make it slightly easier for a program to parse specific information, but there would be no standardization of the full dex pages or how movepools are displayed or anything like that which was your main problem. The standard would be known to all players, not just those within the group, and allow easy importing and exporting of "set info" between different tools.

As for not every major site buying into it.. once we get the ball rolling I would expect a vast majority of the major site owners to be more than happy to be comply with sensible standards for a whole range of things.


The one thing that would be awesome, but I know won't happen, would be to have a sort of "global" database/large XML file for all Pokemon related data that we can all maintain from one spot. We can then pull that into whatever database our websites use. Though, its probably just a dream...
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That's a very.. appealing idea. There would be quite a few problems, such as who to give access. Who would host and design it. And really, all the major pokedexes are simply variations on this (bulba is completely open, but does not use a easily searchable database structure. Veekun has an opensource dex with all the info free to access, but only a few people can make changes live. Smogon's database is changable by 4 or so admins, and the detailed info (how moves are learned) is only partially there/not displayed. I don't know Serebii's full setup, but PO pulled it's dex from there and corrected things, it's in a reasonably accessible format.). Anyway, as I've been finding out.. there is a massive amount of inconsistency between pokedexes. I guess at some later stage the initiative could set out to solve this for everyone, rather than the comparison I'm doing now between just the Smogon/Veekun/PO (effectively serebii) databases.
 
I've been following the discussion so far, and i must say that the idea is promising as well as revolutionary and with a good perspective. As such, UEPC is possitive towards the idea and will happily provide the "neutral ground forum" for the development/implementation of it. If the other forums agree, of course.

Edit: UEPC has an IRC channel too, if needed.
 
I think this has enough support from the various sites to go ahead. I also think UEPC is a good neutral spot for this. I think all that's left is for a board to be created and a representative from each site that wants to be involved put forth to hash it out.

I read through Archaic's post which raised a very good point and MetalKid's which has an awesome idea and my opinions on both are the same as eric the espeon.
 
Firestorm said:
I think this has enough support from the various sites to go ahead. I also think UEPC is a good neutral spot for this. I think all that's left is for a board to be created and a representative from each site that wants to be involved put forth to hash it out.

I read through Archaic's post which raised a very good point and MetalKid's which has an awesome idea and my opinions on both are the same as eric the espeon.
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Heh, though, I can really be the only representative of my site since I'm the only one that codes it and own it... :)
 
I like this idea. As a researcher using OpenOffice (this project sounds very much like the advantages of open source/XML standard of OO.o btw) I find it frustrating sometimes trying to adapt information from the various formats between the sites.

Curtis (formerly known as Gengar) is back and we are trying to get him to update Pokémon Dungeon. As it happens we are in a good position to use any standardization that is used.

I am creating a tool that can be used for creating and tweaking teams. I would be more than willing to adjust the output so it can be used between the different sites.

Arty told me about this thread when I contacted him about all the web masters ever getting together in one forum for a meeting of the minds. I didn’t contact Smogon, because I couldn’t find a contact link for the web master/site.

Eevee said:
I see we are all very committed. 8)
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I have made a list of pokémon sites and found a few more links on the main page of Pokémon Dungeon. I will send an email to each of those with a link to this thread included.

For a mutual site with chat capabilities: Facebook?
 
If we want this data to be as compact as possible, it would be wise to have a common data source with one primary key per row. If everyone had access to these primary keys, it would be much easier to transfer data across systems.
 
while we don't get into the technical aspects much, we'd also be up for this, and can provide whatever support is needed.
 
MetalKid said:
The one thing that would be awesome, but I know won't happen, would be to have a sort of "global" database/large XML file for all Pokemon related data that we can all maintain from one spot. We can then pull that into whatever database our websites use. Though, its probably just a dream...
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Oh this one would be divine. Dreamy perhaps, but doable. After all the data is pretty much the same, the various Pokedex implementations differ in the arrangement and presentation of the information. Don't get me wrong, that's as important as the information itself, but who wouldn't love such a central database?

I'm in for UEPC and I can't see anyone opposing this so I guess we should talk to them on making a subforum and moving the discussion there?
 
I'm an administrator at the pokemon wiki at wikia (pokemon.wikia.com) and was contacted about this. I just want to let whoever contacted me to know that he has no clue how things work at the Pokemon Wiki, LOL. You see, what standards we have at the pokemon wiki are often ignored and it is often difficult to find things once they fall under the radar. There are a lot more important things to enforce like "No Speculation on articles" and other things of the like.

Simply put, it is hard to enforce anything on the Pokemon Wiki and that standards like those would be of a lower priority. I support this and all, but we'd have to stabilize first.

Thank you.
 
MetalKid said:
It's a "European" forum. When you register, you have to choose a European country as your home country. Obviously, USA is not a choice.
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While Americans are not barred from UEPC, we target mainly a European userbase, that is why only European countries are listed in the country field, because if we included one non-European country, we'd have to include them all, in order not to be biased. We don't have United States of America, because then we'd also have to include Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Japan etc. You can still choose a country you're linguistically connected to.
 
Can we get a better definition on the scope and intended goal of this project? As of right now, honestly, while it's all well and good, it really seems like pushing to standardize something that doesn't need standardization. Every website should already have easily readable output for its tools, or it isn't doing a very good job at being a website.

So, what's really to be gained by investing this time in making a standard for all this information that's already well-formatted? It's certainly not a bad idea for a given website to standardize the output of all their tools, maybe even work something into their own forums to make it pretty, sure. But working to standardize things from one website to another is not only difficult to orchestrate, but what purpose does it serve? It's a rather strange expectation to say that a user might use Site A's calculator to determine this hidden value, but then run off to Site B instead for another hidden value, rather than just use Site A's tool for that one as well.

If this actually takes off, we'll be glad to participate in the process and implement the eventual goal, but what are we really working towards here, and is it something that's actually worth the time and effort it would take to get there? If the goal isn't universally implemented, would this project be considered a success or a failure? What data, exactly, are we proposing a standard for, and what would this standardized output be used for? These are all things which should be clearly defined before any work on standardization actually begins.
 
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