Wikipedia article

Any interest in helping me rewrite the Wikipedia entry for Robocode sometime? We can do it there (like on a user page), but just wanted to bring it up here first. It's all pretty stale, and I think could use a major overhaul besides the first 2-3 paragraphs. I also think the final product should be about half the size of what's there now.

I was under the impression that the point of Wikipedia was to have a stale and objective article for every subject.

The problem with the Robocode page is that it is not objective. It reads like an advertisement, or a fan's website. It also goes into unnecessary detail in some places, while leaving out important information in other places.

Yeah, "stale" like "hasn't been updated in a long time" seems appropriate. Inaccurate information should be fixed or removed though.

I don't think anyone (on Wikipedia) cares about which robot is best at what and such, and keeping those up to date would be a pain anyway, last update was claimed to be in 2009. So I think the RR@H champions should be removed.

The influencial robots section needs to be adjusted some. For example to me Phoenix's entry reads like an advertisement, and is YersiniaPestis' passing Shadow for a bit really worth mentioning? Plus a few are missing like Raiko/RaikoMX (First Open Source Surfer), Chalk (Open Source kNN), BulletCatcher (Bullet Shielding), MoxieBot? (Bullet Shadows? Was it the first?).

But I wouldn't mind seeing a list of past competitions on there, might give the game more clout.

Yep, I agree on all those points.

Taking a few of the bots on the Open Source page might be a good start for replacing the "influential bots" list. Maybe list more current/past competitions, but with less description of each than what's there now. For movement/targeting techniques, maybe instead of mentioning all those Robocode-specific terms, we could just mention some of the machine learning techniques that are widely used, like KNN, kernel density, multi-variate histograms (VCS), pattern matching, and neural networks.

I'm torn as to whether the wiki deserves its own special mention besides the link below. It is a pretty strong part of the online Robocode community and a resource for anyone doing Robocode, but I'm not sure that means it deserves more than just a link near the top of "See also" or "External links".

Agreed on all, unfortunately I am super busy again and don't have time to help with this.

I think there should be some sort of heading called "Community" or something like that, where you list the RoboWiki and the SourceForge forums as well as the dev groups.

I agree, and I like your thinking. Could almost copy Open Source wholesale for that section, after converting some of the jargon.

I think a mention in the actual article to the Robowiki would be justified. It is where most of the developments and long running competitions originate (like RR@H). But it might just be at most a sentence like "A great deal of the innovation occurs around Robowiki[External Link], the games premier wiki."

Perhaps a short mention of some of the licensing that occurs in Robocode. Otherwise there isn't really much to say beyond what is already covered.