Talk:Shinichi Shimomura

Profile Picture of Shimomura in KDC's Official Guidebook

I found Twitter user @Reno_san127 posting a profile picture of Shimomura in Kirby's Dream Course's official guidebook. Should this be reprinted? Leo Sukaze (talk) 04:12, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

the left one or the right one

Seriously though, what do you mean by "reprinted"? Do you mean someone with booklet should check if it's really there? Or do you mean recapture image entirely to only include photo? Superbound (talk) 17:18, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure he's just asking if we should post it on this page. To which I say, if we can verify it's real, then absolutely. --YFJ (talk · edits) 18:15, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

His profile picture is on the left, and I'm worried that the image will be copyrighted whether we use it as is or modify it on this page. However, Shimomura's information like this is too valuable and I don't want to miss it, so I consulted here. Ref: WiKirby:Image standards -Leo Sukaze (talk) 17:42, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I believe nearly all of our pictures are copyrighted, but we can use them under fair use laws. --kirb 18:14, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

About left-right question, that was a joke. Anyway, I get your concerns, many of the images in category:Photographs were officially published by companies, but as kirb mentioned there's fair use law, so I don't think there should be a problem unless said person goes to us and requests to be taken down (as far as I'm concerned that's how it works). Well, first it needs to verified if the information is indeed true, and even if you're unsure about this, you can PM them through twitter and ask them. Superbound (talk) 20:59, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Also, while I'm not copyright expert or anything "Do not upload photos that have not been publicly released by the original owner.". I think posting on twitter an image is releasing it into public, but as I said I'm not an expert. I'm going to ask panda about it. Superbound (talk) 21:05, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Seems fairly straightforward to me. If it indeed comes from a guidebook published by Nintendo, then it is fair game to use. All that needs to be done is to track down that guidebook. --Samwell (talk) 21:23, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

(reset indent) Yep, I have already clarified it with pandakekok on discord here. (posting conversation transcript for Leo's convenience)

Superbound: Since my two attempts to ping you through #wikirby-rc failed miserably, @pandakekok9 I'm calling you for input in these discussions:

As the creator, what was your reasoning to create https://wikirby.com/wiki/Category_talk:Kirby%27s_Dream_Land_3_ability_icons ? It is currently under discussion for deletion.

Can you clarify the copyright situation on https://wikirby.com/wiki/Talk:Shinichi_Shimomura ? I'm not sure if I'm right.

pandakekok9: Sorry, I'm using a third-party client (named Ripcord) for Discord, and for some reason the ping didn't get to me. I'm looking into it.

pandakekok9: @Superbound The image standards say "original owner". I'm not sure what exactly this means. Does it mean the photographer, copyright holder (which could be not the photographer), the subject of the photo, or the one who commissioned the photo?

Superbound: 🠒@pandakekok9: "Sorry, I'm using a third-party client (named Ripcord) for Discord, and for some reason the ping didn't get to me. I'm looking into it."
if you mean the rc pings, i messed up formatting there, hence "failed miserably"

Superbound: about image standards, i assumed in my response to leo that it was the photographer, but the policy was written by samwell, so your guess is as good as mine

pandakekok9: 🠒@Superbound: "if you mean the rc pings, i messed up formatting there, hence "failed miserably""
#wikirby-rc looks messed up to me in this client I'm using, so maybe that could be the reason. I wish the wiki had the Echo notification system installed, where you can ping users by linking their user pages on discussions...

pandakekok9: 🠒@Superbound: "about image standards, i assumed in my response to leo that it was the photographer, but the policy was written by samwell, so your guess is as good as mine"
If "original owner" means photographer then we can't accept it. I think that's not what Samwell had in mind when writing that, because that would be very restrictive. Most photographs are commissioned, so the photographer doesn't pay much attention to their photos

pandakekok9: Or maybe we can take that as "permission" from the photographer? They after all agreed to the terms of the commission, so they'd be okay if the commission published the photos. In this case we need evidence of permission from the commissioner

pandakekok9: Which in this case means we can accept it, because it's in the KDC guidebook right? So it's meant for publication.

Superbound: welp i know nothing about copyrights, shouldn't have said what i said :blush-1:

Superbound: 🠒@pandakekok9: "Which in this case means we can accept it, because it's in the KDC guidebook right? So it's meant for publication."
maybe, nobody is 100% sure

pandakekok9: I'd say we accept the photo here. The KDC guidebook was published, right? So it should be compliant with our image standards

Superbound: ok

Superbound: also i found something about echo's implementation https://discordapp.com/channels/266426802321227778/374237263045066752/776505625743196190

After that, discussion went on another topic. But like everyone here said million times, it needs to be verified. Superbound (talk) 11:06, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I tried asking @Reno_san127, he/she gave me permission to work with image on WiKirby, and he/she confirmed that the image was scanned from his/her own KDC guidebook itself. Leo Sukaze (talk) 06:17, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

That is awesome to hear, thanks so much for reaching out to them! I can work on uploading the picture sometime today unless someone else beats me to it. - Gigi (talk • edits) 12:28, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your help, cooperation and progress of the article! Leo Sukaze (talk) 05:42, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Another Shinichi Shimomura image

I caught in the the Spanish Kirby FANDOM (direct image link) and on Reddit (direct image link identical to the Kirbypedia one) another image of Shinichi Shimomura, I thought that it would be nice to have it here, but I have 2 doubts:

1. Both pages say that the image is from the Kirby's Dream Course guidebook, but there isn't a direct image of the complete page of the handbook, nor a direct source of whoever scanned it (unlike the first image that we have, which have a direct Twitter source). As such, it would be better if someone have that handbook to have a more stable source.
2. Every other staff member, including Kirby's creator have just 1 image on their article, so having 2 images of this guy may break the "rule". However, I think that just because this guy is, well, this guy I think that having 2 images of him would be nice. Also, it would help to solidify his appearance to any reader that comes by; having 1 image of someone mysterious is doubtful, but having 2 have more coherence.

So, do you think that that we should include this other image of him even thought we already have one and there isn't a very direct source? (The source thing could be fixed if someone have the handbook, of course. Asking the same person on Twitter that uploaded the first image to get an scan of this other one is an option too.) -Zolerian (talk | contribs) 18:22, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

This image comes from the same Twitter thread and same guidebook, the uploader cropped it. ⁠–⁠Wiz (talk · edits) 18:40, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

I didn't see that before, thanks. Still, anybody thinks that we should include that image of him? If there are only 2 photos of that guy on the internet, I think that we should include them.
On a side note, that group photo could be used in a few pages, like on the merchandise one for the Kirby plush, and if I'm not wrong, both Hirokazu Ando and Satoru Iwata are there. -Zolerian (talk | contribs) 20:30, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Notice

What is the point of the notice telling people to "keep an eye out for any more info about this person"? It goes without saying that any relevant new info we get will be added to the page, just like any other page on the wiki. If this is all the information we have, then that's just the reality of the situation, telling people to "look for more" won't really accomplish anything. If the notice does accomplish anything, it's making the article look unprofessional and giving the wrong impression that there's more information available that needs to be added to the wiki. And besides, what information are we even looking for? This page length seems quite in line with other staff member articles, e.g. Masahiro Sakurai actually having a shorter intro paragraph that also doesn't give a reason for him stopping work on Kirby. Hewer (talk · contributions) 20:12, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Copying and pasting from my edit summary: "There is a reason this is a custom notice and not a simple "incomplete", we still don't know why Shimomura stopped working on Kirby, and that's something to keep in mind if we ever find out one day". I don't see harm to leave the notice up, and I don't see how it makes it look unprofessional. It's a call in case anyone knows info about Shimomura we don't have documented. A while, we didn't even think he had pictures of him available, which was soon proved to be false. There is a lot of obscure Kirby content out there that maybe it simply wasn't made its way online. - Gigi (talk • edits) 20:15, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

My point is that you can say that about anything on the wiki. For all we know there's an extremely obscure dev interview that someone will dig up tomorrow in which they confirm Kirby is actually the decapitated head of a zombie. When that happens, it will go without saying that we would like to include that information on the wiki. Being a wiki, the whole site is incomplete and likely has missing information at any given time, but we already have a notice conveying that we want people to add information on the main page. And for the argument that Shimomura should be an exception because we don't know enough about him: again, how much do we need before we have enough? We don't include that much personal information on our developer articles as is (again I point out that Masahiro Sakurai, probably the most important person overall to the franchise, has a shorter intro paragraph than this article). Hewer (talk · contributions) 20:27, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

I think you are missing the point of the notice. First of all, we are are talking first about a person here, not a character or game mechanic, so let's not go off topic here. For all people covered in the wiki, we know current whereabouts of them, often including social media. Shinichi Shimomura is a big exception to this rule in general (not just for Kirby) that we really have no clue where he is right now, his birth year, and why he left HAL. On top of all that, he's one of the three main directors of the series. If that isn't big, I don't know what it is.

See this custom notice as an "incomplete" notice but with no expectation to ever complete, but with awareness that this info is missing and we would like to know and document in the wiki if we can one day. This is not about your weird example of Kirby being a zombie, or how articles may be missing information we don't know they are missing, this is a case of we knowing we are missing this information, but with it being not publically available as far as we know marking the page incomplete doesn't make much sense. - Gigi (talk • edits) 20:36, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

If you want to see it as another way, think of it as lost media. If, say, Kirby Slide had no documented gameplay of it anywhere, and thus we had no clue how the game played, we could have a notice in the page telling people to look for more content about it, but not marking it as incomplete as it's (as far as we know) lost media. If one day it was found (which has happened), we could complete the page. So think of Shimomura's background and current whereabouts as "lost media". - Gigi (talk • edits) 20:39, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Again though, look at our other pages for real people and compare how much information they have to this one. I'm not trying to argue Shimomura is unimportant, but I am saying (for the third time) that other important people like Sakurai don't have that much more information. None of the other articles for people who left HAL or seemingly stopped working on the series state why they did so (e.g. Sakurai, Shogo Sakai, Tetsuya Notoya), so I don't see why that kind of information in this particular case is so much more sought after. As far as articles about real people on this wiki go, Shimomura really isn't much of an outlier unless we're gonna expand the articles on everyone else. And we do know his birth year, it's in the article.

For the Kirby Slide example, I guess we just have different opinions on how to approach that, because I feel if an article is clearly incomplete because the information to complete it is unavailable, then the fact we'd want to add that information were it discovered would be obvious enough to not need a superfluous notice. Hewer (talk · contributions) 20:56, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Would you had removed the notice if it was simply an "incomplete" notice? - Gigi (talk • edits) 20:58, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Probably. As far as I'm concerned, an article is complete (or rather, as complete as possible and thus not in need of a notice) if it contains all the information that's available and relevant. Hewer (talk · contributions) 21:04, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

So your argument boil downs to the point that you don't think the article, as it currently stands, is missing any information? Even though we know it is missing information? Just because other articles like Sakurai's don't have any incomplete templates? Then if I go and add incomplete templates to some pages (because I looked and a lot of staff pages could use more information, admittedly), would you think this page could be marked as incomplete by the same definition? - Gigi (talk • edits) 21:07, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

If we decided to start expanding pages for other staff (which I agree we perhaps should) then yeah this one would be more of an outlier, though in this case I still don't think an incomplete notice of any kind is necessary if the missing information just isn't available at all to our knowledge. If the situation were to change and we were missing a bunch of information that somehow got discovered then yeah, the article would become incomplete until the information was added, but with what we've got right now a template still feels superfluous (the article itself points out that "there is not much publicly known information" anyway, so it's still clear to the reader that we don't know much about him, no template necessary). Hewer (talk · contributions) 21:20, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

I will wait to see what others think, because personally I don't think the notice here hurts and I feel it helps as a reminder that we want eventually to figure out what Shimomura has been up to since 2002, but I do agree that to be fair other staff articles should be expanded a bit more. - Gigi (talk • edits) 01:43, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

I really agree and vote on leaving the template. It doesn't convey that more information should be seek. What it conveys is that, in case that information is found, it should be treated which much more importance than information about other people. And why? Because he has been one of the three main directors of Kirby. Talking about staff in general, I agree that other staff don't have pages with much information, but there could be some arguments for that. Sakurai has a Wikipedia page, Kumazaki has a Wikipedia page, but Shimomura does not. I don't think that a fan wiki/encyclopedia should seek to make a full biography of a person while Wikipedia already seeks that. Compare for instance Miyamoto's page in SMW with his one in Wikipedia. Its like the opposite that fan wikis do for games, they cover something in extend that Wikipedia covers only in its surface, with biographies of notable people being the opposite. Now, talking about Shimomoura specifically, I guess that he doesn't have a Wikipedia page because there isn't enough notable info about him to make one, other than "he existed and is credited in eight games", and THAT is the reason why here we are going to the extend to note that info about him is important, because there is none. All other staffs with pages have notable available information that is ignored here because it is not needed, but in his case no info is ignored, as there just is none. Again, I agree that pages about other staffs could be expanded, mostly in their biographies sections, or add their ideologies about the series or so on, but precisely that is why Shimomura is notable. Pages about other staff can be expanded, his can't, and thus why this page gained this template. Personally every time I see that template I don't receive a impression that it is unprofessional, but on the contrary I see it as kinda professional, because this page is going out of their way to say something like "hey, this guy is important, and information about him is appreciated, much more than about other people, so it would be great if you happen to find some" and that is just neat to me, I don't know you. -Zolerian (talk | contribs) 05:30, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm not asking for Wikipedia levels of coverage, but that Shigeru Miyamoto page you link to is quite a bit more substantial than our staff pages (at least right now). There's certainly more Kirby-related information available about people like Sakurai to expand their articles more. Anyway, if we must keep the notice then it should probably be rewritten to something that more clearly states the apparent intention, because your claim that "it doesn't convey that more information should be seek" is at odds with the template itself instructing us to "keep an eye out for any more info". Best I can think of would be something like "There is little available information about this person. If you know more information, please add it to the article." I still don't really like that since it goes without saying that we want people to add missing information to any article and singling out this guy seems weird, but at least it gets across better what the apparent actual intention of the template is. Hewer (talk · contributions) 09:54, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree on expanding the pages of staff to lengths about that Miyamoto SMW page for example, but I find that to be a topic separate from the existence of this template in this page. I agree on rewriting the template to be a bit more specific in what it seeks to convey, be in that way you proposed or in another way, but same as Gigi I want to see what other people think about the matter, both about what they understand that the template seeks to convey, and if to rewrite it or not. And while singling out Shimomura specifically seems weird at first glance, I would argue that it is fair to single him out like this, because of the nature of his important involvement and then sudden uninvolvement in the series. --Zolerian (talk | contribs) 14:49, 5 April 2024 (UTC)