It Looks Like The Official Super Mario Encyclopedia Plagiarised A Fan-Made Wiki

I don't know about the English translator, but as a proofreader of the Spanish version myself, I gotta say that Nintendo provides you with glossaries that are not always complete. Well, especially in older games there is a noticeable lack of resources to work with.

And sometimes you have to check YouTube videos to catch the names of the smallest and less important enemies, or yes, check the Super Mario Wiki.

But that's a last resort I used, after trying all the other possibilities. I don't know the degree of effort put into the English version before resorting to the wiki.

This for me is disgusting on the part of Nintendo. They have over the last year attempted to take a moral high ground. Even though we all know they themselves have used the same ROMs and sites that attempt to keep games from dying out...

They have stomped all over anyone they think is plagiarising their work...

But we all know for years they have been stealing ideas and work from fans - and now they have been caught with their pants down.

To blame dark horse is a cop out.... they licensed and employed dark horse to do a job, if no one at Nintendo has a passion for the history and fact checking, they need a new direction and some new staff... millions of us would do a better job!

Wow, it's like when you just copy and paste something from a website for homework. No one thought of looking at this???

@Stocksy Well, coming from a Japanese version the blame is on the translator, which as I said maybe didn't have all the resources they should have, and that part Nintendo is to blame. But the publisher doesn't know what the translator is doing. As far as I'm concerned. And even if they did an internal proofreading, if the people who do it is not an expert on the matter these things will keep happening. I don't think all publishing companies have experts on everything.

Anyway, Nintendo hired a publisher for the original Japanese version. And that's all. An overseas publisher buys the rights to translate and publish that book in their language and Nintendo has nothing to do with the translation or the internal review. That's between the publisher and the translator. But video game companies are known (in publishing circles, which is what I know) for not providing the best glossaries to work with, and you have to insist for better versions to come.

@Spectra https://youtu.be/32Hp1LW08Yc

Filip?

As far as the Wiki owners are concerned, I wouldn't consider this book canon.

That is disappointing. I’ll keep my Amazon order open though, as much of it for me are the pictures and descriptions, I can live with dodgy translated names. Although you do have to worry if they’ve bungled any of the large pieces of text too?

Lol of course Nintendo doesn't police this. Sad day for dark horse to pull this. Was too expensive for me regardless but now feels tainted like a poison mushroom

It's weird. Looking at those images; it says ''Killer Chair''; that name is completely made up as well. The official Mario Wiki lists them as ''Chair'' because that's what the internal DS file says, and it's the literal translation of the Japanese name; makes sense. However, the only source that lists them as ''Killer Chair'' is a Mario Wikia: http://mario.wikia.com/wiki/Killer_Chair

It seems to be a case of the translators using the Mario fan pages, and taking everything they say as truth.

Anyway, it's strange that an licensed product by Nintendo has to source the internet when it comes to information like this.

@Moroboshi876 That is about what I was thinking when reading the news.
Especially for enemies, where the creators of the wiki didn't know the official english names, as they are probably never mentioned, it is also likely that the translators of this book didn't know the english names.
It is even possible that some english names don't even exist, if they are never mentioned, no one would translate them.

As a translator, for the book, If you are missing data, you probably just expect the wiki to be correct. I can understand that.

This is a pretty weird situation though.

@Kirgo Exactly. It's a mistake, of course, but maybe a mistake they forced you to do. And deeming the use of a name plagiarism is a bit excessive. I mean, we're not talking about full paragraphs or sentences here.

And I consider Super Mario Wiki a good source of information. It's not perfect, nor has it all, but it's good.

How can Nintendo live with themselves this day and age? It's obvious that they don't care about their franchises or the fans at all.. I hope they get sued for this crap, although it might be too much to wish for.

@GravyThief Why support something like this??

Technically we should be blaming Dark Horse for this. They have licensed the Mario Characters and screen shots to make a book and have cut corners.

I don't know where anyone would stand on suing Nintendo or Dark Horse for a made up name of a character connected to an image Nintendo owns, and probably wasn't asked permission to use it in the first place.

More the point we should be questioning if it's fair on the consumer who bought a Mario Encylopedia for legitimate information, which isn't present in the book?

“Plagiarism” seems pretty dramatic given it looks like only the names of characters were lifted, certainly by mistake. Poorly researched maybe but that’s about it. If using a name is plagiarism then every reference to “Mario”, “Bowser”, “Bowsettee” is equally plagiarism (of Nintendos works rather than a fan wiki - excluding bowsette of course) which is an absurd line to draw. Plagiarism would likely mean lifting entire paragraphs or at the least sentences.

For all we know it’s Nintendo’s error, not Dark Horse. It’s quite possible that an employee that didn’t know everything there is to know about Mario did a Google search as that was considered easier than going through some internal archive. Hell, I’m in a government organisation and have gone to Google at times for information rather than the internal portals since it’s often an easier way to grab something that’s presumed to be public domain.

If the Zelda timelines any indication it’s that a bunch of the series lore is probably just thrown together when they go to print a book like this as fan service and it’s not all sitting there documented and ready for staff to access.

Unfortunate the mistake happened, but I’m sure that’s all it is. The worst bit is surely that if they had an alternative name then this book would have been a good opportunity to publish that, but as noted this probably will mean those are the canon names hence forward and in a few years this will be a neat piece of trivia of how a fan Wiki named a character. Sure it’ll make the day of whoever made the edit on the wiki that initially gave that name.

There’s a flip argument to be made to that a wiki, a source of information, should make it obvious if they’re making stuff up since it’s likely visitors will go there and trust the information. Places like Wikipedia put a lot of stock in trying to keep information factual.

After that crap Nintendo pulled using third party roms, who's even surprised?

Cya
Raziel-chan

I'll wait for the next edition.

If you give something nice away there's always some jdibdubdubftub ready to try and monetise it. Most of them won't credit you if they can avoid it. Not impressed with Dark Horse on this, a simple citation is all that was required.

Why does Nintendo get jdndldkcbfkfon for something they arent responsible for? It's clearly Dark Horse who's at fault.

wow didnt know filip munchin had got a job with dark horse after getting sacked by ign

@geheimxy Because reading comprehension is in short supply these days, moreso on the internet.

Filip Mucin work on this book?

https://youtu.be/2bt0s9YSMio

@Razzy @Stocksy

For the sake of saying it, it was proven that Nintendo did not steal ROMs of their games.

Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCro3FHKdHA

Spawn Wave looks very closely at information that recently came out. Long story short is that pretty much Nintendo created and internal ROM dump for Animal Crossing on GameCube.

The information he looks at is also cited in the description and allows you to look at the individual data he is looking at as well.

I had found some of the language in one of the "Twitter" messages in the article to had been very rude due to the way in which the word "hell" appeared to had been used as part of that message.

@Damo One of the translators who worked on the book actually discusses things on Twitter, and they admit to using the wiki.

Start of thread: https://twitter.com/ZackDavisson/status/1054841989466734594

The relevant tweet (although the entire thread touches on it): https://twitter.com/ZackDavisson/status/1054881259481063424

Feels like a slow news day here considering this book is a few years old. I fail to see how it is Nintendo's fault here really since they just licensed the Mario name out to Dark Horse who then wrote the book themselves.

Have bought this book... no regrets. Even more interesting with all of this controversy...

Seems totally fine by me to use these names if they want to. Legally, it’s well outside any copyright violation. Morally, I wouldn’t even call it plagiarism. If that is plagiarism, the wiki itself is full of plagiarism. For correctness they should consider including the source though. The question is whether they actually want to use these names though, it doesn’t seem well thought through.

@LordGeovanni No need for proof. You cannot steal what is yours. It is a priori knowledge that Nintendo did not steal their own game. I think Nintendo should use roms from the internet, just to establish the fact that the rights to distribute those roms belong to them.

@TPort777

Why "Rupert"?

Yo! Super Mario Wiki admin here and author of the Twitter thread quoted in the OP. Few things I want to clear up:

@Smigit @Mortenb I would agree that calling what Dark Horse did here "plagiarism" is a bit extreme, since as far as anyone can tell, they only lifted the names used by the wiki and not actual text.

However as I wrote on the wiki's forum in response to one of the translator's justification for the choices (https://www.marioboards.com/index.php?topic=40406.msg2032507#msg2032507), there's a bigger issue here and it's the "Soarin' Stu" name. The wiki has a content redistribution license that allows commercial use, but only if the original author is credited, the license cited and the content distributed under the same terms. Dark Horse took the original creation of a wiki contributor (here the Soarin' Stu name), included it in a book they sell for money... without doing any of that. That's not good.

re Smigit's last paragraph: The wiki makes it abundantly clear when a name is made-up, either through the use of an impossible-to-miss template at the top of the page or mouseover text. In recent years, we've also stepped our efforts to cite names that are not easily found in the game itself.

@geheimxy : While the lion's share of the blame would fall on Dark Horse (since they produced the English translation), Nintendo isn't completely blameless here as they had two "Nintendo fact-checkers" credited who signed off on a book they really shouldn't have.

Lame.

The whole split-timeline stuff in Zelda that is now "official" was borrowed from the fan community as well.

Prior to that, the closest thing to an official timeline had been on display at the official western Zelda website, and included some very peculiar sentiments.

I think the Japanese developers still don't consider the split timelines, or any other canonical cross-dependency between later titles, to be an actual thing.

This is really disgusting and such a shame. Nintendo will do this but not accept free translations offered by fans for unreleased games? For real just credit the site and gives us the games we have been asking for.

@Moroboshi876 @Glowsquid I'd like to thank you both of you for your excellent contribution to this discussion. Having people from both sides of story putting up views calmly and clearly has made this story a lot more interesting then a simple knee jerk reaction piece.

I do feel for the poor translator up against a deadline and with limited resources from Nintendo I can see their perspective. I am not saying it was right but at least understandable. Nintendo has to held somewhat accountable for this if they had provided the correct resources for the translators then none of this would have been necessary. They also had a chance to spot this at the fact checking stage. I hope some good comes out of this and in future printings of the book Dark Horse make the correct citations.

@Arpie You're welcome, and I'm glad my contribution was useful for somebody.

I can't speak for the English translator, maybe they had all the resources available and just was sloppy, I really don't know. But with the Spanish translation of this book and also Dragon Quest books what I've seen is game companies don't give much and what they do give, they do it reluctantly.

EDIT: I just read his justification and I agree sometimes wikis are used when no other resource is available because otherwise fans jump at your throat when you don't use the names they have been using unofficially for years. It happens with manga too. So translators sometimes make these concessions in order to please fans.

@Arpie @Moroboshi876

I do think there was some misreading of the book's target audience. Judging from his twitter statements, it really does seems Zack Davisson (who, by the way, has been nothing but A+ in his response to our criticisms of the book) thought he was doing something swell by "canonizing the fanon", but that's really not what people wanted.

The deal is that the wiki's names are not the One True Fanon but often a "best we could do" deal. Naming follows a pretty rigid convention: If a thing isn't named in the game, we look at the support material (websites, strategy guides, etc.). If no english name is found, we use whatever official foreign name exist (preferably from the game's language of origin). If there's none, we use the internal filename if available. And if truly nothing can be found, then a name is made-up. If a "better" name is found, the page is immediatly moved to that name

I totally get past experience with the scanlation scene and deadlines might have made the translators cautious, but nobody would've shed a tear if the weird swimming cow enemy in Super Mario Land 2 was renamed from "Mōgyo" to something actually intelligible in English. Infact, many people who bought the book wanted precisely that: Finally give these obscure, unlikey-to-resurface enemies and items proper english names and not ugly transliterations from Japanese. In that respect, what the English translation of SMBE did is very dissapointing.

@Glowsquid That's a good point, but let me add that whenever a doubt like that emerges, the original company usually prefers the transliteration. I suffered it in Dragon Quest encyclopedias for instance, as a proofreader with knowledge of the series. A lot of games don't have Spanish translations and they asked for romaji transliterations of clearly Japanese titles and names. It's definitely ugly, but it's what they asked for.

You guys need to pop a mushroom and chill out.

Great so it's collector value just went dark. I just got mine and now reading this makes it disappointing.

@SwitchForce
It still is what its name says it is. Nintendo still signed off on it it was still compiled by Dark Horse, it doesn't directly affect what has happened. At best I would say put a sticky note in the book mentioning that several sources were taking from the Super Mario Wiki. It still is a collector value item. Especially if there is a recall due to this issue. But your purchase is still valid and your purchase is still following the intentions of the book. There should be no shame in enjoying the book for that purpose.

@Mortenb
There's also citing source. While Nintendo cannot legally steal their own game in any fashion, it is still Nintendo's responsibility to cite sources of where the obtained game came from. If there was effort put into something that then your company turns around and uses it is your responsibility to cite and recognize the efforts put in prior. That would be evident if Nintendo had "stolen" the Virtual Console games they should have cited that in the credits. Just like in this case, Dark Horse using somebody else's efforts, Dark Horse should be signing those locations and in addition informing those locations.

They're just taking a page out of Nintendo's own book, like when they uploaded an online ROM on Virtual Console

This reminds me of when IGN stole that YouTuber’s Dead Cells review.

Granted, to be perfectly fair, Dark Horse didn’t take all the contents from the Super Mario Wiki for their book, but enough to raise a little concern.

@Glowsquid “The wiki has a content redistribution license that allows commercial use, but only if the original author is credited”

I very much doubt the use of a name only would be seen as a breach of the license as far as any legal arguments go. Again they’d almost certainly need to be lifting more content, presumably enough that it’d otherwise be considered plagorism.

I mean it’s a two way street here, the entire site exists off the back of Nintendo’s IP and names. I’m glad the Wiki is there too, wouldn’t have it any other way, but it’s going to be hard to argue anything relating to license to print a name in this case.

Honestly feel the article and others are making a mountain out of a mole hill and this is something that should be laughed at rather than getting bothered about. If more was lifted then sure, but a few names that amounted to fan fiction...not so much.

Utter BS. I ordered mine and now don’t want it one bit. This is not official in my view.

@Smigit The whole deal with this is that how exactly are we going to corroborate the sources? We are a wiki. We realize that people rely on us for information and we make pret-ty clear about names that are established and names that are not-so much. We can't really cite ourselves because it would conflict with our idea of a wiki being well-sourced. We made it explicitly clear in the Wiki about the sources of our names. If it's made up, there's an inline tag "citation needed". There's a big template that says there is no English source for the names. Another thing, now this book is in circulation with the Mario fanbase, we will get questions and confusion by those who don't know any better. We have a policy where official material is accepted and even some sort of a totem pole of what names we accept before others. I do suppose the Dark Horse stuff can now go in the same tier as the Prima stuff, but most people I'm guessing won't realize it now, as the thing has been advertised as a definite source.

For those who say "this isn't a big deal", I do suppose in the very grand scheme of things, names of underwater cows in some Game Boy Mario game aren't that important but that doesn't excuse this lazy hatchet job and this also makes our work for everyone involved, from readers to editors at our wiki, unnecessarily more difficult, and that's what annoys me the most. Furthermore, we are a bunch of volunteers. I believe Dark Horse has the resources and all to actually get names from Nintendo, given they are manufacturing a rather expensive book.

I don't think most of us are being very mad. It's mostly disappointment and general confusion and some hand-wringing about proper sources (which isn't a bad attitude to have), at least at the Wiki.

I'll still buy it. I'm over in japan at the moment and it's really frustrating that General words just don't exist in their langusge, so I can see why they might have 'borrowed' or used what fans already love. I'm not fussed. I mean Nintendo copied a rom for a game we all bought on WiiU.. lol

@Abes3 The rumors about Nintendo "downloading" ROMs for resale are false. Yes, Nintendo and other big companies like snipping stuff from our work (see:Youtube), which is a very dickish move on their part, but the ROM thing isn't one of them.

People bringing this up despite it being debunked highlights my point about how misinformation spreads and clings.

@LeftyGreenMario Citing the book seems like a very easy decision given it’s a Nintendo licensed product and the only official reference that has a name for that character. Whether the name appeared on your wiki prior to that seems irrelevant at this point, the names now in a licensed text.

@Smigit But that's the thing, we have an argument against "why not canonize the fanon": the books in other languages have actually done a far better job: the French and German translators have done exactly this, by localizing Japanese names. Why isn't the English version treated the same?

Furthermore, some of the transliterations aren't even accurate. See: the black ball thing from Super Mario 64.

https://twitter.com/SMWikiOfficial/status/1054827213219160064

It's arguable that it's even plagiarism to begin with considering the wiki is just a fan made encyclopedia based off Nintendo's IP. I do find it funny that people will defend someone when they use assets from a Nintendo game, make a fan made game using Nintendo's IP etc., but when a officially licensed Nintendo product(not even made by Nintendo themselves)uses info from a fan made website, it's time to get out the pitchforks.

I'm not saying Dark Horse is in the right here, but I do find the hypocrisy funny.

@KryptoniteKrunch An online fan encyclopedia is perfectly legal, as it falls under fair use (teaching and research). It’s why Wikipedia doesn’t get sued by Disney for having an article on Mickey Mouse.

I long for the day we get a Kirby version of this debacle. There's a decent chance some of the names I made up will become canonized. (I thought it happened with the foes Uja and Cret in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, but then I discovered that those are just their literal Japanese names anyway.)

@LeftyGreenMario yeah I know about the rom thing; was being facetious. I'll still buy the book. I'd personally be honoured if Nintendo used a name I made and made it cannon.

@LeftyGreenMario “we have an argument against "why not canonize the fanon"”

Makes sense, but it’s not you doing it but Nintendo/Dark Horse here given how I’d interpret the events.

Serious question. Had they picked any other name for this licensed book would you have accepted those and updated the wiki accordingly or would additional scrutiny, processes or sources be required? Surely the response in that scenario is the same to take here unless Nintendo turns around and says it’s an error, one way or another, once the emotion of having your own site involved is removed. I think any adoption still ultimately falls on it being made canon by Nintendo/DH, not yourselves and the wikis hands are clean.

Wow, people sure love to hate and create drama. Is it just me, or has the volume of general negativity in the comments increased as of late?

All the Antifa GEDs blaming Nintendo for an error in judgment made by an employee of Dark Horse.

This is not some vast corporate anti-consumer conspiracy to steal the work of the proletariat, it's a company trying to bring its fans a quality product produced by a great company that uncharacteristically did not put 100% into its research and editing processes during production. If you don't like how the encyclopedia was produced, then vote with your wallet and do not buy the book.

There was a time when Hey Arnold and Rocket Power were on Nick and ads for Baby Bottle Pop candy and Bop-It toys played in the background while we sorted through our binders of Jungle set Pokemon cards where fans would have been stoked to see their creations included in an official Nintendo licensed product. Then again, it is the current year, so nothing can be fun anymore: everything must be an outrage!!!

@Smigit "Had they picked any other name for this licensed book would you have accepted those and updated the wiki accordingly or would additional scrutiny, processes or sources be required?"

It really depends on the name being used, but we would certainly change the name unless there are other contradictory sources in the future that have similar reputation (so I mean not stuff from Prima guides).

The problem is that a lot of enemy names have not been given a proper English name and our wiki is a hodgepodge of this. Look at Lumacomete's case: it's a name from a French source and there has been discussions on moving it back to the Japanese name. We thought it would be a good idea to just wait until a reliable authority, which we all thought the encyclopedia would be, and we did wait but it just ended up regurgitating the French name.

And it's not even a matter of "well they just used the Japanese name". The black ball in Super Mario 64 was called "Kuromame" in a revision of our wiki until it was agreed to be changed to "Keronpa Ball" through proposal, but it remained Kuromame in another wiki I guess, but Kuromame is not the correct name for it. The book went ahead and used the Kuromame name.

There is also the case of the bouncing spider enemy from Super Mario Galaxy, was initially "Scuttlebug" but someone in the talk page realized it was called "Spoing" in official guides, and so it was moved appropriately to Spoing. Dark Horse, not paying attention, decided on the bad name from the Wiki and, that's not the only example where they relied on dated information. The book is old, got delayed for several years, so, I guess that's what happens when you don't fact-check properly.

More information:
https://www.mariowiki.com/Talk:Scuttlebug

@Majora101 That's a mess of your favorite irrelevant incoherent political buzzwords that you demonstrate no idea what the heck you're talking about. And yes, nothing is more fun than having a headache of a debate involving 30+ users voting with how we corroborate the source.

https://www.mariowiki.com/MarioWiki:Proposals#Citing_the_Super_Mario_Encyclopedia

@KryptoniteKrunch That analogy you're making is tortured, and I will explain why it's bad: one side has no resources and takes the pains to accredit Nintendo. One side has no impact in nomenclature and corroborating the sources for the nomenclature. One side has virtually zero budget. One side does not have the pressure to provide accurate information and legally cannot even profit off other people's work. The other side has fact-checkers, has industry greenlight and collaboration (which means actual responsibility to provide accurate names and not clip them off fan wikis that have to be far more careful with the sources), has an actual budget, has their unsourced information much better circulated through the fanbase, profits off the work, AND their versions vary wildly in quality. I'm sure others can see the immediate problem with your analogy that formed your flawed conclusions of "hypocrisy" but it's better if I explain to others that don't see the obvious logical problems.

@LeftyGreenMario Not reading that wall of text. Please try again.

I also enjoy lazily dismissing other people's arguments with no substantial rebuttal. Please post more so I can continue to not read what you have to say, assume you have an agenda, and send you on your way. That way I can reply to you with a response equally bathed in sarcasm as this one, and the cycle of our ignorant discourse continues.

At some point, friend, you have to realize that you are the problem. If you disagree with someone, do so by all means, but you do no one any favors when you choose to shut down your mind and engage in the adult equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and shout "No, you're just dumb, la la la!". Learn to show the same level of respect for people regardless of whether or not you agree with them. An improved sense of humor wouldn't hurt, either!

https://www.mariowiki.com/index.php?title=MarioWiki:Proposals&diff=prev&oldid=2533112

LinktheLefty in the link did a run-down of the inaccuracies the book ran with (again, the book is dated and relied on information that went bad from fact-checking and wasn't updated... which is a special kind of incompetence because the official fact-checkers would've smelled a rat with their sources).

"I received a copy earlier, and the first thing I did was flip to the SML section to check the new name of the Roto-Disc-looking obstacle that the Japanese version calls Kaitensuru Honō ("Spinning Flame") only to find, to my great dismay, that it's labeled as ROTO-DISC. In addition to the Kuromame mix-up, there are a lot of other oddities that stood out to me like the off "Game Boy Player's Guide" names reused in the SML section, Para-Bob-omb and Red Spike Top in the SMW section, directly adding that Bubba is the alternative name of Boss Bass in the SM64 section, Sentry Beam getting its Japanese name Laser Pod and Jump Beamer getting the name of Sentry Beam, Spoing suddenly known as "Bouncing Scuttlebug" in SMG yet named properly in SMG2 (Sprangler is intact in both sections), Hefty and Big Goombas in the NSMBU section respectively and erroneously referred to as Big and Mega Goombas in the NSMBW section (as we did), and the general use of certain terms that I'm aware originated from this very wiki from mostly over a year ago such as Pipe Fist, Fire Jumping Piranha, Killer Chair, Fish Bone and Tweester in SMG, Starbag, Rainbow Note, Ghost Vase, Whimp, Mega Grrrol, conjectural Sunshine NPCs, Switchback Platform, and the transliterations in the SML2 section (as I now realize they must be from us outside of the Three Little Pigheads' individual names because the original Japanese version of the Encyclopedia plainly gave the name of "Bomubomu" as "Bomubomu 1・2・3" and also gave the name of "Be" as the alternate "B Fly"). I could keep going, but this is such a surreal doozy. On the other hand, Super Mario Bros. Encyclopedia happens to be the only modern source I've found that gives Cape Mario its correct name of Caped Mario. Go figure.

I'll admit, this is more unusable than I thought and it's no wonder that no one wants to go for the full citation option, but I do see some instances of passable localization buried in it (seemingly courtesy of the other translator if we're being honest, though regardless it needed tighter quality control as it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Nintendo for allowing a product's release in this rough state, especially after such a long delay). If the partial citation option passes, I believe we can work with the following: Falling Ceiling, Scenic Course (unique translation!) and other SML2 locations including the Casino, Giant Gringill, Chibi Chomp, Ground Urchin, Remote-Controlled Clown Car, [Torpedo Ted] Launch Pad, Targeting Ted Launch Pad, Piranha Pod, and possibly other names for things we do not yet have any name for (e.g. Lemmy and Wendy's "Decoy Doll" from SMW or the "Innertube Goomba" and "Skating Goomba" from SM3DW)."

@Majora101 I mean, you started your first post here with dismissing people as "Antifa GEDs" and not very subtly implying in your last paragraph critics of the bok are so because they're no-fun ninnies. That's not really being adult or respectful, is it?

People fixate on the "they stole that fan name" thing, but the truth is: if the english translators of the book had left in the "Soarin' Stu" name in there as a sly nod but literally everything else was perfect, maybe some people would've raised eyebrows at the lack of credit, but there wouldn't have been much noise about it, and certainly not articles about the reaction. The bulk of the critcisms come from multiple factors:

-An overreliance on the wiki result in some objectively sloppy stuff, like a page listing enemies with plain english names like "Bear" and "Floating Face" next to obvious transliterations like "Furiko" and "Goronto", etc.
-The French and German translations of the book were handled more professionally, with the translators properly and uniformly localizing names instead of relying excessively on fansites.
-Deadlines were likely not a factor, as the original book was released in 2015 and was not updated for any of the stuff that happened in-between that and its western release (Super Mario Odyssey isn't mentioned, for instance).

Obviously, it's not world-ending stuff. It's Mario. I won't give the book money, and I don't think it's unreasonable to state why (infact I'm sure Dark Horse's staff appreciates the feedback so they can avoid similar responses in the future).

Furthermore, while hardly the worst instance of this stuff, this fits in a pattern of official tie-in books and the like relying too much or plagiarising fan-ressources (incidents which include things like an Halo guidebook straight up lifting large chunks of texts from the Halo Wikia, complete with factual errors and spelling mistakes, or a Transformers mobile game plagiarizing the character bios from the Transformers Wiki) and I hope the discussion surround this draws attention to this kind of practice, because it's not good.

@Majora101 "don't like it don't buy it" and "there are actual problems in the world" handwaves all the criticisms presented and adds nothing to the argument, being a totally lazy argument.

And you don't get to talk about reading comprehension when you admitted to not reading anything I posted nor do you get to call for civility when you're the one telling me "I'm the problem" and you're the one making blanket pejoratives (calling your opponents "antifa" and insinuating they aren't educated).

And your latest post didn't convince me you even read Glowsquid's comment, second paragraph as you're doing exactly as he's describing, by fixating on the mere nomenclature rather than the other criticisms we offer.

@LeftyGreenMario Replace Tweester (as Doc von Schmeltwick mentioned) with Mandibug Stack (as TheFlameChomp mentioned), and that just about covers the more obvious stuff.

@Majora101 You're missing the point. The current political climate has nothing to do with this - in fact, I'm reasonably sure that the wiki's regular contributors have a wide range of personal opinions and affiliations (if anyone was curious, the "Lefty" in my username was only intended to refer to the character Link, who has since been depicted as right-handed on occasion). That's not why we're here; the core of this issue is ethics, and we can all get behind that, right? The point is, we're discussing video games and presumably share this interest in common, so please don't lose sight of that.

@Moroboshi876 @Glowsquid @LeftyGreenMario @LinkTheLefty
Really appreciate everyone's understanding on the matter; quite a bit more insightful than the article these comments are written on.

@SegataSanshiro That's swell. Thanks for the kind comment!

If anyone still wants to read the debate, it is now archived at: https://www.mariowiki.com/MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive_52#Citing_the_Super_Mario_Encyclopedia

@Stocksy,

I totally agree!

Well, this just sucks. The least they could have done was bother to translate every name directly into English from Japanese, and then find the closest words that mean the same thing where the direct translation didn't make any sense. How this got past Nintendo's quality control is truly beyond me; aren't they usually pretty good with that?