I’ve been thinking of wanting to expand the FNaF sections of the site to help encompass more of the franchise, but there comes this hurdle where once you go past documenting the releases, merch, whatever, if I try making a character page I get into theory hell and nothing i say can be confirmed.
I’ve had similar frustrations with the FNaF Fandom Wiki. Why would I read the page on ‘Gregory’ if not really much of what can be said about him can be confirmed? Sure there’s a ‘Speculation’ section, but they only mention Patient 46 once in the page, despite there being gigantic theory videos on that.
I thought, well hm- maybe in that scenario our way of doing it could be maybe a voting system? Have each theory voted on so the reader gets a sense of current community census (like how FNaF 4’s understanding has radically shifted the past year). But that still doesn’t really help much.
Well- what’s the point of a FNaF Wiki anyways? Sure I’m gonna want to know when a release date happened- Cheese-E-Pedia can do that obviously- document the actual histories of FNaF, but if the point of FNaF is theory crafting, why is there no centralized way to do that?
Character Pages
Immediate issue when even suggesting the voting system fix: Michael Afton? Only directly confirmed in Sister Location Custom Night. Otherwise there’s “Mike (FNaF1)” “Mike (FNaFSL Base Game)”, “Foxy Bro”, “Protagonist of FFPS”, “Maybe Glamrock Freddy”, ect. If you can’t confirm anything directly, you’ve split what’s mostly agreed upon now too far wide. What’s the point of a Michael page if we can’t necessarily 100% confirm who Mike is?
The Web
I think, for the sake of a “FNaF Wiki” actually helping any individual figure out the FNaF story for themselves, and not rely on the hopes of someone else getting it right, that really expands scope and completely changes how we need to approach this.
Imagine in Cheese-E-Pedia’s search by tag interface, where what I’m gonna conceive just consists of FNaF1 stuff. You search “Foxy”. You are given every single image in FNaF 1 containing Foxy. You are given every audio file related to Foxy, you are given transcripts of FNaF 1 phonecalls referencing Foxy, you’re given a breakdown of Foxy’s code on how he behaves in FNaF1, and there are in-game screenshots of Foxy- to account for the fact that the only time we can “confirm” the link between the name “Foxy” and the fox character is the Custom Night screen.
If we expand outside the FNaF 1 game a bit, you’ll get any time Scott says in a Steam or Reddit post anything about Foxy. Any piece of Foxy merch is also available, again with full transcripts of anything. (And maybe if you’re just making a FNaF 1 theory you can limit it to the range of evidence between 2014-2015)
Your Pages
Ok got that? You searched Foxy and have all of the “evidence” of anything Foxy related. Now you search “Bite of 87” and you get Phone Guy’s call transcript. In theory we could have a user write a “page”, going over a theory, maybe Foxy doing the Bite of ‘87, and link to every single piece of evidence in that. You have a post that’s in the user’s own speculation, but confidently connects it to evidence.
Community Consensus
Now, this user could keep this theory page to themselves, the site could just save all of their theory pages and let the user sift through them, but they could also upload it to the main site. Other users could vote on it, and those theories could be connected to any subject you want.
That Foxy Bite of ‘87 theory will now show up for searching “FNaF 1”, “Foxy”, “The Bite of ‘87”, “Phone Guy”, etc. when looking for theories. That also means when searching the Bite of ‘87 you may get correlated tags like “Foxy”, “Mangle”, “Toy Bonnie”
And maybe these correlations could lead to new things? Maybe you’re reading up on Nightmarionne Plush placement in Security Breach, and theories keep unintentionally focusing on this one room its in. You could search idk “Security Breach Broom Closet #547”, and it tells you everything notable inside the room- and maybe you spot something nobody else saw! I mean just on its own wouldn’t that be convenient to get screenshots of every room in a game with descriptors on what’s inside?
So
I think I’m gonna try and craft something around this idea and see what happens, this would be separate from Cheese-E-Pedia’s direct interface- but it’ll just be other pages on the site under the hood. I’ll post further if it comes to anything, would love to hear thoughts!
