User blog:Brainwasher5/Review of Dark Souls information

Here's a review of all the information I find reputable enough to use in this wikia, for those that are having difficulty finding info to help this wikia.

Wikidot
Make no mistake: Dark Souls wikidot is nowhere near the standards of its predecessor, Demon's Souls wikidot. A disturbingly high amount of pages are missing information, and an even higher amount simply have no consistent format. Also, the number of duplicate pages, as well as user comments and disputes are simply embarrassing. On top of that, most of the information on the boss, area, and monster pages are highly subjective. And then there's simply incorrect information, like the claim that red phantoms cannot be drained by the Dark Hand (they can).

Wikidot is still a good place to go to for statistics. As far as I can tell all their numbers for weapons, spells, consumables etc. are correct. They also have the correct layout for in-game descriptions that this wikia should hopefully end up emulating.

Wikispaces
Sort of like a wikidot with more detailed and correct information, at the cost of extreme informality and fairly common incorrect naming (for example, they call the catacomb necromancer "undead mage" and Quelaag's Sister "Ancient white spider witch lady" and variations). I personally use wikispaces for pictures that wikidot is missing, as well as information for those wikidot pages that are incomplete.

IGN forums and other forums
I've very rarely found useful information there, but if both wikidot and wikispaces are missing something that you want to look up, it might be worth a shot.

Quelaag
The username, not the boss. Quelaag is good for some of the lore stuff, and she messages back if you write to her with questions.

EpicNameBro (ENB)
Considered by the Dark Souls youtube community to be the grandaddy of Dark Souls lore, ENB does an excellent job at covering the lore of Dark Souls (which is good because some of it's pretty obscure), over pretty much every inch of Lordran and its inhabitants.

EpicNameBro also has a couple of very good weapons, armor, and rings guides, but he did not get around to finishing all of the weapons unfortunately.

In my opinion, his only weakness is him being prone to speculation (a particularly dubious claim from him involved Havel being inspired by a modern Czech revolutionary). But he usually does a good job clarifying fact from opinion.

Vageta311
This guy has made a couple of excellent videos regarding more technical aspects of the game, such as parry timing and videos of getting more obscure items.

MichelKobayashi
This guy had the text dump and removed content stuff translated to English. He also has videos covering nearly every word of spoken dialogue, with every (or almost every) NPC, as well as tonnes of short videos for obtaining things like sorceries, miracles, pyromancies, embers etc.

A couple of last thoughts
Of course, the best source of information is the game itself. If you are unsure of something and can't trust any of the above sources, hop into Dark Souls and seek that info.

I am not attempting to be (overly) disparaging of the other websites. They have their weaknesses, but my goal (and hopefully it will be yours, too) is to combine the good aspects of each of these information sources and do away with the bad aspects to make a truly professional, concise, and complete information source. So use your own discretion on what to draw from these sources.