User:Wholecanesugar/Guide for Marcie247

From The Build-A-Bear Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Thanks for considering helping us out!
This is a personalized guide based on what you've expressed an interest in helping with. :)


Formatting

Since you've worked with wikis before I'm not going into too much detail, but for your reference, here's templates that will be relevant to you:


And here is our (in-progress) broader guide to formatting in case it's handy: User:Wholecanesugar/Help:Basic formatting and functions

Data entry: the data

For now, there are only a few things you'll need:


Since the main goal here is data entry / transferring the info from the FFDB to the BABWiki rather than fresh research, I think the best thing to do is going to be to start with the bears Build-A-Bear has given us official information about, so we at least have a reference for the release date. What this basically means is that, for the time being, you'll want to focus on just the bears released up to September 2013, and just the ones from the two Furry Friends Hall of Fames. :)

Data entry: the entry

Since you've worked on wikis before I'm assuming you pretty much know what you're doing here too, but I'm going to go through the suggested step-by-step anyways just in case!

Creating a gallery page

The suggested start-point for this is creating a gallery page for the year you'd like to work on. We have a template ({{Bears by year}}) that shows all the years Build-A-Bear has been operating, that has presupplied red links for the purposes of future year gallery creation - which means it's easy to see just by looking which years are missing gallery pages:

You can look at the existing gallery pages for examples of the type of information that might go in the "lead section" before the TOC, or just wing it - that's fine too :)

Here's a basic template you can copy-paste to get started with: 

This is a list of '''all known full-sized furry friends released in YEAR'''.

There were approximately # furry friends released this year.

==January YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==February YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==March YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==April YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==May YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==June YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==July YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==August YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==September YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==October YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==November YEAR==
{{Bearlist
|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==December YEAR==

{{Bearlist

|bear1=
|image1=
}}

==References==
{{Reflist}}
* [https://archive.org/details/september-furry-friends-hallof-fame-allanimals Furry Friends Hall of Fame: All Animals] (2013)

{{Bears by year}}
{{Category:YEAR}}
__FORCETOC__


Of course, once you've pasted it in the goal is just to fill it out, using the Furry Friends Hall of Fame: All Animals (updated September 2013) to tell you what bears came out what month and year. For bears up to about the end of 2009, there are most likely existing pages and images on the Wiki, that were created by the editors who were working on it initially but no longer seem to be active. You can search for them by name up in the top search bar, or you can look for them manually by browsing some of the categories they belong to, like Rodents or Bovines (there's a list here with most of the options). For about 2010-2013, you'll most likely be creating the pages and uploading the images yourself, and the easiest way will be to use the red links shortcut, where you fill out Bearlist as though the images and pages already exist, and then follow the red links to upload the images and create the pages. You should be able to download images of most bears from the The Furry Friends Database or screenshot images from the Furry Friends Hall of Fame, but if one is missing just put Example.jpg for now.

If you come across a discrepancy between the Furry Friends Hall of Fame and the Furry Friends Database, it is most likely the result of a verifiable error in the Furry Friends Hall of Fame, but for now, just go ahead and use the info given by the FFHOF and we can correct it later when we're actually in the process of citing references.


There are 2 exceptions to this suggestion that I can think of offhand, which are obvious copy-paste errors in the FFHOF. The first is the Pink and Blue Cuddles Teddies - there are mistakenly two sets of bears called Pink Cuddles Teddy and Blue Cuddles Teddy listed for October 2005, and only one of those sets actually released that month. Pink Cuddles Teddy (2005) and Blue Cuddles Teddy are the versions from October 2005, and Pink Cuddles Teddy II and Blue Cuddles Teddy II were released some other time, so can be left out of the lists for now until we can cite a release date. The second exception is to do with a bear called BFF Peace Kitty released in August 2011, which is called "v Kitty" in the Furry Friends Hall of Fame, almost certainly because someone's finger slipped while they were trying to CTRL+v.


Creating the individual bear pages

There is in-progress guidance for creating furry friend pages here - the formatting hasn't been prettified yet but it should have all the information you need. For your purposes, all you need to worry about is:

  • Paste the template
  • Place the primary image in the infobox and in the gallery
  • Fill in the release date and cite the FFHOF using <ref name="releaseUS">[https://archive.org/details/september-furry-friends-hallof-fame-allanimals Furry Friends Hall of Fame: All Animals] (2013)</ref>
    • Optional: For many bears released up to mid-2005ish, fill in the retirement date and cite the print FFHOF using <ref name="FFHOF06">''[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780439889797/ Furry Friends Hall of Fame: The Official Collector's Guide]'' (2006), pg. #</ref>
  • Fill in the Description and SKU(s) using the information from the The Furry Friends Database - add {{Citation needed}} at the end of the Description
  • Put "US" in the Countries infobox field
  • Delete the Trivia section unless you have any trivia to add, set the Bundles section to "{{PAGENAME}} was not featured in any known bundles" as a default.
  • Add categories for the year the bear was released, its species (check Template:Categories for examples), and its collection, if it has one.
  • Add maintenance categories: most likely [[Category:Bears missing birth certificate data]] and [[Category:Bears missing hangtag data]]
    • If you haven't been able to get a product photo of a bear, add [[Category:Bears missing stock photos]]


Many of the existing images on bear pages seem to be taken as screenshots from the Furry Friends Hall of Fame PDF and then enlarged, which means some of them are a little grainy. If you want to replace them with better quality versions of the same image, you're welcome to go into the image file directly and replace them (see File:Bearemy.png for an example). If the new image you want to use is not technically the same photo, feel free to upload it separately and put both in the gallery - it's great to have plenty of pictures!

Data entry 2: 2024 boogaloo

Another easy option for rote data entry tasks is archiving recent releases. I'm usually pretty decent about keeping Furry friends released in 2024 up to date with images and red links, but sometimes I just do not have time to make pages for each of the bears, so it goes on the backburner until I have time to sort it out. With recent releases, the process is super straightforward for archiving:

  • Take a snapshot of the product page for the bear in question on the Wayback Machine (you can paste it into the main input box or go down and put it in Save Page Now, either will get you there). As Build-A-Bear is a US company its own collectors' guides are US-centric, so the US site is the most essential snapshot, but if you have the time, checking other countries' BAB sites for the bear you're archiving and saving snapshots of those too is ideal. Build-A-Bear always completely removes out-of-stock/retired bears from their live site eventually, so if this happens before a snapshot is taken the information is more or less gone forever, which is why we always try to preserve pages on the Wayback Machine and then cite those.
  • Save the photos of the bear in question to your computer so you can reupload them here
  • Follow the red link to create the page for the bear
  • Using the templates and guidance here (again, the formatting is in-progress but the info is good), fill out the information in the infobox and under the headings.
    • Release dates can usually be sourced from the subreddit (u/Batt_Mellamy will often post when something is added to the UK site, which usually is only a few hours before it is added to the US site) or from Build-A-Bear's Facebook or Instagram pages.

Feel free to browse the rest of the 2024 releases for ideas on how to format things! We're not too picky about formatting - it's most important that the information is available at all - but if you're like me and like to wing things as little as possible, they're there to reference from.

Optional: research tips

This section is just a crash introduction to my usual methods and resources for researching Build-A-Bear. I'm not getting too deep into them but they'll hopefully be a good starting point if you're interested!

Wayback Machine

Build-A-Bear has had a website since apparently 1997, and it's had snapshots taken that are available through the Wayback Machine since 1998. Not all areas of the site are preserved, not all images are preserved, and not all bears have been available for purchase on the site even after Build-A-Bear launched their webstore, but it's still by far the biggest and most useful resource for Build-A-Bear archival projects there will probably ever be.

→ Link to http://www.buildabear.com/ on the Wayback Machine

Addl. notes:

  • Most of the countries Build-A-Bear has had stores in have also had websites with either catalogues or webstores. The non-US countries are generally preserved much worse than the US site on the Wayback Machine, but there is still useful info in there.
  • I can't remember the exact years off the top of my head, but there is a period of BAB's website history where they used MASSIVE trackers at the end of their links, which makes navigating these periods in the Wayback Machine extremely difficult. Because the trackers would differ from user to user, what ends up happening is that you click on a link on a webpage and the Wayback Machine tells you it's never been archived, which isn't strictly true, it just hasn't been archived with that particular set of tracking characters at the end. What I do when I run into this is copy the link without the tracking characters and paste it into the Wayback Machine, then navigate from the "Calendar" tab to the "URLs" tab. That should show you all the URLs the Wayback Machine has archived that start with whatever you pasted in, which means it should give you all the different versions of the link with massive trackers on the end that it's preserved.

BABW Digital Birth Cert

This is an online version of the screens at the Name Me Station in Build-A-Bear Workshop stores, that is evidently operated by Build-A-Bear themselves. Naturally it won't let you scan a barcode, but you can scroll through long lists of bears, and if you have an older bear's SKU you can put it into the "style code" box and get the information for it. This site allows us to get birth certificate stats (height, weight, fur color, and eye color) for bears we might not otherwise be able to find it for, and the photos you can save from its "is this your bear?" pop-up are high res transparent images, which is great for product photos that we can't find for various other reasons. Since it also lets you input SKUs, it also serves as an at-home SKU lookup, which helps us to verify SKUs we have and to test SKUs we suspect.

→ Link to BABW Digital Birth Cert

Addl. notes:

  • Not all bears Build-A-Bear has ever produced are in the database for this site, but most are. For example, the Great Wolf Lodge Rainbow Wolf is included - you can even browse for it in the Dogs & Cats category - but the Great Wolf Lodge Camo Wolf isn't, so even if you put in its SKU (30251 - link to reference) it won't give you its info. So don't worry too much if you put in an SKU and it doesn't return results; the bear might just not be in the BABW Digital Birth Cert's database.
  • Bears that aren't on the browse menus USUALLY don't have photos loaded into the database, but that's not always true. I found images for the Snake (2008) and the St. Louis Zoo exclusive Cheetah (2007) as well as a few Corporate Exclusives (some CDW bears, a couple Way of Lights bears) by putting their SKUs into the style code box.
  • I would recommend healthy skepticism about the birth certificate stats for bears older than maybe 2000-2005 in the Digital Birth Cert. I've found some strange discrepancies back there so I think some of them are put in wrong or they've had some kind of frameshift error somewhere.
  • The BABW Digital Birth Cert can sometimes be loaded with the "tag name" for the bear rather than the "floor name," which can make things a bit confusing. For instance, SKU 19742 returns as I-SNOW BEAR, whereas I'm fairly certain that bear was sold in Australia under the name Snowy Sparkles Bear (ref). Just another thing to bear in mind when researching!

Worthpoint

Worthpoint is a website whose purpose is to archive sold Ebay listings so that users can research how much an item they want to sell actually sells for - for our purposes it is a repository of old Ebay listings! You can search Worthpoint just like you would search Ebay, and if a listing was sold on either Ebay US or Ebay UK that matches what you're searching for, Worthpoint will pull it up for you. I use Worthpoint to search for sold bears with hangtags (to verify names, original retail price, or SKU) or birth certificates (to verify dates of availability, the physical stats BAB puts on a birth certificate, or sometimes SKU), and sometimes to check tush tags to research tush tag designs or, for the later bears, SKUs.

→ Link to Worthpoint

Addl. notes:

  • Though Worthpoint feels like a repository of all Ebay listings, it naturally only preserves items that have sold, which means anything currently on Ebay isn't on Worthpoint (unless it's been sold and relisted), and anything that's been listed to Ebay but not sold won't appear on Worthpoint. Basically that's just to say, if you're looking for something in particular and you can't find it on Worthpoint, it is worth checking Ebay too.
  • You can use advanced search operators on Worthpoint similar to how you might use them to refine a Google search. If you put your search query in "quotation marks" Worthpoint will search the phrase exactly, or if you want to exclude a term from your search because wrong products keep popping up, you can put a -dash in front of it, and Worthpoint won't show you any listings containing that word. (You can also -"combine these" to exclude a whole phrase.)
  • Worthpoint does NOT anticipate its site being used for extensive research like this, and will start throwing up captchas if you use it intensively because it thinks your IP isn't a real person. It's also flagged something about my activity on Firefox that causes it to error out for me frequently, but I can still use it on other browsers, so if it starts getting suspicious with you too that's my suggestion lol.

Search engines

I've had good luck using Google and Bing for my research. Google is getting incredibly algorithm-loaded, to the point that sometimes it won't show you the results you're looking for even if you go out of your way to indicate them with your search terms, but alternative search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo are usually less bloated by the algorithm and can be a little easier to find things with.

Addl. info:

  • When you're looking for information via search engine, try and find sources as close to "primary" as you can. That is to say, it's better to find a Bearville blog from 2008 that says "OMG X BEAR JUST RELEASED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" than to find another Wiki saying that X bear released in Y year (unless, of course, that Wiki can back its claim up with sources!).
  • Google has some fantastic advanced search operators you can use to hone in on particular results. You can use "quotation marks" to search exact phrases and -dashes to exclude things, but you can also use before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD to search a particular timeframe (these results can sometimes be tricked by wikis but are usually good), and site:URL to only return listings from a particular site.
  • Bing technically also has advanced search operators, but I haven't found them to work as well as Google's. On Bing you can use "quotation marks" to search exact phrases, a +plus sign to indicate terms that must be present, and an –en dash (Why? Why Bing??) to exclude things. In spite of the lack of advanced search operators, Bing still often returns results that Google doesn't, so I still check it if I'm really struggling to find something on Google.

Social media

Build-A-Bear has official social media presences on Facebook and Instagram, and at least used to have one on Twitter though I'm not sure if it's still active. Other countries' BABs also often have or had social media presences, though sadly some of them get deleted after a while of being disused, so for example there's no way to see old posts by Build-A-Bear Japan on Facebook. :(

You can also use any of these social media sites to check for posts made by fans during particular timeframes, since most social medias have advanced search functions (though some are better than others). I use Build-A-Bear Elite on Facebook for a lot of research since it's been active since about 2014, but there may be other groups that predate it as BAB fan groups that might have more primary information.

TBC


Retrieved from "https://buildabearwiki.info/wiki/User:Wholecanesugar/Guide_for_Marcie247?oldid=7899"