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Wikipedia Metadata FAQ
Why doesn't the addon find a game/finds something wrong on automatic metadata update, when it clearly is available on Wikipedia?
Since Wikipedia isn't exclusive to video games and the names of games can be very general, searching for a game name can yield many results, that often don't really fit. Therefore the addon tries to find a match in the search results, that's most likely the wanted game. To do that it looks for the following in the search results in that order:
- Game name with "(video game)" added
- Game name itself
- Game name without additions like "Special Edition" etc at the end with "(video game)" added
- Game name without additions like "Special Edition" etc at the end
The search result also always has to have "video game" in its short description, to minimize results like "doom" not being a game at all. When matching it also removes all special characters and whitespaces from both sides, so for example "F.E.A.R." will be matched with "fear".
Unfortunately that can't be 100% accurate, so sometimes a game won't be found at all, for example when "video game" is missing from the description, or the addon will fetch another page, even if it's no game at all, when it is named like the game and has "video game" in the description. Those cases can only be corrected by manual metadata updates, where you'll be able to choose the right page from the search results yourself.
Why are the names of developer/publisher/people different for games that are from the same developer/publisher/people?
Since Wikipedia is a community driven encyclopedia where everyone can write and edit articles, there always will be differences, for example because one writer thinks the first name can be abbreviated, while the next one doesn't etc. Unfortunately there's nothing I can do about that. You could help unify data like that by editing wikipedia articles yourself. An other option would be to use the Library Management addon for Playnite to rename and merge different data in tags, features, companies etc. For companies there's also my own extension Company Companion to help with that.
The addon renames the links using a list of names and matching url patterns, because there's no reliable way of parsing them from wikipedia itself, and I only added some often used ones. You can open an issue to suggest more website names. Another option is to use the rename function of my Link Utilities addon.
When a game has more than one video game infobox or critic score box only the first will be recognized.
This happens rarely for games that have remastered versions or where the reception is split between contemporary and reviews at release for older games. It's a known issue that I maybe fix in the future.
This could have two causes:
- There is a bug in the addon. In this case please open an issue for that!
- The value doesn't exist locally in the wikitext of the page, but is getting loaded from wikidata. You can check, if that is the case by editing the specific section on the wikipedia page. If the value reads "wikidata", the addon can't fetch it. It's unlikely that I will fix this issue, because that most likely will be a huge amount of work for a rarely used feature. It's more likely, that I or someone else will someday develop a wikidata metadata extension, that can be used instead.
The game has its platforms and release dates split between "original version" and "special edition". Unfortunately instead of proper list templates the page uses a mix of
tags and commas. Since commas can also be part of a name, I only split values by comma, if they aren't already split by
or newline characters. Cases like that can only be fixed by editing the wiki page itself.