Template:Did you know nominations/GamersGate

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:01, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

GamersGate[edit]

  • ... that GamersGate's "Top 10" has been described as "a snapshot of a completely alien PC gaming world"?

5x expanded by Thibbs (talk). Self nominated at 21:01, 12 September 2014 (UTC).

  • Indeed 5x exp (2760 → 14278) and long enough, neutral, QPQ done. Both hooks have immediate refs in article (3b) and check out. The main hook could use a bit more explanation because it might not be interesting to someone who already finds the PC gaming world itself alien—could add something along the lines of how it's used in the article (its referencing to obscure titles). Outside scope of DYK, but there are many quotes in this article and their punctuation should go outside the marks per MOS:QUOTE. Nice work—please ping me if I don't respond czar  18:43, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
Bah, sorry for the multiple edits. Here are a few other things to look at: (1) There are also some close paraphrasing sections that should be attended to. In this diff, the directly copied phrases are bolded, but its surrounding structure with only one or two words changed should be further rephrased into the editor's own language. (2) There are two paragraphs missing final citations (ending in "its bigger titles" and in "via its VOID system"). (3) "these features offer an attractive alternative" could be construed as non-neutral. Rephrase to say either that The Escapist thinks so or that the service was designed to cater to gamers not interested in the DRM of other services, etc. czar  19:03, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the review, Czar! I agree that main hook is a bit obscurely worded and would probably fail to convey the semi-complex point that Gillen (author of the quote) was making. In the last few weeks I've been leaning more toward the ALT1 hook anyway. If that sounds good to you, why don't we just go with ALT1?
    • I've fixed the punctuation issues here, though I didn't put all punctuation within the quotations. As I understand it, MOS:LQ suggests that terminal punctuation is required within quotes that initially terminated in a punctuation mark. This affects three quotes ("downloadable games enable niches." / "in many, many cases we know that ... for the mid-size segment of titles." / and "none of this bickering involves ... and these guys jostling over the last spot on the podium.") which I record here in case my understanding of MOS:LQ is off and they really need the punctuation outside. I also didn't see anything about whether punctuation delimiters go inside or outside of the quotation marks that surround reffed article titles so I left those as-is. I do notice that the citation templates tend to put the delimiters outside the quotation marks, though, so perhaps there's a MOS covering this too. Either way I can change those pretty easily if necessary.
      UPDATE: I went ahead and made the non-quotation instances of ." (i.e. those that were article titles in the ref section) into ". just now in this edit. I'm not sure if it's required/recommended by some MOS/guideline somewhere or not, but if that's what the ref templates produce then maybe that's best. At any rate it might save some semi-auto tool operator some time in the future. The only instances of punctuation inside quotes remaining, then, are the three listed above. I think they have to be that way per MOS:LQ, but I'm open to other interpretations. -Thibbs (talk) 03:54, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
    • I also ignored much of the close paraphrasing link. All of the 2- and most of the 3-word plagiarisms were either common expressions (e.g. "in addition to") used in a completely different context than the earlier article or were irreducible conceptual phrases (e.g. "digital distribution", "featured content", "theo bergquist", etc.) which if reworded would impair basic comprehensibility. In this edit I changed the plagiarized expression "developer paradox interactive" into simply "paradox interactive" and put "a source of comfort" in quotation marks to disclaim authorship. I also rephrased the most significantly plagiarized content ("GamersGate allows players to transfer games between accounts") to "GamersGate users have the option of transferring purchased games to other accounts". I'm not sure that this really addresses the close paraphrasing issue, though, since the meaning in all three cases is the same. I read through the Escapist article again but I don't see the part where the structure is the same with only one or two words changed. Could you explain that more specifically?
    • I reffed all unreffed paragraphs here, and cut out one sentence that was inherently dated and thus to be avoided.
    • Finally I rephrased the "attractive alternative" line here, attributing it to Escapist columnist Shamus Young.
  • Let me know if these fixes have addressed the concerns with emphasis on 1) Whether we can go with ALT1 2) Whether the punctuation issue is cleared up or whether it needs more work, and 3) Which specific parts of the article are inappropriately closely paraphrased. Thanks again! -Thibbs (talk) 23:32, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
ALT1 gtg. Fully cited, and I checked the hook src earlier. It might be smart to mention the confusion between Gamergate and GamersGate, if a source mentions it (which, in turn, could make for a good hook). I'm not a stickler on the other stuff, and you've been very thorough. In general, I try to minimize quotes so as to avoid needing to think about whether the final punct makes better sense inside or outside the LQ quotation marks. The close paraphrasing is fine now by the letter of the bot—don't remember what it was before, but likely similar phrases surrounding some bolded text. (I was only concerned about the long phrases, not the short turns of phrase. Nice work czar  10:40, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! The GamerGate connection is only skin deep (i.e. the names look similar) and since I haven't seen any sources covering anything more significant between them I guess it's adequately covered by the dab notice at the top. Anyway even if there is confusion and we get a few extra readers checking out this article instead of reading up on the salacious details of the scandal of the hour, I don't regard that as a bad thing. Hopefully they'll learn something new even if it's at the expense of their drama diet. Given that we're creeping toward 2 months since the GamerGate incident I'd imagine it's pretty much "yesterday's news" anyway so we might not see much cross-over interest. -Thibbs (talk) 17:17, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Sounds good. (ALT1 still gtg) czar  17:25, 11 October 2014 (UTC)