User talk:Tonelico00

RPGFan links in Wikipedia articles

Hello Patrick. In answer to your request at User talk:Rehevkor#Re: RPGFan, please take a look at the recent contributions of Rapturous via this link: Special:Contributions/Rapturous. Others have posted at User talk:Rapturous to describe the problem with links that Wikipedia may perceive as advertising. There is also a discussion open at WP:COIN#User:Rapturous. If you are affiliated with the website, it would be helpful if you would join the discussion at COIN. Thanks, EdJohnston (talk) 17:17, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Re: RPGFan

Thank you Ed.

I have left a detailed message in the Conflict of Interest field for Rapturous. Regarding what he did, I hope it is taken to be an honest mistake. He thought he was in the right and butted heads with Rehevkor, but has since retracted his stance and understands what was inappropriate about having a contrib staff of RPGFan adding scores.

Let me know if you and/or Rehevkor would be willing to talk to me about what requirements RPGFan ought to meet to make it a "legitimate" source within Wikipedia. By my count, offhand, no less than 30 games and 50 game soundtracks have had either information or "reception" fields filled in. If RPGFan is not a credible source by your standards, they may want to be flagged for deletion. However, it is currently my understanding that RPGFan does meet your criteria, but simply does not have the visibility (on a corporate level: i.e. Cerberus Media Group) at present to prove our objectivity. I'm willing to tell you anything and everything about the site's workings so you can help us as a site understand our role in the wiki community.

Tonelico00 (talk) 17:52, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. It would be useful if you could supply more information for consideration of the voters in WP:Articles for deletion/RPGFan. You should probably not vote either Keep or Delete, but you could add a Comment in that discussion. The history of the web site in RPGFan has no reliable sources. If third parties (newspapers, books, magazines or edited web sites) have not taking any notice of the doings of RPGFan, it's not clear that such details belong in our article. We are only supposed to contain information that can be supported by references. If there is any press coverage at all, you may be aware of it, and it might be added to the article. EdJohnston (talk) 18:32, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

The use as a reliable source is a separate issue from from the AfD (although comments on the AFD seem to suggest otherwise..) and the COI report. It is currently listed as neither reliable or unreliable (neutral) on Wikipedia:VG/S, previous discussions (I suggest reading this) coming to no solid conclusions. Looking into the issue myself I found many editors doubting it's reliability, I could not find any instances of it remaining as a source when an article transitioned into featured article status, editors frequently questioning it then replacing or removing it. Part of the issue hinges on there being no signs of reliable editorial control over the reviews, either internally (there's nothing about policies on the website from what I can see) or externally (no evidence that CMG exerts any editorial control, or if they did no evidence it'd be reliable. "Not a reputable media company" as someone put it). I'm not really an expert, but you could bring the issue up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games/Sources or Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. I, and I'm sure EdJohnston, would be willing bring up the issue if you're worried about a perceived conflict of interest.

Also, on Rapturous' edits, he was adding review scores alone to review score boxes on multiple articles, boxes that already contained scores from multiple respected published/magazine sources (these boxes should really only contain the "cream of the crop" reviews), most of which were (or should be) mentioned in the prose. Simply adding a score added nothing of value to the articles. If perhaps he added something not already covered in the prose, then his edits would have gained some merit (as the reliability is in doubt, not denied). What he did do was add little more than a number and an external link, then called vandalism when multiple editors removed the links and warned him about spamming and conflict of interests. I'm glad he seemed to have learned from the experience, however. Rehevkor ✉ 20:30, 14 December 2009 (UTC)