User:Mikado282/Sandbox/Content policy

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Revision as of 21:53, 28 August 2021 by Wookipan (talk | contribs) (Minor proofreading as per request)
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Add a two-column "permitted"/"not permited" content nutshell here like Tark fixed for me on Community topics


Licensing

Under the Team Fortress Wiki Terms of Use, editors may not "Upload, or otherwise make available, files that contain images, photographs, software or other material protected by intellectual property laws, including, by way of example, and not as limitation, copyright or trademark laws (or by rights of privacy or publicity) unless you own or control the rights thereto or have received all necessary consents to do the same." Thus, editors must not violate licensing or copyright with their contributions, including all uploads and edits to the main and file namespaces. This means that editors must not plagiarize, and editor contributions must conform to public domain rules or free license. Additionally, all contributions to this wiki requires surrendering of any personal copyright; so, editors must not make contributions of copyright they cannot personally surrender or are authorized to do so by the creator.

This wiki is hosted by Valve; Valve's name is "on the door". As Valve's Official Team Fortress Wiki, this wiki and its editors have "received all necessary consents" to upload and present particular Valve content that would otherwise not be free for upload by other organizations. Valve frees uploading of quality and notable images and other content to this wiki that it has published through its license games and associated media. This applies to screenshots as well as extracted media obtained from licensed games by licensed users.

See images and media policies.

Leaked Content

Only Valve may license its content; leaked content refers to content that was made available to the public in violation of Valve's copyrights and licenses. For Valve to accept posting of leaked content to this site, its official wiki, would be to surrender its copyright. Therefore, no editor, other than specific Valve employees, has any authority to free the copyright or license of any leaked content; so, any contribution of leaked content of any game or publisher to the main or file namespaces is a violation of the Terms of Use of Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress Wiki, and Steam. However, certain leaks are notable events and may be mentioned and citations may be made third-party articles about historic leaks.

Screenshots of leaked content are de facto leaked content. Community screenshots of non-free Team Fortress content are themselves non-free media and should not be uploaded to this wiki; simply applying public domain, screenshot, fair use, or any other licensing tag to non-free media does not free it for use on this wiki.

Editorial note: Clearly, uploaded screenshots of leaked content are a violation of Terms of Use, a matter that has escaped review of some uploaded images, which should be rectified.

Unreleased content

Unreleased content refers specifically to content for which there is some expectation of pending intended release by Valve; but, has not yet been patched into the game and has not been made public in Valve and Community servers; examples including, but not limited to, content Valve claims to be developing, Workshop maps or items (even if Valve may have stated that they will be added), or content mentioned or implied in an ongoing Update ARG.

  • Generally, images or articles relating to expected but unreleased weapons, items, or other game content are not permitted until they are officially released. This is because until that point, what the content is, does, or looks like cannot be confirmed, even if leaked.
  • The main purpose of this policy is to reduce unverified speculation or other ridiculous conjecture appearing as 'fact' on article pages.
  • Editors are, however, free to start creating an article about it in their user space and have it moved into the article mainspace upon official release. Note: mainspace categories are generally not permitted on articles in user space; you may comment them out while in your user space, like so: <!-- [[Category:Example]] -->; or use the colon: [[:Category:Example]].

By this definition, sufficiently notable Custom content/Community Mods used in active communities are excluded from this particular consideration. For Community Mod policy, see Mod notability. This classification also does not apply to unused content, which is content found within patched game files, but not used in normal play.

Unused content

Unused content refers to content that can or at one time could be found within released gamefiles, but was never accessible in the game, an example being the Mercenary Park hat.

  • Articles about such unused cosmetics, items, and weapons are included in Category:Unused content.
  • Unused content such as models or textures found in a Valve-published map's files is listed in an "Unused content" section.
    • Notable inaccessible rooms or other spaces in a map that can be discovered through noclip may also be noted in the same section (the Competitive Mode winner's podium is neither inaccessible nor unused content).

Cut content

Cut content refers to content that at one time could be found within released game files, but is was later removed from the game.

  • Articles about such cut cosmetics, items, and weapons are included in Category:Cut content.
  • In the case of maps, only post-release cut content would be covered under update history and would be mentioned in the text only where particularly notable or significantly changing gameplay.
Editorial note: Clearly, there has been a long record of the wiki covering cut content, weapons in particular, that were considered during development are covered with their own articles. Policy expressly including or excluding these articles should be resolved.

Images and media

For image licensing policy, see Team Fortress Wiki:Licensing images.
For guidelines on image quality, see Team Fortress Wiki:Images.
For placing images in articles, see Help:Images.

Languages and localization

See Help:Language translation for help and specific guidelines related to article translation.

The content on Team Fortress Wiki is multilingual, and every effort should be made to ensure that readers of other languages can access the same content in their own native language.

  • Articles should have multiple language translations. Content related to the organization of the project (i.e. pages in the Team Fortress Wiki and Help namespaces) should normally not be translated.
  • Many articles are kept translated via translation switching templates. This allows consistent formatting across pages, and ensures that localized text and template code are kept in one single template.

Community websites

The community website pages on this wiki have always been prone to abuse, and as time went on, concerns of bias and the usage of the wiki as a vehicle for product advertising became more pronounced. A lack of guidelines acceptable to all parties has also always been an issue, so as of 2014-05-12 the wiki has enacted a concrete policy of no site pages whatsoever in favor of more helpful and informative basic guides that document the features more generally. This should solve the concerns of advertising and bias, as well as giving a more concrete starting point for newcomers. The new guides are: Basic Market guide, Basic trading guide, and Basic inventory guide.

Custom content / Community topic notability

Editorial note: Drafting replacement for Team Fortress Wiki:Policies#Mod notability section in existing policy page.
See Team Fortress Wiki:Community topics notability guidelines

Community topics embrace a collection of subjects of content and activities that occur outside of direct Valve corporate operations and publications of the Team Fortress series of games and all related media. Of course, the Team Fortress Wiki will not cover all Community activities. Secondary, if not tertiary, to the primary task of keeping this wiki current with Valve's publications and updates, editors may cover useful and notable Community topics, but only in compliance with this wiki's Policy for Community topic notability.