Team Fortress Wiki talk:Policies/Community content notability guidelines

Extension of the Mod notability section to the broader Community content notability concept

See the subject of this topic: User:Mikado282/Sandbox/Community content notability guidelines

Community content has been a foundation of the Team Fortress franchise. The Team Fortress concept was initially created as a community mod to Quake. Team Fortress 2 was developed with an intention to foster the operation of Community servers and the Community development of mods and maps, groups and event. Presently about a third of Team Fortress 2 participation is on Community servers. The majority of new content for Team Fortress 2 is Community developed. If this wiki is to be most useful and relevant, it should continue to give some service to Community content.

OK, the elephant in the room; what do I, a relative non-participant in Community events or servers have to contribute to the subject of Community content? Please provide the balance of your perspectives to my suggestions where I may be seen as overly biased to including Potato events and maps (there, it’s said). On the other hand, IIUC, most of the new Community content pages come from the Potato events, and at this time, participation on Valve MvM and Potato MvM maps are roughly at the same level.(Clarification: Per teamwork.tf, certain Valve missions are much more popular than the Reforged missions, while the Reforged missions, in early August, were much more popular than certain other Valve missions, at that moment. Since then, Potato participation has decreased.)

At present, there is compliant of quality, incompleteness, and style deviation of a certain range of Community content pages. But really, the answer to those issues is no different than for the same problems of quality, incompleteness, and style deviation in Valve content pages when they happen; edit it. The real question is whether each Community content page (new or legacy, finished or stub, opus or shlock), like each Valve-content page, actually belongs as a unique page on the wiki main space, and that, IMO, is the question of notability.

My observation is that the existing "Mod notability" section has much of the wording appropriate to extend to Custom maps, and potentially to Community events. I have started a sandbox for such an extension here. The links to Community content pages and categories is intended to illustrate present coverage of Community content. The criteria I added are those that seem to also matter on notability, particularly for events.

Alternatively, instead of extending the Mod notability section to Community content notability, you may suggest additional sections specific to Community maps and Community pages.

I am not set on any particular criteria, but some expansion seems called for if we are to look at the broader Community content.

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 22:31, 2 August 2020 (UTC) 03:51, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Should Community notability take into account the relative popularity of the official content the Community is expanding. Is it more notable when a mod draws thousands to a less popular game mode(MVM about 9% ) than a mod that might draw similar thousands to a more popular game mode (pl or ctf)?

I am not saying this isn't a sticky wicket.

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 12:55, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

I added suggested replacement Custom content tags to the Policy talk page. I may take some time to make the banners, or you may.

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 01:50, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

1.Since some community contents with low notability could be more famous in the future, should we move them to a user sub page like what we did for Creators.tf?

2.For the tags, most community content may never be released officially, while they are "released" on some servers or mods, so Dereko would prefer "unofficially released Community content".

3.For notability discussion in the future, I believe we need an independent discussion page which would make the discssions gather together and make it easy to refer to, and even if the community content page is deleted, the results of the discussion can be publicly preserved.

05:32, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

1.Since some community contents with low notability could be more famous in the future, should we move them to a user sub page like what we did for Creators.tf? -- Dereko

Unfortunately, I don't know what was done for Creators.tf. We already have a policy for use of Sandbox for drafts of potential articles. The main space articles (e.g., Operation Canteen Crasher) should not link to user space pages. If it is notable, the article should only be in user sandbox during drafting (if then))

2.For the tags, most community content may never be released officially, while they are "released" on some servers or mods, so Dereko would prefer "unofficially released Community content". -- Dereko

FWIW, I come from a background were release has specific meaning. As I view it, Value patches are controlled releases, but I don't assume that even with Potato that we have an anything that might be considered a controlled release. One of our Community tags has a statement that the content may have errors, omissions, or out-of-date information. I think any Community content tag should have that statement, since we have no particular assurance of configuration control -- we can say Teien has been in 5 Community events, but I wouldn't try to say that the same version or which different version of Teien was used in each event. I would say that Teien is notable, but which version of Teien used in each event is less notable (Achievement Idle and its derivatives are notable, but the change histories of all of its variants are not).

3.For notability discussion in the future, I believe we need an independent discussion page which would make the discssions gather together and make it easy to refer to, and even if the community content page is deleted, the results of the discussion can be publicly preserved. -- Dereko

OK, I see the weakness in that part of my proposal. It seemed to me that a page's Notability discussion could be recorded on its Talk page, but yes, where do we record it when it is not notable (where any later editor might find it, too). WP has a very involved process for DYK; every WP DYK entry has a logged record of the results of dozens of man-hours of review. We would want to make this a very light process, and for events, a blanket assessment for the event, not a separate discussion for every map in the event.

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 21:15, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't think moving something to userspace is a "solution" for articles that art not notable -- while userspace can be used to draft stuff, the tf2 wiki is not a web host. Naleksuh (talk) 19:28, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Before I give me complete reply about what Mikado said earlier: You're allowed to put anything you want on your user space (Within reason, of course. This means you can't just organise KKK rallies here, for example) as far as I know. I host a personal list of stranges I own/do not own here, which has nothing to do with the wiki. Moving the pages related to this topic should be completely fine anyways, as it is a TF2-related thing anyways.

Complete reply:

First of all I'd like to mention that the teamwork.tf numbers might not be entirely accurate, it takes the timeframe of an exact second and only counts nicknames. I.e. everyone playing at 08:00:00, but this leaves out everyone playing from 07:00:01-07:59:59, and leaves out everyone playing from 08:00:01-08:59:59. So take the numbers from Mikado with a grain of salt as it shows 12k players in TF2, while steamDB and steamcharts show roughly 20k minimum and 80k maximum (And they are independent of each other, they take individual IDs over the span of an hour instead. Teamwork.tf's system also means theoretically, if there are 40 people named "Jeff" they'll all be counted as 1 person despite being different people and in different games.).

Maps: For maps, I can only see it going 2 ways: Maps are completely excluded, no exceptions. Or, the only maps that are allowed in are maps that have official Halloween versions (E.g. Bagel and Cauldron).

Potato mvm: I mention potato specifically because of how the situation currently looks. I haven't peeked in their Discord to see if anyone is gonna continue/has abandoned the wiki side of the project, but I've noticed less and less contributions to the point where it looks like some translated parts of the wiki (Lots of red links). I'm personally strongly in favour of moving all of the potato.tf stuff over to a user space, but keeping the main event page and the medal pages. These user space pages shouldn't be linked in the main articles either, if they want they can link it on their own site but as it is currently looking, it's looking quite bad. I'm all in favour of letting them move it themselves, as they refused to wait when asked to and flat out ignored what was suggested. I'm also advocating for turning it into one big "potato mvm" or "potato.tf" page, this would mean severely shortening the descriptions, removing any mention of who made which missions, and which missions/maps were featured. I've also noticed some stuff that possibly breaks copyright laws during 2020's april fool's event, which are still on the wiki. (This goes for any future things as well)

TF2-inspired games: Things such as Fortress Forever and Team Fortress 2 Classic, these are games which are inspired by TFC/2 and I believe they shouldn't be on the wiki at all as they are fan-games. However, it could be put under an overall "TF2-inspired games" page.

Mods: Things such as Advanced Weaponiser and creators.tf. Personally I don't have much of a problem with these, but I have no clue what the specifics would be. A rough guideline would be having multiple servers running, and an active pool of people playing. (I told you, it's rough).

Gamemodes: Stuff such as Versus Saxton Hale and Zombie Fortress. I think the same really applies as with mods, except that the content of the mods need to be looked at (I.e. Freak Fortress has the Vagineer, whose mouth looks like... well... you get it.) to ensure it's nothing weird.

I'm not sure if this was the purpose of this discussion, but this is how I interpreted it.
GrampaSwood (talk) 20:22, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

@GrampaSwood The purpose (and topic and lead) of the discussion is the proposal of extension of existing Team Fortress Wiki policies on Community Mod content to all Community Content. I admit, I could have been more explicit.

• From your differentiation of topics currently categorized as "Mods" ( Versus Saxton, Zombie Fortress, Fortress Forever, Team Fortress 2 Classic) it seems your are suggesting that even the existing Mod notability policy should be revisited. Are Versus Saxton, Zombie Fortress, Fortress Forever, and Team Fortress 2 Classic incorrectly categorized as Mods?
• From your comments against Custom maps, you seem to suggest or imply that Mod notability policy should not be extended to maps, rather your only policy on maps is whether the Custom map has a Patched version. (I counter that certain Custom maps are notable enough for inclusion.) If maps should have a distinct policy for inclusion, then consider starting a topic for it. I did think about separate policies for Community events and Custom maps, and maybe there should be, but the common criteria really should be notability, I think.

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 13:19, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate continuing patience as I must be traveling. There are certain considerations I want to have made for maps, but there are numbers yet to be run and presented. If there is any Mission Statement for the wiki, it it to be useful to TF2 players, but is it to be useful only to the 2 out of 3 hours of playtime that are on Valve Servers? There are Custom maps that draw many more players than several official maps. My intention is to make their case in a week or two. M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 18:09, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure what this page is for now, the issues lies with community content in general (Ranging from simple things like maps to complete game revamps). So yes, I would suggest that there should be a talk on every bit of custom content that the game has and what we deem worthy and what we deem unworthy, which I divided into different categories. I'd also not be against completely removing any custom content, but that would be an extreme.
GrampaSwood (talk) 19:58, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

"I'm not entirely sure what this page is for now,"

Per the page title, this Talk Page is for discussing Policies for Community content (more accurately Community topics). There were requests that I draft policy for custom maps and community events. I made a sandbox draft. Admin requested (if I understood correctly) that I establish the discussion here. Whether any new policy for Community topics is placed on the Policies page or on this or another better-titled subpage is TBD.

Per the OP, this specific topic is for discussing extending the existing Community Mod guidelines, which are based on notability, to all Community Topics. I wish I had been more explicit in the OP. In the draft, I envisioned one Policy section to cover all Community Topics. In the OP, I did acknowledged that separate policies may be preferred, positing "you may suggest additional sections specific to Community maps and Community pages." Statements here of support or opposition to the topic, the sandbox draft, would not be inappropriate. I am drafting alternative separate policies considering your suggestions.

Other Topics on this Talk page, as for any Talk page, are for breakout discussions, or for discussion of policy to specific types of Community Topics.

See prior discussions: Team_Fortress_Wiki:Discussion/Archive_32#Regarding_pages_on_custom_maps.2C_competitions.2C_MVM_missions.2C_and_such

See the subject of this topic: User:Mikado282/Sandbox/Community content notability guidelines

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ 20:25, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Proposed criteria for Community event notability and Custom map notability were remove from above and incorporated into a User:Mikado282/Sandbox/Community content notability guidelines#Draft: separate sections|a second draft of separate policy sections to cover specific types of Community Topics]]

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 12:37, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Glossary: Official versus Unreleased content, et al

Proposed definitions relevant to the above conversations (because "Community" itself is too broad to be practical for specific use).

Official: Generally, "official", "Valve", or "released" content refers to content that Valve Patched into the game or published on its copyrighted Internet sources (e.g., blog, comics, news).

Unofficial: Generally, "unofficial", "custom", "mod", or "unreleased" content in contrast refers to content that was developed outside of Valve, and is used on non-Valve servers, and has not been Patched into the game.

Community: "Community" has a couple conflicting meanings in this conversation: Maps and cosmetics that Valve has patched into the game but were developed in the Community are called Community content by Valve. But, But "Community" also means things made outside of Valve. And, servers not nominally operated by Valve are called "Community servers" by Valve. (On the Halloween ConTracker, Valve makes the distinction between "official_maps" and "Community_maps", but all of the maps on the ConTracker are "official" and "patched".

Looking through this again, now, maybe this thread should be renamed "Custom content notability guidelines" or "Unofficial content notability guidelines".

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 21:50, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Community charity events

OK, I have been wondering about notability for the Community charity event aspects of this, in particular.

A couple of factors:

1) I would think there is a natural tendency to want to help with charities, to be useful, in a helpful sense. So, would Community event featuring a charity establish notability? But it is probably not enough for the event to claim it is a charity, there would need to be some vetting of some form.

2) It occurs to me that a Community entity hosting a charity using Valve's TF2 IP may require some Valve approval. I don't know personally, I would have to ask someone who actually ran one. Doesn't running a TF2 IP when promoting a charity involve some Valve intellectual property rights and corporate image control, but, also tax law? In short, if Valve openly acknowledges a charity that is using Valve IP integrated with online money exchange, that establishes a degree of legitimacy (e.g., not wire fraud) -- not just some guy saying "send me money for a fund raiser".

Sorry so disjoint; but, does Valve promotion of a Community fundraiser make the event notable enough to mention on TFwiki, with helpful information in an article, before the actual event?

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 01:52, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

1. We can always just add a link to popular/notable charities (E.g. ones highlighted on the blog/famous ones such as hugs.tf and Tip of the Hats) to the main page if we wanna help out.

2. It does not.
GrampaSwood (talk) 19:14, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

I would think that a community event with a charity event -recognized- by Valve (i.e even something as small as being given a blog post to advertise themselves) would be enough to make it notable. Of course, you can add more arbitrary conditions such as how much money has that charity event got and given and so on, but it would complicate the matter more than it is necessary. So in this case, i'd more or less agree on Swood.

As for the second matter - all that happens is Valve's approval in form of being given a blog post spot, there arent really any extensive negotiations or anything whatsoever.

In general, as already said, I would treat community events with a charity event and which received recognition from Valve as notable enough, however, if the amount of those type of events is too overwhelming, you can always add extra safe brakes and conditions - such as how much money was raised, how much was the event spoken about in community (very arbitrary and hard to verify personally, unless we go off something like r/tf2, TF2 youtube, TF2 discords and so on)

Goodjob (talk) 12:12, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Accuracy of teamwork.tf statitics

"I'd like to mention that the teamwork.tf numbers might not be entirely accurate,"

As previously requested in PM, the discussion of accuracy of teamwork.tf needs to be its own topic, because that question is distinct from the question of extending Mod notability guidelines to other community content.

I have drafted a response to this at User:Mikado282/Player-Map_statistics. As described in the report, it is easy to demonstrate the accuracy of teamwork.tf numbers; pick a map, filter for it on Valve's Community Server List and find it on teamwork.tf Map Statistics, and, during events, Potato.tf servers. Every time I compared the real time player counts on an MVM map, they exactly matched. The listed sources are reasonably accurate measures of how many players are on each map at the time sampled.

"So take the numbers from Mikado with a grain of salt ..."

Is salt really need needed? Have the readers found the player counts are usually inaccurate on a freshly refreshed Valve's Community Server List? I haven't, but, maybe I am weird (er).

"08:00:00, but this leaves out everyone playing from 07:00:01-07:59:59, and leaves out everyone playing from 08:00:01-08:59:59"

The actual sample time is 12-15 minutes (not one hour), so samples at 07:46:00, 08:00:00, and 08:14:00 only miss everyone playing exclusively within 07:46:01-07:59:59 and within 08:00:01-08:13:59. What you are really saying is that if you are on a server for only 1 minute, there is a 1 in 13 or so chance that you will not be counted, and that is probably reasonable, because under Valve's accounting, statistically, 130 people playing only 1 minute each count, on average, the same as 10 persons playing 13 minutes each. Even if teamworks.tf sampled every 3,600 seconds exactly, and every one of 60,000 conjectural players played for exactly 3598 seconds each, only 0.056% or 33 players of the 60,000 would be "missing" from the count.

Do not confound Valve's instantaneous players on maps counts with SteamDB and STEAMCHARTS. The latter are making very different measurements; counting total unique Team Fortress 2 logons from 8:00 to 9:00 rather than counting how many players are actually on servers at 8:12. Teamwork.tf's and other sites based on Valves server list count people actively playing on maps at points in time, while SteamDB and STEAMCHARTS count logins to TF2, playing and not playing, totaled over an hour; different methods, different numbers. Which method is the more useful depends on your personal use.

Please, give me a couple days to respond to the rest, in their place. M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 04:44, 27 August 2020 (UTC) M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 12:40, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

My Two Cents

howdy. after a recent edit i promised swood i'd post here, so here goes. personally, i believe community content should either be:

A. removed from this wiki almost completely, and moved over to those communities own wikis B. moved to a "subdomain" of some sort

let me explain. during one of my recent editing sprees, i came across a custom class leaderboard icon for the Civilian uploaded to the wiki. it was meant for the team fortress 2 classic page, but managed to be shown on official pages such as Stun due to the way some of the trickery on that page worked. point is, these contributors that contribute exclusively to community pages blatantly disregard the main wiki, causing problems like this to potentially occur. a lot of the edits made by them are also very low effort, with glorious image summaries such as "aafsdasdasf". given that many of the communities documented on this wiki are big enough to "warrant" their own pages, i'm sure their communities are more than able to create their own wikis through wikia or gamepedia.

now for point b, which is probably the more likely one to happen - move everything to a "subdomain" and enforce it. what i mean by this is, have every page begin with something along the lines of "https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/community/"

move community pages over to said subdomain, and then enforce similar guidelines to community images (example: have every image start with "Community" or else it gets moved)

on top of this, i think every community page should have an infobox explicitly stating its community content, not unlike how custom maps do it

i'm just kind of spitballin here so maybe we can come to a conclusion with these starting ideas - Boba (talk) 20:55, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

"i think every community page should have an infobox explicitly stating its community content, not unlike how custom maps do it"

(Assuming that you mean a banner template) I would have no problem with that, it is just a manual tag, easy to make the templates, just make tags for Fan updates, Community events, Community Mods.

I am all for tagging and categorizing of unreleased Community content. A year and a half ago I started on the Custom map categorization (e.g., Category:Custom maps unreleased stubs). However, there is a problem ingrained in the Template:Map infobox; it automatically puts both both released Community maps and unreleased Custom maps in the same category, I assume the value of the developer parameter makes the selection. I have challenged editors to make the modification needed to put released Community maps (as Valve classifies them) into Category:Community maps, but no takers, yet.

P.S. What about these tags?

"move community pages over to said subdomain, and then enforce similar guidelines to community images"

If we move community pages a subdomain, will we enforce article quality any easier? Or, would we create a ghetto? I recognize that quality of the custom map pages at at large is an issue, but one that is solved with simple editing. I recognized that, but I also figured that between a released content stub and an unreleased content stub, the released content stub should get the priority. That is why I put the unreleased map stubs in a subcategory. Actually, from the few Potato map stubs I have looked at it would not be a sophisticated task to clean them up to stub quality. If they stay at stub quality forever, that is not much more of a problem than a released map staying at stub quality indefinitely.

I don't care if the unEvent unreleased version of a release Event map stays a stub forever, as long as it is at least stub quality. I take this lead from the other editors not caring that Valve Event maps languished for years as stubs.

"but managed to be shown on official pages such as Stun due to the way some of the trickery on that page worked."

No. No trickery. Someone studied the template and used the intended method to make an image for a class link (ill advised the specific image may have been). Now, the well-intended reverter of that image has left a broken template on that page.

M I K A D O 282 ⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ ⊙⊙ (talk) (Help Wanted!) 03:23, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

"These maps and missions will never be played again." (regarding Custom maps used in events being used beyond events)

Clearly, even during the Reforged event, other past Potato.tf event maps were being hosted by other groups, some were even occupied.

A couple days ago, I looked for hosted Potato MvM maps. Given that

1) Reforged is over

2) It was not rush hour

3) Halloween is on

I was only a little surprised to see several Potato event maps are hosted, several are occupied, several of those have full teams, and some of those are on multiple servers.

It should be noted that in this situation, the numbers of players shown on these maps by teamwork was many times larger than the number of players shown on Valve's list of Community servers. My understanding is that teamwork counts maps hosted on private servers, which the Valve list naturally does not. My interpretation is that the the Potato maps are being privately tested, either for maintenance or updating, for the next 2020 event Potato is teasing.

The simple point is, it is not particularly true that a Custom map for an event is never played again. If it is popular, it can be hosted by others whenever.

M I K A D O 282 🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 🎃🎃 🎃🎃 (talk) (Help Wanted!) 21:25, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

My personal take on this stance

Figured after 6 or so months I'd give my take on this topic.

I personally think it all just depends on the quality of the map, and quality of the article. A map that was slapped together in 5 minutes, all dev textures, random objects and assets added, on top of a bizarre thumbnail on the Steam Workshop would not fit the wiki at all. A map that's popular on Creators.tf (KoTH Spillway for example) is perfectly fine, but a page covering it that has no images or a one sentence description of the map would also not fit the wiki. Npire is a good example of a map that almost no one in the community knows about, and has a ton of unique features, but the article itself is within the wiki's standards. Bagel is a good example of a very notable community made map (because it's Halloween version was accepted for Scream Fortress 2018) with an article written as if it was part of the core game.

This doesn't mean that every single custom map ever should have it's own wiki page, just ones that are super popular and ones that have some pretty unique qualities to them. ShadowMan44 (talk) 00:38, 19 April 2021 (UTC)