User:Mikado282/Sandbox/Content policy

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 surrender.

This wiki is hosted by Valve; Valve's name is "on the door". As Valve's Official Team Fortress Wiki, this wiki and it editors have "received all necessary consents" to upload and present particular Valve content that would otherwise be not 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 extracted media obtained from licensed games by licensed users.

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 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 un-free Team Fortress content are themselves un-free media and should not be uploaded to this wiki; simply applying public domain, screenshot, fair use, or any other licensing tag to un-free media does not free it for use on this wiki.

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Editorial note: Clearly, uploaded screenshots of leaked content are a violations 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 being content Valve claims to be developing or content mentioned 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 in their user space and have it moved into the article mainspace upon official release. Note: main space 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, Community Mods 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.

Unused content

Unused content refers to content that can or at one time could be found within released gamefiles, but is was never accessible in the game, and 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.

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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.