VSBW Profile Standards (Staff Only)

[Crabwhale]

You know there comes a time when technicalities, rules and their loopholes need to get thrown out the window and common sense must prevail.

This is one such occasion. No matter what system we devise, Suggsverse will never be acceptable.

 

[Matthew_Schroeder]

Limiting this wiki to only works that have copyright / trademarks is stupid.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

My discussion with Agnaa was mostly unproductive because what Agnaa proposes doesn't really change anything about our system, while I believe change needs to be made for vague cases of viability, such as cartoons with no continuity, games that prominently feature advertising characters and youtube personalities, real life actors playing as themselves in an otherwise fine fictional universe, exactly how prominent an original work needs to be to be viable, and others.

So yeah, it was a lot of retreading old ground, mainly because if we aren't changing anything we've gone back to square one with all of the problem profiles above.

If nothing changes, I'll bet that we'll see this same exact problem pop up later when it's too much of an issue for the on-the-fence users to tolerate, we'll see people unwilling to budge on proposals that affect a single verse that's currently on the site, and we'll see the same compromises that swap around words on rules that we already have. And repeat.

 

[Qawsedf234]

Just make a list of simple criteria. Like

• The work must not be a derivative of previous work that they are not affilated with. So something like Superman: Red Son is fine to have but not Superman from a DCAU fan comic

• The work cannot have sexually expliclit content be its core focus ot be included

There's probably a bit more, but that would include a bunch of things people are currently debating about. Then there can be execptions like Suggsverse that's a bit infamous in origin and known for weird power claims.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

@Qawsedf

Those clauses are already on our page criteria and site rules if I'm not mistaken.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

We're basically looking for where the line needs to be drawn, but we keep raising and lowering it back and forth is the problem. We have too many verses that are obviously allowed, such as established published words being allowed. And Joke verses with 0 sense of scaling not allowed. But it appears the focus should be on the verses that appear somewhere in between. We aren't going to fine the line to draw unless we get closer to it rather than farther away on both sides.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

I actually heartily agree with that, DDM. Well put.

Yes, polarizing the issue won't get us anywhere, it might benefit to make specific rulings on these problem profiles.

 

[Sera_EX]

Limiting this wiki to only works that have copyright / trademarks is stupid.

No one ever argued to literally remove anything without a "TM" or an "R" slapped onto it. Not once.

 

[Antvasima]

Dargoo and Medeus make sense to me.

 

[GojiBoyForever]

Staff only. We should only make exceptions for honorary staff and retired staff.

 

[Sera_EX]

I'm in agreement with Andy.

 

[The_real_cal_howard]

I still advocate for the "Deal with it" approach. It'll make thing so much easier if we do. Use common sense to figure out if something should be on the wiki and delete it if it's not. Someone gets uppity about it, tell them that it's dumb and to put on their big boy pants and deal with it.

This isn't a joke/troll post, btw. I'm entirely serious.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Yeah, I personally think the conservative approach suggested by zi Sewa and Ven is the ideal thing to do here, since, when you get to the meat of it, this issue is mostly caused by people trying to assert a solid, unchanging set of rules to restrain a problem that is as fluid and intangible as the wind.

Additional rules and standards that aren't as fundamental as "have decency when talking to people" are 100% arbitrary and intangible in the end, and there will always exist loopholes which people will try to abuse in order to push for stupid shit to be on the wiki and thus causing this whole ordeal to be repeated, unless we decide to go full YHVH Mode on them, something which we obviously don't want here.

It's pretty much like Crab said up there: Common sense should prevail here. Really, no matter what system we devise to deal with this issue, we will never allow something like the Suggsverse to get into the wiki for reasons that while obvious to us, may not be such for other people, and can be ultimately be summed up as "bc it's dum".

 

[Antvasima]

I'm in agreement with Andy.

In what manner?

 

[Sera_EX]

'''inspecting the problem profiles to better define the general rules'''

 

[Dragonmasterxyz]

>Tells us to fix the system

>Doesn't give a suggestion how.

>Doesn't give us a reasonable reason as to why.

>Doesn't provide an argument.

>Posts this on an irrelevant thread to tiering.

Brilliant

 

[Sera_EX]

@Dragon

That was a clear troll given what he put on the RV thread.

Probably one of the Discord lot considering they mentioned the Everlasting controversy.

 

[Antvasima]

inspecting the problem profiles to better define the general rules

Yes. That makes sense. Suggestions are very welcome.

 

[Sera_EX]

I suppose we could go by category.

 

[Antvasima]

Please elaborate.

 

[Sera_EX]

Like, internet characters seem to be a common issue (take Youtube for example). So we could check the Internet and Internet characters categories.

 

[Agnaa]

My discussion with Agnaa was mostly unproductive because what Agnaa proposes doesn't really change anything about our system, while I believe change needs to be made for vague cases of viability, such as cartoons with no continuity, games that prominently feature advertising characters and youtube personalities, real life actors playing as themselves in an otherwise fine fictional universe, exactly how prominent an original work needs to be to be viable, and others.

So yeah, it was a lot of retreading old ground, mainly because if we aren't changing anything we've gone back to square one with all of the problem profiles above.

If nothing changes, I'll bet that we'll see this same exact problem pop up later when it's too much of an issue for the on-the-fence users to tolerate, we'll see people unwilling to budge on proposals that affect a single verse that's currently on the site, and we'll see the same compromises that swap around words on rules that we already have. And repeat.

• Cartoons with no continuity can easily be dealt with via a continuity/canon rule.
• Games that prominently feature advertisement characters are already banned, the thread was just about making the rule more clear.
• YouTube personalities in games can be dealt with via a simple amendment to the YouTube persona rule.
• Real life actors playing themselves could have a rule written about them.
• I think the line for original works is competently drawn already.

The reason I say I want to do most things the same is because I don't want to needlessly overhaul the fundamentals of how we do the system, deleting a bunch of profiles that are otherwise fine. Especially because most of these issues you've presented are rather distinct from each other, with staff consensus differing from point to point - those things you listed aren't universally considered issues.

@Cal If the notability guidelines can't function as a proper basis, then that approach takes my vote.

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you Agnaa. I would appreciate practical suggestions from you and others regarding new regulation texts based on your post.

 

[Agnaa]

Part of what I meant with "those things you listed aren't universally considered issues" is that some sort of staff consensus should be established on what we want those rules to be before we write them.

i.e. for real life actors playing themselves. From past discussions I know that some staff think that all of these should be allowed, some staff think that they should only be allowed if the movie doesn't revolve around the real life actor and they merely play a relatively small part, and some staff think that none of them should be allowed.

I've written my suggestion for how to write the notability guidelines, but I'd like to know our consensus on most of these topics before writing guidelines.

Also for the advertisement characters in games, the thread was specifically about rewriting the guideline, since we had a consensus on how the rule should work but didn't know how to put it into words. Dargoo seemed to be ready to write a draft for this rule but was busy at the time.

 

[Agnaa]

Here's Dargoo's proposed rule for advertisement characters in games:

If it's an original game that was made to sell merchandising, it's fine. If it's a game that revolves around existing advertising icons for stuff like fast food and cereal boxes, then it's clear the game doesn't stand on its own two feet. Easy to understand, can be thrown onto our rules pages in a quick edit, solves most of the issues on this thread and we can move on to more important stuff.

This needs to be tweaked to fit in with the wording of other Editing Rules, but serves as a good baseline.

 

[Antvasima]

Something like this perhaps then?

"It is allowed to create profiles based on original games that were made to sell merchandise. However, games that revolve around existing advertisement icons, such as fast food and cereal boxes, are not sufficiently independent/do not stand on their own, and are as such considered unacceptable."

 

[Antvasima]

But I did post a rather lengthy explanation for why the Suggsverse should not be allowed. The problem is that it is so harsh that we likely cannot post it in an official regulation page.

 

[Sera_EX]

It should be common sense that certain verses are highly difficult to tier. For example, most Atari games that have colored backgrounds and graphics that barely represent what they're supposed to be. All you can do is try.

Most of our practices and methods of tiering immediately become inapplicable. Calcs require some realistic environments to actually work, a square that's supposedly meant to be a person, yeah try making that 10-B without feeling "okay, this is weird".

I agree that merely saying "common sense" and that's it doesn't solve our issue due to how immensely argumentative people are willing to be over this issue, but the more "conservative" approach as they call it is a far better idea than "let's be as open and fluid as possible".

You have no idea how many people on Discord think "anything with a feat can have a profile" and actually sat there and argued with me about it. That's how low we've gotten. I'd rather combine Ven and Cal's ideas, outright listing the types of verses we allow and being

But honestly, I'm starting to not care anymore. Again, it's the modern art argument. If people wanna believe a crumbled up piece paper put into a glass display within an art gallery suddenly makes it art I have nothing to say to them. Same goes for people who think just because something may be "interesting" to index and debate means it belongs on this site. It's been six days, far longer if you consider the threads that led up to this one and we're still at that overly lenient stage. This is why Cal actually makes sense here. We may have no choice but to stop being nice and just say "look, we're not allowing this, get over it" like we bascially do for Suggsverse.

 

[Antvasima]

I think that Sera makes sense, and would appreciate if we can hurry up and be efficient with this, as we have other important administrative work to take care of afterwards.

 

[Crabwhale]

Same, this discussion just feels like it keeps going in circles.

We need to stop just stretching this out and come up with some actual, definitive rules. Hell, even prototypes work since we can just debate on them instead of going on tangents.

 

[Antvasima]

Agreed.

 

[Antvasima]

Something like this perhaps then?

"It is allowed to create profiles based on original games that were made to sell merchandise. However, games that revolve around existing advertisement icons, such as fast food and cereal boxes, are not sufficiently independent/do not stand on their own, and are as such considered unacceptable."

What about this for a start?

 

[Crabwhale]

That seems fine by me.

 

[Antvasima]

Well, in that case we basically first have to define what kind of profiles we don't want in this wiki that are not already sufficiently prohibited, and then write down concise justifications for it.

 

[Agnaa]

I'm only willing to go to "common sense" if we can't get any reasonable concrete guidelines. The idea is that newer users keep pushing the boundaries so much (as we've seen) that any guideline we write up they'll find a way to skirt around it on a technicality.

I'm not sure that this will happen, or that we can't draft up actual rules, but it's the worry I think Dargoo and others have.

But until then, I think drafting concrete rules on the points I outlined above is a good place to start.

 

[Sera_EX]

It's not about being strict or lenient, it's about leaving a proper reason for something not being allowed instead of just acting like common sense is on your side and expecting people to accept that

This is that strawman I was talking about. Neither Cal, Ultima, or myself said common sense is on our side. We said we, as in the site as a whole need to use common sense, including the ones making the argument to use common sense.

 

[Crabwhale]

@ Andy

You're taking what I said and applying it to everything, when in reality I was only saying it due to one very specific, very extreme case, which was Suggsverse. And it was done at a time when it seemed like people were somehow arguing it may or may not be eligible.

But very well, if you're so inclined to argue about it, I will tell you why we cannot allow something like it on this site, at length.

It is a broken, spastic work made by an egomaniac that is almost entirely disconnected from reality, extremely obscure aside from dedicated VS debating sites and possessing of some of the most inconsistent and nonsensical storytelling and powerscaling to possibly exist.

The entire verse has numerous characters that exist only to be as powerful as possible, and would completely flood the Tier 0 category. That is, if the completely senseless writing would even let them be.

If we're going back to the standards presumably set before (canon and popularity), Suggsverse fails at both. Hard. Hard and hilariously.

 

[VenomElite]

I agree with Crab, the arguments against the mention of common sense are starting to delve into strawman territory.

 

[Antvasima]

Again, I would appreciate if we could please let go of the redundant circular arguing that is just wasting everybody's time until we are too exhausted and frustrated to get anything done, and start to come up with some practical standards here, similar to the suggestion that I cleaned up the language of earlier.

 

[Agnaa]

Here's some potential solutions to issues Dargoo brought up. I'd appreciate both comments on how you think they should be solved, and actual regulation drafts.

Here's a cleanup of one of those drafts that Ant made. I'd appreciate input on if this should be added.