Template talk:Significant events

"Not appropriate to structure this as such"

@Miles, if your reason for deletion is "Not appropriate to structure this as such," why didn't you instead offer your own alternative solution to fix the situation? If you feel that there's a better way, you should be working together with the user who made the template instead of immediately trying to get it deleted.

Honestly, when you instantly put a deletion tag on things like this without even bothering with another option, it reeks of you trying to get rid of content that you don't like with as little resistance as possible (especially given your historic biases against the competitive community, when SmashWiki has clearly decided that competitive content is allowed here). It also calls to mind deletionism, where people think that deleting content is the best mindset to run a wiki. If you're really editing in good faith, a deletion tag should not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you see something like this. Awesome Cardinal 2000 21:40, December 7, 2020 (EST)

1. Competitive content shouldn't be in the mainspace whenever possible. We have multiple other established namespaces for it.
2. What goes on this template will, unavoidably, be subjective and open to endless disagreement and debate.
3. Putting something on this template would flavor readers' impressions of what is and isn't "signifcant", which is generally not our call to make.

There's several good reasons not to have this; pick your favorite. Miles (talk) 21:47, December 7, 2020 (EST)

1. Where in SmashWiki's policies does it say that competitive content shouldn't be in the mainspace whenever possible? Also what does "whenever possible" mean? Do you think it means "delete if it's not a smasher, tournament, or team?" I don't understand why you're going back to arguments that have been thoroughly decomposed numerous times for you already.

2. SmashWiki is a representation of the Smash community, and SW:NPOV makes it pretty clear that covering subjective material is allowed as long as it's of significance to the Smash community.

3. Again, we have an entire policy dedicated to this at SW:NOTABLE. We already have categories like Category:VIP players. SmashWiki users have, for the past ten years, used talk pages to discuss about how significant things are, and there's no indication that this template would create the problems that you insist it will. Again, going back to deletionism, if people argue that there are events missing, articles for those events should be created, instead of deleting what's already there. SmashWiki is not complete. Awesome Cardinal 2000 22:08, December 7, 2020 (EST)

Pretty much entirely agree with Ac2k. I can't say I really agree with any of the points Miles made. I don't see any issue with overlap of competitive articles within the mainspace and no policies seem to suggest otherwise. As far as determining what is notable or not, we can easily make an amendment to the Notability policy determining what is and isn't impactful to the scene. I'd definitely argue that these three events in particular have deeply impacted the scene. Señor Mexicano (talk) 22:16, December 7, 2020 (EST)

I agree with Ac2k as well. S3AHAWK The Festive One 22:49, December 7, 2020 (EST)

Well first I'll get my opinion out of the way: This template groups together all the articles I don't want us to have because their content is covered just fine on the relevant pages. Grouping them on their own pages causes information duplication, and by their very nature they'll be constant targets - I don't really mean vandalism targets because we can use protection for that, I mean "pages that make it a lot easier for people to give the wiki negative publicity".

Now the template itself: I think it is naturally much harder to define what makes an "event" notable compared to a player or tournament. Players have results that can be compared to some reasonable baselines; tournaments have things like number of entrants or prize money. But events by their very nature cannot be compared to each other in such a way, which is how we would decide which ones are notable and which are not. In addition, I do not think any event classified as "ongoing" can have its notability determined fairly without a large amount of recency bias; it would have to be considered "over" for a few months first. Toomai Glittershine The Emissary 22:56, December 7, 2020 (EST)

I don't agree that information is being duplicated here, all three of the articles in the template have tons of additional information + sources that are not featured on the other page on the wiki. Subjective notability has not been an end-all issue either, we still have the List of rumors page + entirely separate articles for the Gematsu leaks and the Vergeben leaks. We've proven already that it has the ability to determine subjectivity on an individual basis, and is completely prepared to handle these cases. Plus I can't see how these discussions would come more than a handful of times every year at maximum.

That being said I never thought of the recency bias + potential for vandalism before. Perhaps this would be better as just a category to make it less visible. Awesome Cardinal 2000 23:10, December 7, 2020 (EST)

I seriously don't see how documenting occurrences within the community would give the wiki negative publicity. If anything the wiki is already suffering from a stagnant negative reception as it lacks any form of contact with the community. I also don't think it's very difficult at all to determine which particular events would be notable or not regardless of recency. For example, COVID-19 knocked out an entire year of in-person Smash tournaments and significantly boosted the popularity of netplay. The sexual misconduct allegations resulted in the departure of many notable individuals throughout the community and a heightened sense of security. In our most recent case, years upon years of information was unearthed describing how Nintendo and other corporations prevented the growth of the community and many times significantly harmed it. Now I'm indifferent on whether this should stay as a template or a category, but I firmly support keeping it up in some form. Señor Mexicano (talk) 00:24, December 8, 2020 (EST)

What did you mean by the wiki "lacking any form of contact with the community"? People still use the wiki. Once in a blue moon, a pro player will even edit it. I don't understand. Anthony1996 (talk) 01:39, December 8, 2020 (EST)

SmashWiki has virtually no social media presence. In the world of today social media is a vital necessity for most if not all communities. For us it'd allow admins or whoever else would run the social media channels to be able to talk about current events on-wiki as well as gain community trust by simply interacting with the community. The only efforts I've seen of this happening was when Aidan tackled the sexual misconduct situation. The wiki is deeply disconnected from the rest of the community. Señor Mexicano (talk) 18:34, December 8, 2020 (EST)

Some general comments from me (addressing the whole page, rather than anyone specific):

• While I don't think that the mainspace is the absolute best place for information like this to go...I'm not sure of where else it could go. There's no dedicated namespace for stuff like this, and to create one would seem superfluous.
• On the information itself, I think it should be covered regardless, but concisely in one place; as an example, there is no reason to have a page on the cancelled TBH tournament while also having a page for the cancellation of it, in my opinion.
• For quite a while now, I've tried advocating for the list of rumors page to only have what should be considered "notable", but there is a noticeable gray area between what can be considered "notable" now. The community is the largest it's ever been, social media creates much bigger spreading of information (imagine if the EGM Sonic hoax happened now, for instance), and if we go by old standards of "notable", then practically everything gets to be covered, when that 100% should not be the case. The same rule applies here. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with making these pages; it's the act of categorizing them subjectively as "notable" that I have a problem with. (A category would probably be better than a template, though, I will admit to that.)

Aidan, the Festive Rurouni 00:51, December 8, 2020 (EST)

I initially tagged the tournament page for deletion, but Miles removed it stating that it's not so clear cut. imo I believe it definitely is. We have historically always deleted canceled tournament pages and once again the movement that resulted from the tournament's cancelation has expanded far beyond it. Something I noticed that Inkipedia does is that they have a blanket namespace called "Competitive:". In this namespace they contain players, teams, and tournaments. While I don't think we should 100% follow this approach, perhaps we could have our own "Competitive:" namespace for anything that doesn't fall within the context of a team, player, or tournament. One thing I noticed though is that this would effectively be a replacement for Category:Competitive play. While on thate note, if we already have a category for competitive play articles on mainspace, then what's the big deal? Señor Mexicano (talk) 01:04, December 8, 2020 (EST)

I would argue that #FreeMelee has become big enough that it's gone past being just associated with the tournament itself, which is why it deserves its own page, regardless if the original tournament article gets deleted or not.

I also agree that there's a chance it could turn into a List of rumors type of thing, but I don't think the list of rumors page is that big of a deal. It seems that nearly all the Ultimate rumors have been reliably cited or linked to the original source. And even so, it's not like the page itself is unreadable or anything, it's well organized into different subsections and everything. I believe that the benefits of having the information displayed here outweigh the drawbacks. I would rather as a wiki decide what counts as "notable" instead of deleting these kinds of lists altogether (on an informative encyclopedia it's impossible to completely avoid all forms of subjectivity anyways). In addition, deliberately removing events like the sexual misconduct allegations from a significant events would feel like censorship in my opinion. Awesome Cardinal 2000 01:21, December 8, 2020 (EST)

In addition canceled tournaments like TBH Online should still have their own pages, the wiki goes by a "once notable always notable" policy, just because the event is not happening anymore doesn't mean the preparations and hype leading up to the event go away as well. Awesome Cardinal 2000 01:24, December 8, 2020 (EST)

I wouldn't be opposed to this so long as we keep it consistent. The reason I chose to create a new article instead of keeping it on the tournament page was because A) we have historically deleted cancelled tournament pages and I wanted it to stay consistent and B) as I've said many times before the situation that unfolded has expanded well beyond just the tournament. Once again though an amendment to SW:NOTABLE describing this would be nice to have things set in stone. Señor Mexicano (talk) 18:34, December 8, 2020 (EST)

I have to agree with the tournament page being deleted. "Once notable, always notable" shouldn't matter when something didn't happen; it's the events that transpired afterwards that were notable, not the tournament itself. Aidan, the Festive Rurouni 18:43, December 8, 2020 (EST)