User talk:TheTechnician27

Issues micro templates

Hello! I'm glad that you're enthusiastic about editing and trying something new, but creating templates for simple sentences is clearly over the top. Templates should be used in moderation (like anything in this life really) and using them to such extent requires any contributor (old or new) to at least remember them all. May I suggest that this is impossible and it will only scare people off? Besides no one will go through all the games to even apply these new templates, too much work. (I reverted the changes) --Ngng (talk) 17:11, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Windows PCSX2 guide

Hi again. I have moved your unfinished guide to this page where you can finish it at your leisure (and replace the original afterwards). It's better to have an obsolete but still somewhat helpful guide than a page perpetually under construction. I myself will never find the time and desire to delve into it like I did before. Good luck. --Ngng (talk) 17:44, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

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Hi. If you want to do some drastic changes (i.e. remove all games' descriptions), can you discuss them prior to do it? We can use PM system for instance. Thanks. --Ngng (talk) 07:00, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi, Ngng. I actually was about to speak for myself, but fobes beat me to the punch. There are a couple things I'd like to clarify: the first is that I did write those game descriptions myself, attempting to make them concise but still useful. The other concerns copyright. To address the box art first, that's a bit different. Although their usage exists within a legal grey area, what constitutes "minimal usage" in terms of image resolution is vague, we use them solely in an educational capacity, we use them only on the article where they're relevant, they are not used for profit, there is no adequate substitute, and in general, Wikipedia airs on the extremely safe side when it comes to copyright. I think they're perfectly fine. On the other hand, the game descriptions unequivocally do not fall under fair use or any other legal justification. 1) The length of time the material has been here for does not make a difference. 2) You did provide proper credit, and you were clearly trying to do the right thing, but attribution is not a magic wand that resolves copyright infringement. 3) In November 2015 when these descriptions were ripped, verbatim and in their entirety, from GameFAQs, the website was owned by CBS Interactive, and the website clearly displayed "Copyright CBS Interactive. All rights reserved." This unambiguously means that we did not have legal permission to use them. 4) Since that time, this material has never been released under a compatible license, and the intellectual property is currently owned by the same company who owns Fandom, again all rights reserved. 5) An adequate substitute does exist, namely writing one's own description. 6) At the bottom of the wiki, we advise: "Content is available under CC-BY-NC-SA unless otherwise noted." However, we fail to note that distinction either for the box art or for the game descriptions, neither of which are compatible with said license. 7) A perceived drop in quality (highly debatable) does not justify the unlicensed use of copyrighted content. 8) I find it a touch ironic that my actual, original writing is "AI generated 3 sentences from Wikipedia" when it seems, to my untrained eye, that at at least one point you directly, without attribution, and verbatim plagiarized Wikipedia for a game description. Compare the relevant PCSX2 wiki revision with the corresponding Wikipedia article a few weeks prior. I respect how much work you've put into the wiki over the years, and like you, I'm just trying to make it better.

PS: For some reason when I try to write on your talk page, the Cloudflare check shows up before I'm redirected to a blank source, so I'm trying here and pinging Fobes. TheTechnician27 (talk) 10:25, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

So I did some digging regarding the copyright status because you mentioned you got written permission, and this is what I came up with. I can believe that you got this permission, although 1) we still don't distinguish that the GameFAQs material isn't under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, and 2) I still think it's better to have our own descriptions, especially for the ones that are so long that they detract from the readability of the wiki. TheTechnician27 (talk) 12:40, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh, you actually can talk! ;-) Most of the information on GameFAQs including descriptions and boxarts was collected buy unaffiliated contributors, people like you and me (stolen from other sources?). This is what I've been told and this is why they still have notes like "Contributed By: Polymathic" on every game page. They don't own the rights to these contributions, not fully anyways. Please stop worry too much about obscure copyrights for the ancient games on the system everyone has forgotten about a long ago. Besides, about 50% of descriptions here are not from GameFAQs (either written by the contributors themselves, taken from Wikipedia or snatched from other sites across the internet) and many of them are modified, rewritten or touched up. If the worst ever comes to worst, modifying some of the description could be done relatively quickly.

The wiki has many other problems which need to be addressed: outdated guides (you tried to start to update the main guide but never finished), trashy front page, broken spoiler tag (I'm still waiting for a PM response from seapancake before I'll try and take any action), lots of missing descriptions and boxarts for rare games, lots of missing developers pages (not that they are so crucial to the wiki but for completion purposes), lots of "stub" marks on completed game articles, a few series templates could possibly enhance experience, incorrectly names games, etc., etc.

The wiki however does not need 12K redirects of all Sony serial numbers into their corresponding game pages (c'mon man, what were you thinking? - you can literally type the serial into the search field instead), and most importantly we should agree on drastic changes before they are initiated and no changes should ever be started if they are doomed to be incomplete. Every now and then a new contributor modifies 5-10 pages in a drastic manner and disappears, thinking that his work is finished and leaving other 5K pages for the community to modify. You would never have finished your serial number redirection crusade it's unfeasible and unnecessary; and I've seen a lot of this kind of attempts through the years (most of them were reverted, a couple of earlier ones I finished myself). --Ngng (talk) 07:26, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

P.S. "PS: For some reason when I try to write on your talk page, the Cloudflare check shows up before I'm redirected to a blank source, so I'm trying here and pinging Fobes. TheTechnician27 (talk) 10:25, 15 March 2024 (UTC)" -- The page is too big. For the same reason I can't update Complete List of Demos and Tool Discs and Complete List of Games now (first time in 5 years I wanted to do it and failed). Also I can't use my simple robots anymore to automatically update pages because of this cloudflare. The inability to update big pages is definitely a problem now. --Ngng (talk) 10:51, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

P.P.S. It works if no cloudflare check is involved. It seems to be a bit random, but you have to save any other smaller page w/ cloudflare check, then the middleman lets you save w/o checks (for a time). --Ngng (talk) 11:05, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Regarding the guide, that was mostly me finding it intensely difficult to balance old 1.6.0 stuff and new 1.7.X stuff at the same time. Every few sentences throughout the article I would need to place side-by-side screenshots for both versions, and I would need to make constant, awkward disclaimers that something only applies to one version. I can't remember two years later if I simply gave up or if I decided to wait until the Qt version was properly out. I think at this point (given the website even walls off access to 1.6.0 now) that if a new guide is created, it'd be reasonable to create it around the Qt interface. But regarding Wikipedia, that actually still is a licensure issue. Wikipedia operates under a sharealike license for (what was at the time) CC-BY-SA 3.0, whereas we're CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0. That 'SA', sharealike, means it needs to stay under the same license, i.e. that we can't suddenly make it 'non-commercial' (that 'BY' also means attribution, which it seems we didn't do). And the GameFAQs issue does, I agree, become even more complicated because those descriptions may have been ripped from elsewhere. My broader point isn't that something bad will definitely happen with these descriptions; it's that it isn't proper to redistribute this content under a license it doesn't support. The main purpose behind the serials isn't so that there's a result in the searchbar (although I feel that is quite nice); it's that it makes for a way to automatically, from the outside, index every single game on the wiki just by its serial number. Because every page name serves as a unique global identifier, this would mean for instance that https://wiki.pcsx2.net/SCUS-97429 would link directly to the corresponding article for Jak X. Although I'm aware of the amount of time this would take, I feel like I was progressing quickly enough that it could've been completed solo within a couple months even had the pace fallen off. TheTechnician27 (talk) 18:35, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

If you really want to spent ours of your life to implement such (imo, unnecessary) feature, who am I to stop you? Everyone sees fun differently. Two things to add on this: this will mess the wiki's Google index a bit (Google stores a limited amount of pages for a certain website, so these redirect pages will somewhat affect the visibility of real game articles); to make the work easier/faster I suggest writing a simple program, which would to take next line from a text file, parse it to URL and page text, start URL (opening another tab in your browser), emulate Alt+Shift+E keypress (or your Linux equivalent), wait until the browser window changes its title to "Creating ...", emulate Tab, put the page text into the clipboard (or your Linux equivalent), emulate Ctrl+V, wait a bit and emulate Alt+Shift+S. I used such simple scripts in the past to make a lot of semi-automatic changes (you can even modify pages this way). 10-15 pages at a time and some manual work in stubborn cases. You can also try and find real robots/crawlers on the internet, I prefer to use my own soft when I can help it. --Ngng (talk) 17:19, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

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Hello, again! As I did not receive a PM answer from seapancake (real life is ever so demanding), I wanted to ask an opinion on what should be done with text inside defunct spoiler tags (ex. [ICO]). The spoiler tag stopped working after the latest update "in the name of security", because the plugin was not "maintained recently" ("you did not waste your time on us recently, we will disable your plugin"). The easiest way for me is to remove the block completely and obviously all the information inside will be lost. As an alternative I could copy the contents to the "comments" column (much trickier but can still automated). What do you think? --Ngng (talk) 15:04, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Does the PCSX2 wiki have an equivalent of a {{collapse top}} and {{collapse bottom}} template? TheTechnician27 (talk) 05:17, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

It's a table template with a caption. It won't work in these narrow columns and it would look pretty alien (you can try it yourself). Official Wikimedia never implemented anything hidden or collapsible except for tables with a caption. --Ngng (talk) 07:48, 22 March 2024 (UTC)