Rare wants VPDS media to be back to Wikipedia
All their official citation needs answered in a single quote
There was a time when school kids had to work hard to complete their homework; believe it or not, sometimes we even had to open heavy and thick encyclopaedia volumes to finish properly our writing exercises. Ahhh, good ol’ times…
Who would have told Diderot and d’Alembert back in the XVIII Century that in a couple of seconds you would be able to look up every single piece of information in the Human history: from the complete biography of Jim Carrey to the meaning of the Chandrasekhar limit, and all for free. Wikipedia marked that change.
Of course, Wikipedia has some major problems, and vandalism and inaccurate sources are two of them. It has already been reported how the Axis of Evil (that’s it, the CIA, the Vatican and Microsoft!) have edited or even removed unfavorable content from their entries on the site. And in order to keep an appropiated reliability level, quoting sources is mandatory, of course.
And what does all this have to do with Rare, you wonder… Well, apparently, some admins from Wikipedia have recently removed the complete screenshots gallery from the Viva Piñata DS entry, due to the lack of an official source. But since guys at Rare are smart enough not to edit them back without a trustworthy source supporting the issue, they have asked us to kindly inform you about the following:
“Rare acknowledges the screenshots that previously appeared on Wikipedia were taken from the upcoming Viva Piñata game that is set to be released on Nintendo DS in 2008. They are an accurate representation of the game in development (in as much as they’re screenshots - the clue’s in the name) and so we’d really like to see them back up there,” Rare’s community manager, George Kelion, told MundoRare. Charming!
That’s it, maybe the reference that somebody needed out there. In the meantime, you can always check them out in our own VPDS gallery, while hoping that our growing Rarepedia doesn’t crash the Wikipedia success!
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Our readers say...
By nifboy
It basically boils down to: Wikipedia doesn’t allow fair-use image galleries. There are two ways around this: One is to only use one or two images in an appropriate context of the article. The other, which is more ideal, is for Rare to release screenshots of their game(s) under a free-use license (allowing republication, derivative use, and commercial reuse). This can be done if Rare sends an email to Wikimedia’s OTRS system (see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:OTRS )
Ubisoft has done this (see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Avatar/Ubisoft )
By Jacoplane
This is being discussed here, by the way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games
By Xmooth
I think that Mr Kelion found it quite useful! So thanks for the feedback!
By Angryaztec
“It has already been reported how the Axis of Evil (that’s it, the CIA, the Vatican and Microsoft!) have edited or even removed unfavorable content from their entries on the site”
Add to the “axis of evil” every single entity/person/country/thing that has been mentioned in Wikipedia. Especially when other people alter the content to make someone or something look bad or use false information.
Yet you make it sound like it’s a rarity that the content gets altered by whoever is mentioned in the site. Hell, it happens all the time. What would you do if mundorare had content that said that every staff member is a MS fanboy? Such a lie couldn’t go unpunished, riiight? LOL
By Xmooth
Hey, Angryaztec, it was just a joke 
I thought it was funny that the CIA, the Vatican and Microsoft (all of them big ‘organizations’ in different ‘areas’) were all in the same sentence in the article from ZD Net Asia that I found when I was doing some research, and I decided to use it (but linking them as the source). In fact, Mr Kelion did read this article before I published it, and he didn’t mention anything about that part, so I thought it was ok.
Otherwise, an article just saying “hey, guys, Rare want those screenshots back” would have been quite boring, don’t you think?
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By Masem
FWIW, Wikipedia promotes “free” (as in thought) content. Video game screenshots, in general, are not free (this is non-free, fair use) and the Wikipedia Foundation has set specific guidelines for non-free image use to comply with copyright law. Generally, this means galleries of non-free game screenshots are inappropriate.
This is not to say the screenshots can’t be used. Ubisoft has already granted WP an exception for their game materials to be reproduced freely. All someone at Rare needs to do is to contact the OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) and let the volunteers know they are willing to extend a free license for the image’s use on Wikipedia. Then like the Ubisoft screenshots, a special exemption will be set up, the images will be tagged as free, and the gallery can be restored. Details how to do this can be found at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:OTRS (Note that Rare has to do this, so if you have good contacts with Rare, please forward this — WP would love to have Rare’s images as contributions)