User talk:Mike O'Brien/Archive/2009b

Proposal for accepting suggestions and feedback, part 2

Hey all,

Thanks for all your input. I’m going to archive the first part of this thread and replace it with what I hope is a fair summary of the issues.

• ArenaNet is ready and willing to work with the community to bring the community’s suggestions and feedback to our designers.
• All existing suggestions on this wiki were posted under a license which prevents ArenaNet from collecting and considering them. There is no possible solution where these suggestions can be considered by ArenaNet without involvement from the original contributors to resubmit their suggestions under a different license.
• There are other types of web sites besides wikis which can be used to collect feedback. Wikis may be the right long-term solution for collecting some types of feedback and not the right long-term solution for other types. Regardless, wikis are what we have today.
• Thus, ArenaNet proposed a change to wiki license terms that would enable us to start using this wiki to collect suggestions and feedback.
• Because ArenaNet’s proposal can’t retroactively fix the license on old suggestions, ArenaNet’s proposal assumes that the wiki community can scrub old suggestions from the wiki. Due to the large size of this wiki, that may be infeasible.
• ArenaNet’s proposal, and any proposal which impacts the license terms of this wiki, also raises concerns about compatibility with other wikis:
  • If suggestions and feedback on this wiki are not licensed under GFDL, that makes it impossible to copy that text from this wiki to other GFDL wikis. Gordon Ecker and poke proposed that this could be solved by a wording change to the license.
  • If the license requires contributors who post suggestions and feedback to assign ownership to ArenaNet, that makes it difficult for people to copy text from other GFDL wikis to this wiki, except when the contributor is the original author or when the text contains no suggestions and feedback.
• In the discussion, people floated the idea of having new license terms apply only to some types of suggestions and feedback. This didn’t work because it creates a large burden on designers to understand what types of suggestions and feedback are safe.
• In the discussion, people floated the idea of having new license terms apply to only certain pages or namespaces. Various versions of this idea strike different balances between convenience, understandability, and administrative burden.
• In the discussion, people floated the idea of having ArenaNet start a separate wiki for suggestions and feedback.
• No solution is perfect. If we accept nothing less than perfection, what we will have is nothing.

Gordon Ecker posted a chart of available options, which I’ll summarize and update here.

• Option 1: Take no action.
  • Pros: Preserves compatibility with other GFDL wikis; no scrubbing required; no policing required.
  • Cons: ArenaNet can accept no suggestions or feedback.
• Option 2: Modify ArenaNet’s proposal to increase GFDL compatibility, and apply it to the entire wiki.
  • Pros: Users can post feedback anywhere; easy to understand.
  • Cons: Requires a full scrub of the wiki; makes it difficult to copy content from other GFDL wikis to this one.
• Option 3: New license terms apply only ArenaNet namespace and ArenaNet employee talk pages, or to some other select set of pages.
  • Pros: Preserves compatibility with other GFDL wikis for the rest of the wiki.
  • Cons: Arbitrary distinction is difficult for users and designers to deal with; incompatible with the proposal that users should post suggestions in their own userspace; difficult for the community to police.
• Option 4: ArenaNet creates a separate feedback wiki.
  • Pros: Preserves compatibility of this wiki with other GFDL wikis; no scrubbing required; easy to understand.
  • Cons: There would potentially be two sets of user pages; the community would need to police two wikis.

I met with the Live and Community teams here at ArenaNet to discuss these options. No option is perfect, and we understand that. Of the available options, we’re quite skeptical about option #3 because of its potential for confusion. And obviously we'd be sad to see option #1; that's a last resort. Either of the other options work for us. We’re willing to setup a separate feedback wiki if that turns out to be the best solution.

--Mike O'Brien 22:52, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Just a side note, the Arenanet namespace likely contains a lot of suggestions, for example on the dev update talk pages, so using that namespace would involve significant deletion. This may be a feasible level of deletion. People have talked about "archiving" existing suggestions, but I don't know how comfortable you would be with telling staff to ignore archives as unusable considering you don't wish to restrict them to one namespace at the moment, so deletion seems to be the only viable option. If the #3 option is selected I would recommend creating a new namespace (Feedback namespace or something), then nothing needs to be deleted and it could be filled PURELY with feedback under an appropriate license. I don't really understand the difficulty in restricting developers to harvesting that namespace, but I don't work for ArenaNet. People could still refer developers to that name space on their talk pages. You said that, "ArenaNet is ready and willing to work with the community to bring the community’s suggestions and feedback to our designers", does that mean some deletion/sorting/maintainance of the feedback sections wherever it ends up would be done by ArenaNet staff? I ask because the previous suggestions section became too large for the community to effectively manage, which led to the current move of suggestions into the user space. Largely this exponential growth occurred because the community is unable to accept/reject suggestions so old suggestions are never "finished" and the number of suggestions continues to grow forever. Misery 23:12, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

What happened to the idea of treating suggestions as wiki pages? and having a format for that?75.165.115.205 23:16, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

A note to option 3: we could make it so suggestions within the ArenaNet and user spaces fall under the new license. This would allow other wikis to copy stuff from us and the other way around (especially the bits about the wiki organization and the content about the game itself, since those are within the GWW and the main spaces) while also allowing the idea that users would post their suggestions within their userspace. It's also easier to tell apart an mainspace article from an userpage than telling apart Linsey's talk page from my talk page. Erasculio 23:22, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Mike, do options 2 and 3 actually include the multi-licensing part? Also a simple notice like this (of course much prettier; this was just an example) wouldn't make it very hard for you to determine if a page is actually "safe" or not. Or another possibility would be to add some magic word to the wiki parser (like __ANET__) which then changes the visibility of the page in a different way - for example by making the background of that page different, as it is done with some namespaces on mediawiki.org (the Help namespace for example is marked differently as it is public domain, and the project pages are in a different background color too). Instead of limiting such things to a namespace, such a simple magic word could implement that it works for individual pages. And then I don't think it will be very hard to see what page is "safe" and what not. poke | talk 23:49, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Trouble is, a magic-worded page might be easy to recognise, but how does one find that page in the first place? There would need to be an easy way of knowing where to go to find feedback, in which case, we might as well limit them to a namespace or user pages. I do think it's a good idea to have some obvious visual clue as to which pages are feedback pages and which aren't, but I think it'd have to be done in addition to an organisational structure. --Mme. Donelle 01:31, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

*Shakes Fist at all Lawyers everywhere*. Thanks for the thoughtful write-up though Mike/Liveteam, it reads as more than just a token gesture. Personally I like Option4, that or a legally-bound committee-community that basically does the same function AND weeds out all the unpolished proposals. --ilr 23:52, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Well I vote for option 4. (Terra Xin 01:52, 18 April 2009 (UTC))

I'd vote for option 3 if it was made impossible to move articles from the said namespace to the rest of the wiki and vice versa. (Terra Xin 02:04, 18 April 2009 (UTC))

I would go with option 4 Mike. There are plenty of us here who would be willing to maintain a separate wiki that the suggestions were housed in. --Shadowphoenix 03:04, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Option 4 - I would agree that the number of concerned players/wiki users ensures that there are enough bodies to maintain a separate wiki structure. Anything done to alleviate this issue, however, would be appreciated. One of the great things about GW is the great sense that we as players get that our input is gladly accepted and considered (a thing unheard of in most gaming circles.) It makes it just as much our world as ArenaNet's. We all feel we have a real part in it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Terryn Deathward (talk • contribs) at 14:50, April 18, 2009 (UTC).

My apologies if this was discussed previously, as I just found out about this issue/discussion. MediaWiki is open source, so you can create add-ons to the software. Other wikis have different tabs at the top, so what about exploiting that? A new "tab" could be added so you have "Page", "Discussion", and "Feedback", and the licence ammended so as to release anything on the feedback page differently. (You could probably even include a note to this effect at the top of every feedback page automatically....) The feedback pages would be empty when the licence is changed, so nothing would be affected by it. Pros: Keep the old wiki content, no separate adminstrative issues. Cons: Development of code for a new tab/finding an implementation. -- Lord Ehzed 00:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

I Would happily/be honored, infact, to re-submit my suggestions under a different license if that means ArenaNet wants to use it. I am sure players who care enough to submit suggestions would do the same. Those who do not come here that often to know of this issue, probably would not take the trouble to suggest anything. Hence I think we need to put up a notice banner on the welcoming page informing visitors of the a new place for suggestions/feedbacks so that they may register and sign a new set of terms and condition and to please move their suggestions over to the new place. I guess Option 4 it is IMHO. Option Pumpkin Pie, the next time any user log onto the wiki, ready a pop up of new terms and conditions for signing and include the new licensing terms for us to sign? Pumpkin pie

Resubmitting your suggestions under a different license doesn't mean Anet wants to use your suggestions, just that they are able to use them if they so desire while still being sure that they wholly own every last detail of the game, and it can not be copied/resold by others. calor (talk) 20:43, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Question

dose this ban on no suggestions apply to changes to skills and things that are already in the game?75.165.115.205 22:48, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

There isn't a "ban" - ArenaNet currently just can't use/comment on the feedback. If you mean about the suggestion pages restructuring (which was up on the sitenotice for a month or so), please read that page - it's quite clear. -- Brains12 \ talk 23:24, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

no i didnt mean that other page. what i mean is if you suggest a change (to like a skill) is that not going to get commented on as well? 75.165.115.205 23:38, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

With the current licensing situation, yes. poke | talk 12:12, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

dose it apply to external websites as well?75.165.115.205 04:51, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Option 3

I'm making a new section because this is gonna be long, and I don't want it and comments to it to get buried in walls of text, nor to accidentally bury anything else.

I understand your skepticism toward option 3, but if we can come up with a sufficiently clear division between what is licensed to Anet and what is GFDL, and we make sure the line between the two covers everywhere the devs would sensibly be able to find feedback, I hope you aren't ruling it out completely? Certainly a division that is arbitrary and ill-defined would help neither ArenaNet's ability to know what you can use, nor would it help other wikis trying to adhere to proper licensing terms. I think I speak for most people when I say we're willing to concede the grey-area to Anet's side, so long as we don't have to worry about the slightly off-white being taken with it.

By and large, the ArenaNet namespace (and its associated talk) is where most feedback takes place (it's already where bug reports and skill feedback are, and up until recently was where suggestions were). I think everyone's agreed that anything anywhere in there should be considered feedback and licensed accordingly, since that's the whole point of the namespace. If need be, we could probably scrub the whole namespace and start it fresh when the new license takes effect, since everything prior aside from some formatting and organization is useless anyway.

I'm going to make a quick list of everywhere I can think of that gets feedback for Anet of some sort or kind:

• ArenaNet and ArenaNet talk namespaces (includes:)
  • Bug reports
  • Localization pages
  • Skill feedback
  • Dev updates talk
• Staff talk pages (and subpages)
• Game updates talk¹
• Suggestion pages and associated talk pages²

For Game updates talk, I think we could easily move that into ArenaNet namespace. I recall we even discussed doing so when we first got the ArenaNet namespace, but I think we didn't have a compelling reason to do so at the time.

Suggestion pages, as of the moment, are in userspace. They may wind up back in ArenaNet namespace, but I don't think they will ever be anywhere but one of those two namespaces. Certainly they aren't going to go into the main namespace, which is the one we primarily want to be careful of incompatibilities for.

Sometimes someone will make a comment on a random talk page (the Main Page, the Community Portal, a skill's talk page, occasionally even HELP:GAME), but in general the community asks that the comment be moved to a more appropriate place anyway, and I don't expect that the devs normally keep an eye on these pages.

This all leads to my question and my suggestion. My question is, is there anywhere else, not mentioned above, that Anet staff look on the wiki for feedback? My suggestion is that we use the licensing terms you've suggested, as you worded them, except limited to ArenaNet:, ArenaNet_talk:, User:, and User_talk: namespaces and images which are used/linked there. We move the game updates pages to the ArenaNet: namespace, we make a big, highly visible and clear tag for suggestions pages and user talk archives which have stuff from before the license change (only removable if all previous contributors agree, and we'll make sure that's enforced), you trust the community to keep feedback for you guys out of places where you can't use it, and you guys go ahead and use/comment on any feedback that isn't prominently marked "No, don't use this!"

I know that's both asking for a lot of self-policing from the community, and asking for a lot of trust from Anet that we don't accidentally get you into a jam, but for the most part the tricky part is going to be the transition period (say the first month or so), which is also going to be when concerned community is going to be most attentive to keeping everything where it should be. I think it could work. - Tanetris 01:09, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

The problem I see with option 3 is that with sections that have been marked off, you can't even move stuff between the marked sections and the rest of the wiki because they are under different licenses. So what's going to happen when someone accidentally moves an article into the wrong place, and Anet use it? That's a risk. (Terra Xin 02:02, 18 April 2009 (UTC))

If something isn't feedback and gets moved from one to the other, no problem, it's not feedback, therefore it's still GFDL regardless of namespace.

If something is feedback and was originally created in the ArenaNet or User namespaces and someone moves it to some other namespace, it's licensed to Anet per the original contribution and just needs to be moved back where it belongs.

If something is feedback and originally created outside the ArenaNet or User namespaces and the original author (assuming one author) moves it to ArenaNet or User, they're consenting to the licensing to Anet terms of that namespace.

The only problem is if it's feedback created outside the ArenaNet or User namespaces and someone other than the original author (or one author without the agreement of the others when there are multiple authors) moves it, in which case either we delete it as a copyvio, or we tag it as unusable until the original author(s) agrees to the licensing. Keeping in mind that the sort of people who move other people's pages where they belong are also the sort of people who keep up to date on the rules, and given the number of RC stalkers we have around for anything that slips through the cracks, I don't see this as a problem. - Tanetris 02:27, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Unless you are also suggesting we delete everything currently in the user and user talk spaces, what you suggest would be illegal. The bit about moving update talk would certainly be. Backsword 10:56, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

I really agree with you on that, Tanetris; and my comment from above is directly related to this as it would allow to just make the ArenaNet and ArenaNet talk namespace be explicitely for ANet and allow other pages, wherever they are, to be marked as ANet content as well. poke | talk 12:20, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

You have misunderstood something, Backsword. Likely the fact that the license would apply to all future feedback contributions to those namespaces, and anything made before would be clearly tagged as unusable unless/until all previous contributors agree to the new licensing. Moving the update pages (and therefore their associated talk pages) to the ArenaNet namespace would be so that the talk pages of future updates would be in that namespace; previous update talk pages would be tagged as unusable the same as old suggestion pages. Please try to understand what's being suggested before making accusations.

That aside, there would never be a need to wipe the entire user and user talk spaces, as the original proposed license change (which we'd be keeping, just with the clarification that it only applies to certain namespaces) only affects contributions which are deemed to be feedback, and there's plenty of things in user and user talk that would never qualify as feedback under even the loosest interpretation. - Tanetris 17:30, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

I understood you perfectly Tanetris. But the fact is, no tag we place could retroactivly change the license used on previous material. Since placing such tags would constitute editing the material, that in itself would be a violation. I guess we could place them before, but that means we would have to tag every page in those userspaces and prohibit removal in everycase where the page contains material derived from more than one editor and those ditors have not allowed it. That would include transcluded material. As we can't practicly do that, the wiki would soon be in an illegal state. Backsword 18:31, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

The tag wouldn't be retroactively changing the license, nor trying to. The tag would be marking the page as unsafe for Anet to use feedback from it. Adding the tag itself, since it's not feedback, would be GFDL just like every other non-feedback contribution, so I do not understand what your problem is with tagging before the change vs after. If you have a legitimate concern in there somewhere, I have no earthly idea what it is, so I'd like to ask that you reread my proposal, reread Mike's originally proposed submission language and terms of use, and then try to express your concern(s) as clearly as possible. - Tanetris 19:34, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

My reading is that anything that is part of feedback would constitute feedback. And no, I will not reread anything. Backsword 20:32, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Would it be possible to have a combination of this idea and the "users maintain their own suggestions in their own space" idea? Like, a user gets a subspace within the new namespace or Arenanet:Suggestion/<username>? So, a user would have to be registered to have a place in the namespace and would have to maintain their own suggestions there, but as it's within a "safe" namespace it would be easier for Devs to not get confused? --JonTheMon 14:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

That would be one possibility if we go with the namespace as a seperate area idea. We would do the same with templates. I could possibly mock up a sort of pseduo category with DPL. No posibility of images, tho'. Backsword 15:00, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

@Backsword: I'm taking your refusal to either better understand the proposal or expand on/clarify your objection despite it being shown to have no grounds whatsoever to mean that you withdraw your objection.

@JonTheMon: It's certainly an interesting idea, and would allow both keeping things to the ArenaNet namespace as well as having the personal responsibility for your own suggestions that the restructuring sought. Yes, it would be compatible with this licensing proposal, as the wording remains broad within the confines of ArenaNet and User namespaces (and associated talk namespaces), so that as long as we keep to one (or both) of those namespaces, we can organize it however we want and reorganize it in the future if need be without having to revisit license language. - Tanetris 19:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Option No. 5: in game feedback collection

← moved to User_talk:HH_LEADER

← moved to User_talk:HH_LEADER

I disagree with the move.

Firstly, there is no licencing issue with using by the company of what they already have developed, because as it turned out there was nothing new in what I was proposing. And since it is not 'a new idea per se' and channel is already in a game then nothing can prevent the company from using it for different purpose.

Secondly, because the company cannot comment on it does not mean that it cannot be posted here. I specifically said that company does not need to comment.

Thirdly, I don't see why someone takes the liberty of moving my post twice from this talk page without being asked by the owner of the talk page and withot my permission to move it to my talk page creating 2 duplicate topics on my talk page. Isn't it against the policy? Where is the policy says that something like this can be done? If this is allowed, should I expect all my posts being moved soon to my talk page? Would you stop at nothing Erasculio? HH LEADER talk 13:02, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

You want it to be moved trice then? oh wait, it already was.... Seriously, forcing your idea won't solve anything, it just detracts from the problem. Oh, and you wrote it, so it can be moved to YOUR talk page. — Poki#3 18:10, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Naturally, all the postings need to be moved to the talk pages of their respective contributors. Please allow for certain time to execute your request and let me know whose postings I should start with first. HH LEADER talk 05:48, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Question 2

I posted this question yesterday, but now the section is archived and Wyn's answer never actually addressed the question itself. Why is a license needed to share ideas? It's stupid. Ideas cannot be owned. Only the particular expression of an idea. Has it ever occurred to you that the lawyers only make money when those lawsuits about copywrong do happen? So the laws are written in such a way as to make them near inevitable. It's why most of our politicians are lawyers. Don't listen to your legal team blindly. Just because they may say something has to be done a certain way doesn't mean it can't be done another way. --Axwind 12:56, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Easy: This wiki is licensed under the GFDL. GFDL however requires that all derivatives are licensed under the GFDL too. So if we post suggestions or ideas for GW(2), and license them under the GFDL, and then ANet wants to use them in their games, they would have to license the games under the GFDL, too. And that just doesn't work. poke | talk 13:10, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

You're quite right that (under US copyright law) ideas themselves are not subject to copyright and therefore licensing for the ideas themselves is a moot point in general. However, there are things like community localization (specifically mentioned in Mike's original post), text corrections, suggestions that include particulars of dialogue, etc, in which Anet would not just want to use the idea but also the expression of the idea (or some derivative thereof), which is covered by copyright. In that case, the licensing would be necessary, and since none of the staff active on the wiki are (to my knowledge) copyright lawyers, it's much easier to make sure they can use as much or as little of the feedback as they want, rather than have to go to the legal team for each particular case and ask where the distinction between idea and expression of idea lays. As Mike has said a few times, we don't want to put the burden on the devs to figure out what's safe and what's not. Does that make sense? - Tanetris 20:29, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

What I meant was, why is all this rigmarole necessary? Why does a wiki and the ideas on it have to be licensed in the first place? And why does the community use a licensed wiki if it causes such headaches? Can't they make their own open source one instead? Sorry for all the questions but this is the first wiki I've ever been a part of and I'm still learning how they work. --Axwind 00:08, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Some form of license is necessary to avoid certain legal risks. If wiki contributors don't agree to some form of license when they make their contributions, it would leave the wiki and ArenaNet vulnerable to copyright infringement lawsuits, because a contributor would not automatically grant other editors permission to make derivative works (later edits to an article), and I believe that contributors could probably retract permission to host their contributions. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 02:00, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) I think your questions boil down to why is this happening now? Long story short, no one really thought about it. When GWW was conceived, it wasn't intended or considered as the vehicle for suggestions or primary contact with the devs and community team that it's become. History lesson! Once upon a time, there was something called GuildWiki (perhaps you've heard of it. It still exists, but it's not what it once was), and the folks at Anet thought this was an awesome way to document Guild Wars, and they wanted to host it and even integrate it into the game's help. After some discussion with the lawyers, they determined they couldn't do that because GuildWiki is licensed cc-by-nc-sa (Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, The NonCommercial bit was the sticking point), they'd have to make their own starting fresh, which they invited the community of GuildWiki to come over to. So after some more discussions with the lawyers and with the GuildWiki admins of the time (who became GWW's first admins), they settled on a license that was similar to GuildWiki's license, but allowed them to use it for commercial purposes. For a long time (maybe a year?), when people made suggestions on the wiki (usually Gaile's talk page), we directed them to the fanforums, as that's where Gaile said the community team looked for them. Eventually it was decided that the standard "go post on the forums" response wasn't cutting it, as the officialness of the wiki, the activeness of Gaile and a few other Anet staff on it, and dissatisfaction with unresponsiveness made the wiki quite attractive to suggestion-givers. So Gaile set up a separate talk page in her userspace just for people who wanted to make suggestions. Eventually this grew, spread, and evolved into the ArenaNet namespace. As the ArenaNet namespace kept growing and getting harder and harder to keep organized and was getting little to no response from Anet's side, particularly spurred by Izzy's talk page and the Ursan talk page (pre-nerf) getting completely out of control, the community presented Anet with a list of questions regarding if and how they used the various feedback from the wiki. That was back in August. In the meantime, of course, the community got tired of waiting and decided to take some actions with the ArenaNet namespace (the suggestion restructuring), and then a week ago, presumably after a lot of talks with the lawyers, Mike posted what he posted, and you know the rest.

So we've been winging it, basically, and apparently not well. Why have a license at all, rather than automatically releasing into the public domain or even turning the rights over to Anet? Mike could answer that question better than I can, as he was actually part of those discussions, but I'd speculate so that contributors could still feel that their contribution is theirs, not something just anyone can use without giving them credit and not something Anet is trying to "steal" from them. Besides, GuildWiki had one. Why did GuildWiki have a license? I wasn't there back in the day, but I'd speculate largely because Wikipedia did. It's "how things are done" on wikis. I apologize for this being long and rambly, but hopefully that clears up some of your confusion.

Rigmarole is a cool word. - Tanetris 02:42, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

That does clear some things up guys, thanks. But what happens if a user gives a suggestion and gives Anet clear permission to use it and implement it in the game in whatever way works best and makes no personal claim to the suggestion, caring only that it is in some way done? --Axwind 03:13, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

There is no clear way of doing that in a way that would alleviate the lawyers' concerns on a GFDL licensed wiki. Attribution is required for anything submitted in any later forms. So, ArenaNet would have to keep absolutely complete records of who's suggestions they used and add credits in game (that list of stuff that scrolls by when you beat a campaign). With the way suggestions have been set up in the past, especially those in the ArenaNet namespace, they were edited and changed by many people, some who were registered users, and many who were not. This alone would make it virtually impossible for ArenaNet to record who did what in any kind of meaningful way. -- Wyn 00:38, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Multi-licensing

So, is this idea dead? I've been reading this discussion for some time, and to me it seemed like an incredibly conveniant solution. Yea, it would require us to delete the old suggestions, but we were planning to do that anyway. With a multi-license, we could easily revamp the original suggestion pages, forcing people to use templates and stuff, and strict format guidelines. And it's not that hard to direct people posting suggestions on talk pages to the suggestion page, right? I mean, we're doing pretty well on the Help namespace, I suppose keeping suggestions in line wouldn't prove so much more difficult, if it's done right straight from the start. I'd love to see the following happen: we accept a multi-license of some sort, then write a very clear and strict policy on the suggestion pages, and all be fine? I myself would rather keep suggestions on this wiki instead of another one, but that's an option too, I suppose. — Why 16:25, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

The problem with that idea is that feedback is currently seeded all over the wiki in such a way that simply deleting it all, is far from simple and in my opinion impossible. It would involve deleting every talk page in order to be safe and many user pages/most pages outside of the mainspace. It's just not possible to crawl every page on this wiki to check if it has feedback on and tag it for deletion. Go check the statistics special page to see why. Misery 16:57, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't know why people are always coming up with the "delete all old" thing? Whatever we decide about the new license, either it is completely compatible to the old or it just applies to new contributions, in which case we have to mention the date somewhere that the former contributions were contributed under a different licensing. poke | talk 18:01, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, poke, but that's just wrong. Any license compatible with GFDL would contain a Share Alike clause, which is exactly what Mike et al wants to avoid. And the issue with designers not being able to check the dates (not everyone has your wiki skills), makes the second an impossibility. Not to mention the work normal editors ignoring it would cause us. Backsword 18:20, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, about the first part that was what I was getting on. Changing the license but keeping it compatible won't work. And whatever the designers want or don't want to do, it will be exactly like that. The new license only applies to contributions that were made after the change; and it is totally uninteresting what users think or can do, but it won't be possible to not have to separate the old and new contribtions. poke | talk 18:35, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Then I don't understand what you had against Miserys statement. Backsword 18:40, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Where did you get the idea from that I have something against Misery's comment? My comment was just about the general "we have to delete everything" idea some people seem to persist in. poke | talk 18:42, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

My mistake then. You placing a related negative comment directly after his gave me that impression. Obviously, we only have to delte things in some scenarios. Backsword 18:47, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Regarding multi-licensing, if ArenaNet owned all new suggestions under option 2 or option 3, would releasing those suggestions under the GFDL impose any obligations or restriction on ArenaNet with regards to their own derivative works of those sugestions? In other words, what restrictions, if any, does the GFDL impose on the copyright holder. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 21:58, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

None, unless you also transfer the rights to the FSF, something they would like you to do, but which you are under no obligation to. Backsword 22:01, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Is there a big enough loss in scrubbing everything from all the old talk pages to not do it? I don't mean checking each individual page for feedback - deleting all of it. I would prefer some kind of archive for all the old talk page content but it just seems like a simple solution which will effectively enable Arena Net to look ANYWHERE on the wiki and harvest feedback. Pages like Fort Aspenwood:Talk contain feedback but the reason it was put there was to try and get something changed. Any user space content deleted can be re-uploaded using the new licence. I am under the impression that Mike wants the devs to be able to look anywhere on the wiki and feel safe to implement any suggestion they read there. Even if we created a new wiki for feedback pages like Fort Aspenwood wouldn't exist there and any suggestions on it wouldn't be able to be read. Old suggestions are useless and the only vital content on the wiki is on the article page not the talk page anyway. This seems like the cleanest solution imo. "either it is completely compatible to the old" - I was under the impression this was not possible as the old content was submitted under a different license, "or it just applies to new contributions" - didn't Mike say this idea was undesirable because it then makes it possible for a dev to read a discussion on the wiki which isn't under the new license, increasing the work load of an already busy person to check every single thing they read.I have no problem with option 2 even if it means losing all talk pages and having to resubmit user content. I'd rather see option 2 than any of the others. 122.105.107.182 06:10, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

The attribution clause of the GFDL prevents an automated talk page wipe. Some talk pages are used to provide attribution after merges, or to work on drafts for article changes, preventing them from being deleted without providing attribution elsewhere. Also, I suspect that, because talk pages are often used to discuss article changes, articles may count as derivative works of their talk pages, if so, they would also require attribution to be provided elsewhere if they were deleted. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 07:43, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

As Gordon says. In addition, feedback is not only on talk, so for both reasons we would have to delte all material on the wiki. Backsword 11:04, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

OK, so what are we discussing still... the consensus is that archiving talk pages is an impossible task, and Mike rolled out 2 other options. That only leaves us with "make another wiki". We're going in circles with this, let's move on, because this looks to me like a waste of time :/ — Poki#3 16:20, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

(RI)We'll its been narrowed down to options 3 and 4. I got my hand on option 4 because then we can work on everything (and EVERYTHING) from scratch. Let's work on getting some consensus going. :) (Terra Xin 05:15, 20 April 2009 (UTC)) (Terra Xin 05:15, 20 April 2009 (UTC))

I only meant deleting ArenaNet:Suggestions/* pages, which has been done. Why would we need to delete stuff from talk pages? I doubt ANet would bother to scout out talk pages for ideas when we could just list them on a suggestion page with a clear policy. But hey, I haven't involved myself in this discussion before, so I might be saying a lot of stupid things which have been brought up long ago. Consider my question answered. :P — Why 14:38, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

What's wrong with Option 4?

Now that we know it is a possibility, what are the downsides of Option 4? I mean, I see a lot of discussion about Option 2, 3, and Option Not-Listed-But-Should-Be, but, if there is nothing wrong with Option 4, and Mike and Team are willing to do it, why not just go with Option 4? Is there a downside to Option 4 that I am not seeing? (Satanael 22:37, 19 April 2009 (UTC))

I'd prefer option 4 or another incarnation of it to be honest. An official forum would be the best as I said somewhere. Auron said it too because I am his parrot. Misery 22:39, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

I also would prefer a completely new site, forum would be better, but if wiki is what ArenaNet will provide, I'd be fine with that as well. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I believe it would be the least painful, and would not mean recreating the wheel, since the user database could be shared, so people wouldn't even have to reregister, a majority of the administrative policies could be grandfathered, as well as the admins, (at least to start with). Elections could then be held to get a group of sysops who want to specifically deal with suggestions and handling feedback. All feedback/suggestions here could be deleted (to prevent mass copy/pasting), and we could simply link the ArenaNet portal here to there. The proposed licensing changes could be installed there from the beginning, and as long as people were vigilant in stopping things from being directly copied over I think it would work.-- Wyn 22:51, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

There is no copy issue with O4 that doesn't exist with every other alternative. Backsword 22:57, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

O3 and O4 are really just variants of the same solution: create a seperate space for feedback. Given the undesirability of O1 and the practical impossiblity of O2, that is what I assume would be prefered.

While there are many problems associated with treating one namespace as a seperate site, I can see two with a seperate wiki. The first is that we would have to agree on an foundational policy, an issue that has been painful in the past. The other is the oft repeated doubt that Anet would want to run yet another wiki. Backsword 22:57, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, Mike has already indicated in his summary above that they ARE in fact willing to set up a separate wiki. -- Wyn 00:40, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Option 4 would be safer than option 3, at the cost of higher maintenance. (Terra Xin 01:23, 20 April 2009 (UTC))

For the copy issue, isn't a bot possible? Forgive me if I am mistaken, but I think Wikipedia has bots that google text in search of copyright issues, couldn't we have something similar for the feedback wiki? That's just a thought, I actually have no idea if it's even possible...(Satanael 03:35, 20 April 2009 (UTC))

Those bots will generally find copyright issues for newly created articles on wikipedia. I don't know if its possible either, but in situations where feedback is edited constantly, the bot would have to do checks for every edit made, not just on a new article. (Terra Xin 05:08, 20 April 2009 (UTC))

Option 4 is best. That way there is no confusion that is part of 2/3. Plus really this wiki was not designed to be for feedback (we all bump into each other). Having a separate feedback wiki would be great as its less confusing, better design, and less of a chore. Dominator Matrix 05:36, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The problem I have with a separate wiki is part of the benefit it gives. We have to start from zero and that will be very, very hard. Given that we had lots of policy discussions here about rather unimportant things like the signature policy, or that we have discussed multiple hours about a possible adminship policy on GW2W shows that we will have to face a lot problems on that suggestion wiki, too. Of course, we could simply just grandfather everything, including all policies and all rights and keep them always the same. But that would need to be decided first, and I'm not sure if that will happen.

Also a problem is that it is a separate wiki, with separate namespaces like User, Project and MediaWiki. That means that we have to do a lot things to make it compilant to this one. And we have a separate RecentChanges, probably the worst disadvantage. When RCing here, we don't see what happens there, so we have to check two (three) RecentChanges tabs at once, not really nice imo.

So we are creating a wiki just to use one namespace (the main space probably) there with a new licensing. Personally I would really prefer to have that one namespace on this wiki then, with a separate licensing (which is easy, if we start a new namespace), and when GW2W is ready (whenever that happens) we can move the GW2W suggestions to its own "suggestion namespace". poke | talk 08:21, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I obviously agree with you on your first concern. However, I don't see why you think we would refuse to use more than one namespace on a seperate wiki. Having access to a file and category namespace is one of the great advantages of O4 over O3. Backsword 11:00, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree with poke. Policy discussions are a considerably large issue that will have to be taken care of, plus we will need a team of admins who is willing to policy the new wiki (which isn't that easy - who here would like to have that responsibility?), plus plenty of other administrative issues that will have to be taken care of, plus the time and resources it would require from Arena Net to implement and manage a new wiki.

I favor using a namespace on this wiki, or just using the Guild Wars 2 wiki for that, given how it has already been created and isn't being used for anything right now. We would have an almost empty wiki that is already there and with most of the policies already in place. Erasculio 14:38, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The old issue with using GW2W still stands: not all feedback is about GW2. I don't think anyone is saying there is a magic bullet solution that is the clear winner over the others, the question really is which is the least painful while yeilding the greater result, and right now the community seems to think either O3 or O4 is the least painful, while most agree 04 would yeild either a greater result or the same result as 03. Bearing in mind ANet's skeptisism about O3, which do we think would be the least painful and yield the better result?

IMHO, I think O4 would yeild the better result and be no more painful than O3, we may have to start over in many respects, but there is a significant amount of "infrastructure" in the ANet namespace that could just be cloned over to GWFeedbackW. Also, I would favor grandfathering policies over where possible, and any other policies that could not be grandfathered over would likely have to be fought over in the new O3 namespace anyway. Only other issue I have heard about O4 is the requirement of monitoring 2 or 3 wikis instead of just 1 or 2. That seems to be a little bit of a personal choice. To be perfectly honest, while I am on both wikis, I almost never go to GW2W, and I would hardly say I "police" anything on this one outside of suggestion related stuff. In my case, if we were to go with O4, I would likely spend all my time over there, feedback and interaction with ANet staff is just what interests me more.

Either way we are in for a lot of work and a lot of discussion. There will be issues and problems with whatever we decide to do, in the end I don't really care if it is O4 or O3, but O4 seems to be the best option from what I have seen thus far. (Satanael 15:07, 20 April 2009 (UTC))

My concern about option 4 (uneducated as it may be) is that despite what Mike said about their willingness to have a separate wiki, do they really have the ability? Are they really able to watch & monitor two separate wikis? It seems that sometimes they have enough trouble with just the one. I'd prefer option 4 if this actually isn't an issue. Maybe the "trouble" they appear to have with the one wiki is dealing with suggestions, so moving that to a separate wiki would be beneficial. My 1 1/2 cents. ~Mervil 15:27, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The concern with the GW2 wiki hosting GW1 and GW2 suggestions is IMO the same thing as the GW1 wiki hosting GW1 and GW2 suggestions. I don't think that's a good reason to not have both kinds of suggestion on the GW2 wiki. Erasculio 15:39, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

We are not talking about hosting the suggestions on GW2W; we are either talking about a completely new wiki, or what I mentioned moving the GW2 suggestions to GW2W as soon as that wiki is more lively (if we decide to keep the suggestions here for now).

Backsword: Of course, File and category namespace are helpful, but as we are talking about suggestions there will always be a limited number of required categories (and we didn't have a problem with the additional suggestion categories here); and there is no limit to the number of stored files within the File namespace either, so we could simply use the existing wiki here for that. But by using a new wiki we are wasting additional namespaces, make people put up new userpages, and thus require more policies for a wiki about just one "simple" thing: Suggestions. I mean, we could simply have that namespace then over here as well, and use it as if it was a separate wiki. So there is not really a benefit of a new wiki (with many not required space that still needs to be administratively observed) over the same content inside a existing, and working wiki, when separating that new content strictly from the rest (by having a different licensing).

If we go with a separate and new system for suggestions, then I would rather see a forum or a bug tracking system for suggestions instead of a blank wiki. poke | talk 18:35, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, poke, we probably didn't make this clear enough. There is no technical limit, but for legal reasons we can't mix things with incompatible licenses, and the file namespace would be under GFDL. Thus there is a legal limit. Of zero. Backsword 18:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I still say option 4 is the best for all the legal concerns. Anyone who doesn't want to be involved in the set up and maintenance of it would not have to be. It would provide an overall safe zone for suggestions for both GW and GW2, and the people who are passionate about suggestions could take the responsibility for it. Again, I think that most of the admin policies (signatures, elections, admin) could mostly be grandfathered over, and since the process of creating them seems to be the biggest objection here, if everyone could just agree to keeping them as they are here, no new painful discussions would really need to happen. The only truly new policies that would be required would be for the suggestions themselves, and that's going to have to happen no matter which option is chosen, since there will have to be set rules for suggestion submission, editing, deletion regardless. I find it really amazing that in August, there was a mass cry for suggestions to be moved from GWW completely and now the fight seems to be about how to keep them there. -- Wyn 19:49, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Namespaces are not licensed as a single unit. If that were the case, the file namespace on GWW would already be unusable, as it's already split between GFDL images and ArenaNet-owned images. Similarly, you can categorize things that are not GFDL, else heaven help the Anet images category. Isn't this discussion cluttered enough without representing misinformation as fact? - Tanetris 19:59, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Another issue with O3 which I just realized is that, AFAIK, the overriding consensus is that suggestion creation should occur in userspace (indeed, many suggestions already are in userspace). The reasons for this are many and detailed out in various places, but the point is, if we we go with O3, we will have to either ignore this consensus and go with suggestions being housed in the new namespace, or apply the new license to userspace. True, this same issue would apply to a new wiki, however, in GWW, even if the new licensing were applied to user space, we would still have the problem we have with feedback in other areas of the wiki, i.e., edits made to userspace before a certain date would still be GFDL. Would we have to delete all userspace edits currently made to allow for this?

With O4, ANet would still own our userspace (as I imagine the new license would be applied wiki wide on GWFW), but there would be no issue of when an edit was made or suggestion created.

@Mervil, as best I can tell, the vast majority of the interaction between ANet staff and community members on this wiki is Feedback related in some way. Really this would only be an issue for Linsey, since she's the one who gets all the lore questions (which aren't really feedback). But people like Joe and Gaile and, to a lesser extent, Regina would be concerning themselves almost entirely with the feedback wiki, and so wouldn't have to bother with much of what would go on here on GWW. (Satanael 21:34, 20 April 2009 (UTC))

There is still a lot suggestion-type content within the ArenaNet namespace; not everything is a game suggestion and was affected by the suggestion restructuring idea. Actually most of the suggestions are still there and will probably remain there (for example bug reports and skill discussions). And just because we decided that we want game suggestions in the user space, that doesn't mean that it always have to be like that when the premises change. The suggestion restructuring idea was based on the fact that ArenaNet wasn't really interested in the game suggestions and we, as the community, had alone the work with all those pages. If the licensing changes and we actually can expect active participation of ArenaNet members, I think we can easily try to find a solution that works well and is not limited to the user space. So please do not let that decision influence this more important licensing issue.

Backsword, as Tanetris said it works easily. And I wonder what kind of images will be used for suggestions anyway - screenshots? Oh right, they are ArenaNet content anyway... poke | talk 06:24, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Tanetris is defelcting. Feedback images would be under GFDL, such as concept art for an item someone wants added to either game. (See the design a weapon contest for examples). Nor could we use our many untility icons and other mminor icons. Even screenshots would have to be expluded, for the same reasons photographs of copyrighted works are problematic. Backsword 12:33, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Design-a-weapon contest, as part of the submission was likely giving the idea to Anet. Screenshots, like poke already said, are already Anet property. And the amount of images used for feedback is quite minimal. It just depends on how we word the license and new policies. --JonTheMon 13:07, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely not, Backsword. If we can have a separate licensing for the textual suggestions, we can also simply make some other tag for user submitted graphics that are owned by ArenaNet. And there is no problem with having a text that is licensed so that ArenaNet owns the copyright but still using GFDL images. Nobody says that a text with license X has to use license X compatible templates/icons/images; otherwise all of our articles wouldn't work (we use GFDL text + ArenaNet icons, you remember?). So as Tanetris said, stop representing misinformation as fact. poke | talk 16:58, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

That is ture. But, it was raised before and what we could do is mimic those namespaces. Eg. ArenaNet:User/Username, ArenaNet:Template/Templatename, and so on. Backsword 12:33, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

IMO, there are way too many problems with making a new wiki for suggestions:

1) A wiki can't really handle suggestions. This kind of software is not really fitting for long discussions or for providing feedback over someone else's ideas. The fansite forums and places like NikiWiki or whatever it's called now are better suited technically-wise for this kind of thing. If we are going to point people somewhere else, we might as well point them to those already existing resources than to a wiki that would have many of the problems we already have.

2) Arena Net would have to spend time and resources with the creation of the new wiki that could have been used elsewhere, from improving GW2 to adding more features to this wiki. Using something that already exists as the place for suggestions (forums, this wiki, the GW2 wiki, whatever) would require less resouces.

3) Linsey, Regina and some others would have to spend their time dealing with two wikis. Right now Linsey's talk page is already a sea of text walls she barely has enough time to answer, imagine how bad it would be if she had to pay attention to two talk pages in two different wikis.

4) If most of this community also contributes to the other wiki, we would have people dividing their time between both places, and so contributing less here than they could be doing, especially considering how we will lose time reimplementing policies and etc over there. Not to mention the trouble it will be to policy a whole other website.

5) If most of this community does not move to the other wiki...Then we would have a significant problem. It was mentioned that the "Suggestions Wiki" would be filled with people passionate about suggestions, but unfortunately some of the individuals passionate about suggestions lack common sense (see above). We risk spending all this time discussing something that would fail thanks to incompetent management by users who cannot make a wiki work.

And etc. I would rather send users making suggestions to the already existing fansites, or keep suggestions here and change the appearance of pages with suggestions (by adding something that people could not possibly miss, such as the background being black with white letters) to make it clear which articles are "safe" and which ones aren't. Erasculio 13:25, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Ultimately, I don't care if we go with O3 or O4, but I do still worry that O3 means we would not be able to use usersapce for suggestions. This new license does not solve the maintenance issue for suggestions (I severely doubt that Mike is intending this to be any more than his staff's ability to comment on and use feedback, I certainly hope he is not assigning the time and money to have someone maintain feedback structuring rather than having the community do it, I'm sure this is one of the reasons he prefers doing this on a wiki in the first place). Yes, I do think it is an important issue because it is very difficult to decide where to house suggestions if we don't know how they are going to be administered.

@Erasculio, I'm not going to respond to all 5 of your issues above, some of which I think are valid concerns, some of which have been both raised and responded to above, but I did want to say that I think #5 above amounts to little more than trolling. I don't think that was necessarily your intention, but saying something won't work because it will be run by a bunch of idiots doesn't help anything. In all options above we need to assume the best intentions and capabilities of those involved, otherwise we are only left with O1. (Satanael 16:21, 21 April 2009 (UTC))

Let me put it in another way: this wiki has worked and is thriving, but we do not know if a Suggestions Wiki would work, given how that depends of many different factors. The waste in having an entire new wiki fail and be scrapped is far larger than the waste in having a new section in this wiki to fail and be scrapped. Erasculio 21:49, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

GFDL 1.3

The "or later" clause in the GFDL and the recent GFDL 1.3 clause implemented for Wikipedia to change its licensing terms might be able to be exploited by this wiki in order to change its licensing WITHOUT requiring a scrub. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but GNU.org has a FAQ about it and how it relates to wikis. Reference: [1] --Emkyooess 23:39, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

That provision only allows for the translation to a CC-BY-SA licence. It is a share-alike licence which requires the derivative works (ie. the game, any game documentation) to be released under a licence identical to the original work. This is not really suitable for ArenaNet as it poses many(all?) of the same problems as GFDL1.2 which they are trying to work around with their suggested rewording. Nice idea though. :) --Aspectacle 00:24, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

GFDL 1.3 and Wikipedia's possible merge to CC BY SA is absolutely not related to this problem, as both licenses are compatible (which is the reason for the move). But ArenaNet would still have the redistribution problem that exists with GFDL too. poke | talk 06:18, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Regarding option 3 and something other than namespaces.

A couple of things with regards to the 3rd option summarized above.

• Mike, you say that you don't want to put the designers in a position where some things are "safe" and others are not. The only way to accomplish this is through a fresh site with applicable licensing terms (whether this fresh site is through a complete wipe of the current wiki or through creation of a separate site doesn't matter). There is no other way to accomplish this.

• Thus, if we even want to consider option 3, it means that we're going to have to assume that the designers are okay with being in the position of having to determine what is safe and what is not via some means.

• If we are operating under the assumption that designers will have to be able to tell what is 'safe' and what is not easily, then I suggest that a namespace or namespaces are the not an optimal way to accomplish this. Consider the following:
  1. Non-experienced wiki users don't necessarily understand the namespace concept, and thus might post in the wrong location.
  2. Namespaces have no inherent informational value beyond their name. Any applicable terms would have to be present on a separate page, not necessarily immediately visible to someone reading/editing.
  3. Most namespaces on the wiki are designed around topical organization, thus having namespaces which share topics with other namespaces, but are under different legal terms can be both confusing and prone to accidents when moving pages between namespaces.

• I further suggest that template markers (NOT tied to namespaces) are a much better solution, for the following reasons:
  1. They can be made highly visible on the page(s) in which they are inserted, both for recognition and also for ease of comprehension by non-experienced users.
  2. They can be applied to any content topic.
  3. Their application requires directly editing the page (and thus the editor is fully aware of what they are doing) as opposed to namespaces (in which someone moving a page might not be aware of its content).
  4. Implementation of such a template would not require any excessive amount of content removal/relocation for existing pages.
  5. Implementation of such a template would minimize potential issues with new licensing terms, since the pages to which any new licensing terms would apply would be clearly designated.
  6. For new suggestions, such a template is easy to police; if the template is present on the page all further additions/edits are also licensed under the suggestion-friendly terms. Simply don't allow the template to be added to a page unless all prior authors/editors agree (which in general would work out to not allowing the template to be added to any page with a large number of existing authors/editors - which is fine! New pages can always be created with similar ideas but with the template added).

Since the purpose here is clarity in what is "okay" and what is "not okay", I don't think it's possible, outside of entirely separate sites, to be more clear in what is "okay" than a highly visible notice at the top of the page stating that the author agrees to allow ArenaNet to use the page's content according to non-GFDL terms. (Aiiane - talk - contribs) 01:31, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

The use of templates would also allow easy categorization of suggestions so rather than having to go searching through lots of different places, devs could simply go to the specific category and know that everything in that category was safe. (I know it sounds like I'm talking from both sides of my mouth considering I'm a proponent of a new site but I thought this should at least be noted). -- Wyn 02:23, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Once again, they could only go in the category and know that everything in the category was considered safe by whoever categorized it. People have copied and pasted entire articles from GuildWiki hundreds of times, and I suspect that most of the people who did it honestly believed it wouldn't pose any legal problems, and people frequently include their email addresses on the various help pages despite the huge floating red warning box. Someone could plausibly slap a template on a suggestion page under the mistaken assumption that every suggestion page is supposed to have it, or copy and paste a suggestion from a user subpage without proper attribution (for example a suggestion with multiple editors could have been copied and pasted to a user's subpage, and that user could have forgotten that it was collaboratively edited). -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 04:02, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Also, don't read me wrong here. Personally, I'd be in favor of a new site as well (that didn't use the wiki codebase). However, from what I've gathered a non-wiki site wouldn't be something that could happen immediately, hence my consideration of other alternatives. (Aiiane - talk - contribs) 02:39, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, Gordon, no matter what we do, that's a possibility, so if you are going to just continue to bash every single option we have, I say we should simply delete all the suggestions, and feedback, etc, pretty much the entire ArenaNet namespace since it's all pointless. WTF ever happened to AGF? I mean, as YOU have pointed out time and time again through out this discusssion, there is nothing at all stopping someone from copy/pasting wholesale from someplace not safe. I personally don't care two hoots about suggestions/feedback here, other than the fact it is eating up huge amounts of time that could be spent on things that would actually further the purpose of this wiki which is to document the game. However, I am just one voice, and there are many here that do care very much about the suggestion/feedback area and are trying very hard to come up with a way we can make it work. Stop being a continually negative voice in the discussion. -- Wyn 04:30, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the problems I mentioned were exclusive to option 3, I should have been clearer. I was just trying to point out that there is no perfect solution to avoid the consequences of human error, only precautions which can reduce the risks, such as templates and categorization. I have a habit of clarifying generalizations with more precise explanations, I usually focus on the points which I am attempting to clarify and don't worry about offending anyone (which works fine in non-contentious discussions, but is a really bad habit in contentious discussions like this one). -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 06:05, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I think everyone knows that there is no perfect option, there are pitfalls with all of them. What we need to do is find the best way to lessen these pitfalls in the most efficient manner. Let's focus on strengthening the positives (while not losing sight of the negatives of course) and not keep the negatives at the forefront of the discussion. As for the human error factor in the use of tagging templates, yes it's there, however there is an entire community here to provide checks and balances to try to minimize the errors, or quickly correct them when they do occur. Look at the wonderful job this community does with the rest of this wiki... it's rare for vandalism to last more than 5 minutes. The passion and dedication of this community is something that has to be taken into account when weighing the options. -- Wyn 06:14, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I swear I mentioned the template option before, but this is a massive discussion so things are getting lost pretty easily. My major problem with this approach is I feel that it's actually easier for such a template to be applied incorrectly and harder to notice than it has been as opposed to a namespace move. I am also pretty skeptical that new users would tag their own suggestions with the template and it could be very difficult to track them down to get them to do it. Admittedly, this problem exists with namespace as well, but I disagree that templates are easier to understand than namespaces. A majority of suggestions ended up in the right namespace under the old system excluding dev talk pages, but I don't think we really want to put such a template on every second topic on a dev's talk page. Arguably, you could just tag the whole talk page of every dev, but that could confound people who wish to contact dev's for non-feedback related issues (such as wiki issues) who don't wish their comments to be otherwise licensed. I suppose it is not a huge problem if some suggestions go untagged and are "lost for all eternity" because people can't follow instructions. It's Arenanet's call how much effort they want to put into training their staff or maintaining a separate architecture. Misery 06:36, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

If a user doesn't tag their post, then it's not the end of the world because there's no horrible consequence - the only effect is that ArenaNet doesn't look over that suggestion. Thus just adding a note on the page of the user is plenty, a huge effort doesn't have to be made to force anyone to tag a page. Furthermore, if someone likes the gist of an untagged suggestion, they can always post a similar one with the tag. (Aiiane - talk - contribs) 21:18, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

As I have also mentioned before, if it is wanted, I could write a wiki extension that adds a magic word to the parser that can be used instead of a template tag. This would allow for example to specify special css styles for those pages (such as a different background) or even to highlight (or to color different) pages tagged with that magic word on RecentChanges for example.

And I fully agree with Aiiane; if we can't get a non-wiki system for suggestions, I would rather have a page based system here on this wiki. poke | talk 06:52, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

So, what exactly would be the problem with using wiki-software as long as it is run with forum/bbs-like rules? A new suggestion wiki doesn't need to use our same "reach concensus or discuss until hell freeze", but could just apply something like "not editing other people's edits" policy, simmilar to talk pages.

Let's remember that, as per Mike's explanation, he want's it as easier and clean as possible. I don't see a dev checking recent changes to see what edits are ok (even if they are font-size 18 lime-green letters blinking over a hot pink background), nor would that solution be all-inclusive as intended since suggestions get posted everywhere anyways on this wiki (and we have tried to keep feedback on a single place before (ursan) but in the end we still apply that "as long as it does no damage is fine" custom that is so common here).--Fighterdoken 07:13, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean by "forum / bbs-like rules"? -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 08:02, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Basically, following a "the usage is a privilege, not a right" premise. Most game-related "forums" i know hack, slash, move, delete, ban, censor, and basically exclude the comunity from the managing process. A theorical new wiki intended as a place for collecting feedback, could pretty much be run leaving outside anything that could be potentially troublesome, withouth having to give explanations or having to go through 6-month discussions.--Fighterdoken 09:02, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Stricter editorial oversight seems reasonable. I believe the wiki's suggestion pages were such a mess because we never got an official answer to the quantity vs. quality question. If ArenaNet wants quality to be prioritized, deleting suggestions for quality reasons would generally be a good thing, and if deletion votes (and rating votes if we use a rating extension) are inadequate, granting some trusted users editorial authority would probably be a fairly effective failsafe to deal with bad but popular suggestions (and prevent the deletion of pages for controversial but not inherently bad suggestions). If ArenaNet wants quantity to be prioritized, this type of filtration would be counterproductive, however if quality is prioritized, efforts to improve what are considered bad suggestion pages would be wasted. Many, including myself, favored caution, opposing large-scale deletions in the absence of an official response. Additionally, it seems that many avoided contributing to suggestion pages which they felt were likely to get deleted after an official response. I believe that suggestion pages, either here or on another wiki, would be far cleaner if we were guided by clear priorities and goals. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 01:28, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree with poke and Aiiane. If we are going to use a wiki system for suggestions, I would rather have a system in this wiki, relying on the special css styles to make it clear what is a suggestion and what isn't. This would have multiple advantages:

1. By limiting suggestions to those things with the special css style, we would effectively allow Arena Net to look at a single place for suggestions, as opposed to go hunting in multiple articles (no suggestions on the Ursan talk page, for example). We could use the same system we have today (instead of a handmade list of suggestions, a DPL based list that automatically adds suggestions with the proper parameters) in order to automatically add the pages with the proper style and also automatically ignore the pages with the wrong format. This kind of list could also be categorized with information such as date of creation (like the current list), topics covered (such as PvE, PvP, character customization and etc, allowing Arena Net to quickly sort through what kind of idea they are seeking at any given time) and similar traits; the date of creation would allow the community to quickly check if the most recent entries are "safe" for Arena Net to read or not.
2. By making it clear that suggestions within the talk page of developers cannot be considered to be implemented in game, we have a very strong argument to make people stop flooding Linsey's talk page with suggestions, as well as a good excuse to delete said suggestions without wasting Linsey's time in doing so (after all, she would not be expected to even read such ideas, so we would not have to wait for her to see the suggestions before removing them).
3. By making the process of adding suggestions something minimally complex (adding the proper template, with the proper categorization and etc) we require people to actually pay attention to what they're doing, unlike the old "create your suggestion" form we had (and which led to plenty of nonsense ideas that were soon deleted).

Also, I don't believe Arena Net could possibly say "please, delete the bad suggestions for us", given how that would be bad PR. I think it's up to us to decide if we want quantity or quality. Erasculio 01:52, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

If that is the case, the community can say "we're going to set quality control standards, and if ArenaNet is silent on any specific issue, we'll have to use our own judgement". Even if they want to take a fairly hands-off approach, there could be specific requests, such as "we don't want suggestion involving X, Y or Z for legal reasons", "we're aiming for a T rating, so keep the suggestions work safe", "we'd like well-written expert feedback involving X" or "we'd like you to brainstorm some ideas for X, don't worry about the precise details". -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 00:21, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

MMOZine Interview

Hi Mike. Thank you for your interview in the latest issue of MMOZine. I really love to read about games I play than ones I have no interest in. However I have to say I was somewhat disappointed with it. Granted, the interviewees should have pushed you further, because you gave us no fresh news, and it felt like a rehash of the news on guildwars.com. I was so hoping for just one new glimmer of what to expect in GW2 or even something to do with the upcoming update that wasn't on the official site. I think they only asked 2 or 3 questions in total. Sadly I am left in much want - please throw us a bone soon! LOL – josəph 11:36, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

The IdeaRunners.Com option (re idea licensing)

I suggested this a while ago, but what about utilizing something like what Stephen Nichols did for Dungeon Runners (another NCSoft game). That way the wiki becomes less convoluted with walls of text, there is a more specific place for suggestions (rather than devs and CMs digging through forum dirt), AND suggestions can be self-moderated by the community. --Ravious 13:52, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Community moderation leads to bias moderation. The decision about suggestion fate cannot be delegated to community because no community has enough knowledge about game mechanics or what is in current development and how the suggestion can fit in company development/creative plans. Any community moderation is useless waste of time. Also it has to be done in all supported languages. Besides not everyone wants to go to forums for fear of being mocked and lack of time and many good ideas will never be posted. So, if suggestions are ever accepted they have to be submitted directly and never discussed. Good suggestions from company prospective can be rewarded and bad ones dismissed without negative comments that will discourage further posting. If company opens a direct channel it can control its usage and either issue a warning or increase the time between posts or simply trash all input from 'unproductive' users e.g.: "\set filter: Redirect All Input from HH Leader -> trash." He won't even know and will keep happily posting ;-) HH LEADER talk 14:28, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

You're funny. I would delete "community moderation is [a] useless waste of time" as soon as possible considering where you are. --Ravious 15:12, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I can see that you are not a programmer. 'As soon as possible' does not define a step in the process. Do you want to delete said sentence before the whole post goes to trash? If so, were you put the deleted part: in the same trash or another one, or some place else for archiving? And if you want to delete it after it has been put to trash, do you mean to say that you want 'undelete' it, and if so, where you going to put it afterwards? In short: what is you definition of the filter: "trash everything, but... and put the 'but' somewhere else" or "double trash everything he has to say"? ;-) Thanks. HH LEADER talk 17:25, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

May your assumptions be your undoing. --Ravious 19:52, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

That's deep. I like it ;-) HH LEADER talk 14:39, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

← moved to User_talk:HH_LEADER

wow Auron, you must have trouble cutting butter. :S @ HH: I have a question. How does community moderation raise bias, when moderation is done by the community, and not a panel? We already know that we're not the developers, and we don't know as much about the game as they do. But the reason why this wiki came into fruition was to set up a transparency between player and developer - something that all games of this age should have. Second, they didn't come here to ask us if we could help them make their game - they just want to know what we think. But you have to understand that the wiki is one voice, not a united front of individual contributors. Third, Suggestions are criticized, not mocked. And finally, if anet ever decided to enable a direct feed of suggestions that are not tampered by anyone other than the one who wrote the suggestion (which I think is a terrible idea)....aside from the fact that they would have to hire someone to moderate the influx of every suggestion on the tip of the tongue (which they won't do) you would get repeated suggestions, poorly conceived suggestions and SPAM-related-SPAM. Then everyone who posts a suggestion would naturally expect that anet will read it, and then demand that they respond to that suggestion (which they won't do.) Um. btw, is English your second language....no offense intended, just wondering :)(Terra Xin 15:35, 23 April 2009 (UTC))

My first and fafourite languge is 'C'. All criticizm is subjective. Any possible interpretation of the suggestion by the party it wasn't intended to is based on the assumptions with no basis. It is a 'broken phone' way. And Yes, I think that at some point in time the players will have direct impact on how games are being developed. If ArenaNet will be the first to start listening to players directly it will gain competitive advantage and become market leader. If not, well, someone else will. If you want to read my response to Gordon Ecker's question about duplcate suggestions you can do so by following the link on my talk page. HH LEADER talk 16:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

@Terra Xin: Moderation is biased regardless of who does it, but community moderation also falls on "popularity trends" every certain amount of time. At least, when the moderation is done by the company itself (or by a few "stablished" chosen ones) people can have an idea about what will be chopped down and what not.

About suggestions... I am not sure if you actually took a look on the feedback of suggestions before editing them, but for every valid criticism you can find lots of piggy-back "mockery". Heck, i remember the first time i suggested that Anet separated skills on PvE and PvP versions; it wasn't an encouraging experience for sure.

So, you fear people will post "stupid ideas"? They will, and hey, stupid ideas today may be the solution to a certain issue tomorrow (see: pve and pvp versions of skills). You fear they will repeat ideas over and over? They will, and there is a small chance that idea will be implemented in the end (see: increased Xunlai storage). You fear they will post poorly conceived suggestions? They will, and that poorly conceived suggestion could be worked over to develop a new feature they didn't think about before (see: Zaishen menagerie)

People expecting Anet to answer, people "commenting" on other's suggestions, people editing other's suggestions, are all things that can be worked over if Anet decides to use any solution BESIDES this same wiki.--Fighterdoken 22:07, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

And for every bad idea that could be salvaged into something useful, there were one hundred others that were just a waste of Arena Net's time. The Zaishen Menagerie wasn't created because someone went to a fansite forum and claimed "I liek p3ts!". Skills weren't split between PvE and PvP because you suggested so; rather, the points raised by the people who didn't agree with you (which you claim were mocking you) were the reason why Arena Net took so long to split those skills and why they try to do that to as few skills as possible. And so on.

Not all ideas are the same. Not every idea is a good one. Not every idea is worth Arena Net's time to read them. The feedback the community provides over any suggestion is useful as it allows Arena Net to see more than one point of view over any given concept, and such discussions not only help the company to gather feedback, they may also improve those very suggestions.

Being afraid of criticism isn't a good idea to reject criticism or moderation. Being unable to accept that an idea is bad is just a way to prevent a suggestion from being reworked into something useful by its author. This wiki has experience in dealing with suggestions now, and fortunately the community here knows, for the most part, what I have stated above. One more reason why suggestions should be placed here, in this wiki, if we are limited to a wiki-like site. Erasculio 22:32, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

The thing is, it's ArenaNet's duty to decide which ideas are worth their time, not the userbase. I want for ArenaNet to say "Hey, this idea is good and we didn't think about it before." instead of "Hey, this idea is popular with the vocal minority". If ArenaNet can't fullfill that duty, then there is no reason for them to implement a feedback repository.

Ideas are ideas. You need bad ideas for reaching the good ones (see: filament selection for the light bulb). If you allow any editor to reject one based on his own biased vision of good and bad, you are denying Anet the chance to find a good idea that can be born from a bad one.

This wiki has experience dealing with suggestions, true, which is why i don't think this wiki is fit for gathering the kind of feedback ArenaNet wants. Reworking ideas into something different going against the intention of the original author, deleting because "it's stupid", plus the obligatory talk-page with "this sucks/this rocks" (without arguments as to why) doesn't really help when your intention is to "gather ideas".--Fighterdoken 23:17, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

You are getting awfully of track. Could you move this discussion to one of your talkpages, or some other location more suited? Backsword 23:20, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Fighterdoken: ironic that you would mention a vocal minority, because that's all Arena Net would listen to if they accepted suggestions from anyone. Do you truly believe the majority of players would come to this or any other site in order to post suggestions? The experience we have with any fansite shows otherwise. Speaking about fansites, when looking at those often you would see someone claiming that he/she sent a suggestion directly to Arena Net by e-mail, and was then told to post said suggestion on a fansite so the community could give feedback on it. That makes perfect sense: if Arena Net is going to hear only a minority anyway, they may as well ask people from said minority to comment on each and every idea they get. As I already mentioned, that not only gives more feedback to Arena Net, but it also helps to improve the idea.

It all boils down to: can people stand the idea that their suggestions are not perfect, and thus may receive criticism by other players, who would be affected if any new idea were implemented into Guild Wars? Or do people need the illusion that the game revolves around them and that their suggestions are infallible? It's incredibly amusing, IMO, that those so willing to provide feedback about the game are so against receiving feedback about their own ideas. Erasculio 03:12, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Endgame

Alright people, let's focus. It seems we've narrowed it down to either Option 3 or Option 4, with Option 3 certainly getting the more discussion, if that means anything. But I'm wondering how this issue actually gets decided? Do we put it to a vote? If so, when? If not, how do we decide this? (and don't say, "we discuss until there is consensus," 'cause that doesn't seem like it is going to happen) Also, I think it might be worthwhile to hear at least one more time what Mike and Team think about either Option 3 or Option 4, given the discussion since last Mike chimed in. (Satanael 06:58, 24 April 2009 (UTC))

Ultimately, it's ArenaNet's choice, so we wait. Misery 07:00, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, no, it is our choice too, otherwise why come to us at all, right? I mean, the community has to decide to adopt new licensing terms, n'est ce pas? (Satanael 07:03, 24 April 2009 (UTC))

Yes and no. Seeing as no existing content can change, they could have done it all without consulting us at all. It doesn't really matter what we all agree is the best solution, they are the ones who have to do it and pay for it, so it's their call. We can only advise them. Until Mike gets back to us again, there isn't really any more to discuss. Misery 08:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

For option 3, does creating a new namespace that's sectioned and quarantined eliminate the need for retrospecting? Or are we still on the part of Mike's reply with regards to "we don't like the risk"? (Terra Xin 15:13, 24 April 2009 (UTC))

I mean I'm still sitting on option 4, but a lot of good points are being raised by option 3 as well (Terra Xin 15:16, 24 April 2009 (UTC))

We are still waiting and we can't retrospect no matter what option we pick. Misery 15:17, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

It's more like we have a saying on this, but just so they know what we think. Even if we want sometihng else, they will ultimately will have to choose what they can between all the choices they have. Al we can do is state what we want and hope that one of the possibilities 'they can' is one of the possibilities 'we want'. For me, is as simple as this: I just want to post my ideas in an site as official as possible and have them noticed by as many players and Anet staff as possible. MithTalk 16:34, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

We can also point out benefits and drawbacks they may not have considered. I think we got all of them. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 00:34, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

This is what dual-licensing is for

Am I missing something here. The whole point here is that arenanet needs to own everything on the wiki, but they'd also like it to act like a wiki where anyone can add anything and take anything. They don't care if YOU take stuff, they just don't want to get sued if THEY take stuff. Am I right?

I THINK dual-licensing is used for that exact purpose. COMPANY X can have a public container that they secretly take anything from and own, while at the same time anyone else can take anything under the other more open license. So one license is for the company, and one is for regular people.

The hassle of implementation is a non-issue. Licensing always takes work, but this situation is easy as pie because old content doesn't really matter. Old content is explicitly the old license, there is no doubt. The old pages just need to keep their existing license information. New content would be under two licenses. New things could not simply be copies of old things unless it was the original author doing it, but that is not a concern because there is hardly a unique thought on this wiki. Before long, everything that has been posted before will have been posted again in a different way under both licenses.

Also, time for a reality check here. Licensing only matters if anyone cares. If I hold up a coke bottle and say I invented it, that is a big legal problem by the letter of the law. But because nobody cares, it is not actually a problem at all. If I did it in a superbowl ad, I'd have a problem. But get real, this wiki isn't the superbowl, and the ideas posted by gamers here aren't coca cola bottles. Find the pragmatic solution and move on. 76.11.79.206 13:43, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

We didn't make this up, Arenanet did. It's their call what level of legal security they want to have. As for the dual license, the problem is apparently they cannot rely on their staff to determine licensing from history or don't want them to have to go to that much effort, so they want some way to make it very easy to determine what is safe and what isn't. Misery 17:20, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

The other issue is they don't want their competitors taking any of the ideas posted on this wiki. If the feedback is licensed under GFDL, competitors can come and take the ideas just as easily as ANet can. This is no big deal for the bug fixes and localization feedback, but for new content suggestions this could be an issue. (Satanael 18:08, 26 April 2009 (UTC))

That at least makes sense. I'd never want credit for anything I contirbuted, not in the "I demand this or else"-way anyway. And I think a lot of feedback posters feel that way. They just wanna help improve their favorite game. 145.94.74.23 11:04, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

One "protection" GFDL has is that if you use the idea under the GFDL license, you have to release whatever is derived from it under that license. So if they made a game, they'd have to release it under GFDL, meaning they couldn't charge for it and it'd (I believe) have to be open-source. But, under this special brand of dual license, ANet would use the idea under their ownership, while everyone else would use it under GFDL. --JonTheMon 12:59, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Just a quick note, GFDL does not mean a company couldn't charge for a game derived from GFDL content (and therefore GFDL itself). In fact, GFDL is very specific about the fact that they could charge for it. However, anyone they sell it to (or who obtains it some other way) would also have the legal right to give away more copies for free, or even sell more copies themselves. - Tanetris 14:13, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Uhm... wouldn't something like a game have to fall under GPL for that? I don't really think GFDL covers the implementation of the idea, just the idea itself (hence the "documentation" part on the license).--Fighterdoken 23:50, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Handling feedback until everything's sorted out

So how should we handle bug reports and skill feedback? Would it be okay to just point out the bugs and perceived skill problems without providing actual suggestions? If not, should feedback be directed through support? -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 01:10, 27 April 2009 (UTC)