Talk:PDA

Mass deletion of infoEdit

Aren't we supposed to have a discussion before something is single-handedly deleted? And yes I believe a 200 KB subtraction from an article constitutes an effective deletion. I'm aware of the copyright issue and have been for some time, but had been thinking about how best to deal with it. I do not agree that the action taken was the best way to deal with it - you just deleted my own primary reference for Doom 3 canonical timeline information. That will really help me in my work on the rest of the Doom 3 articles. --Quasar (talk) 05:22, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining further (I saw the IRC posts first).  I honestly am not comprehending how my action could possibly have the effect in your last 2 sentences — apologies if I'm overlooking some simple point.

Obviously I don't own this article; in the long term it might look completely different from my edit today.  But IME an edit has to be made, or discussion is extremely unlikely.  People just don't feel like posting about copyright [1] [2] [3] [4].  They don't even feel like it when the thread begins by saying the rules might be at fault [5], even when their own contributions are being directly discussed and they're already active [6] [7].  So here I am, trying a different method to get discussion going.    Ryan W (talk) 06:53, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

To be blunt, I am not interested in the results of conversations on this topic that you had with other people in other situations. You did not attempt to start a discussion about this article, and have abridged policy in my view by not following procedure. Instead of nominating it for deletion due to the perceived copyright violation, which would have prompted the discussion you supposedly wanted and would have provided me the time to disseminate some of the information elsewhere and then rewrite it as it occurred here to a form on firmer fair-use grounds, it was mass-deleted unilaterally and then overwritten immediately with a new revision, which has an obvious chilling effect on an attempt to restore any of the removed information.

While on that subject, the nature of whether or not offering this information is legal or not deserved discussion. You yourself admitted this information is available in at least five other places. How are those places offering that content more legally than we were? How would linking to them instead of hosting it ourselves be any better, if they are not in fact offering it legally? How likely is the original publisher of the material to object an offering of the content that is 1. non-commercial, 2. in a different medium and therefore non-competitive, and 3. transformative (offered for purposes of understanding and making connections between characters in the game world). The strikes against it are that it is a significant amount of text and that it is verbatim without critical or commentative material interspersed.

Those are the issues that I wanted to try to find a way to address without completely massacring the article. It *was* and still is, as of right now, the top-ranked result in Google for Doom 3 PDA. I do not suspect that should remain the case now that, for example, does not so much as even list the PDAs that occur in the three games, link them to relevant mentioned characters or places, or really do anything more useful than state what a PDA is in the context of the game.

I am beyond weary of the amount of lawyering that is involved in running this site. I am currently the only one actively reviewing articles, and all of the talk page discussions I have tried to start in the last two months have gone completely unanswered. Yet what we do seem to have plenty of time for is to bicker endlessly over individual sentences in well-established articles and to delete a large amount of content in a way that anyone would have to understand beforehand as being provocative even if it was completely within policy. My frustration is tangible at this point. --Quasar (talk) 10:38, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

(editing from phone) OK, a lot of points there, even if I wanted to stop discussion with a pat response I don't know one. My revert is not meant to stop discussion but to at least restore the 2 positive aspects you mention, "primary source" and number one hit, the first I didn't know about (should I have?), the second we don't make a habit of copypasting material just because people search for it, but if your transformation argument proves accepted, maybe that's debatable. Ryan W

At least part of that is my fault; I should have taken care of this a long time ago and instead I put it off repeatedly. I even meant to open a discussion on it myself on this page at one point and somehow didn't get around to even that. I did figure that it had been here long enough that it wasn't at risk for abrupt deletion, and I guess that's why I was surprised and a little bit upset (which is still a bit more than I should have been most likely). I think we agree the state of the article isn't really acceptable as it is; what I need is input on what we can do to fix that. I do have a few ideas, which would fall along the lines of work I earlier did on Strife minor characters and Doom instruction manual - both of these go obscenely far into description—completely in my own voice, of course—of things which we cannot directly host due to copyright concerns. I think something similar could be done here, and then verbatim quotes that are actually needed should occur somewhere more appropriate, such as in the article for that character when the character has one. Just ideas and I welcome input from any direction at this point. Let me know when you're back around on IRC and we'll talk because I feel like I owe an apology even if I have valid points; I am never good at putting my thoughts across without coming off like a raging lunatic. --Quasar (talk) 15:53, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

(from phone) Haha, and aparently I am never good at helping with an initiative w/o tripping over a heavy issue(tm) like copyright, that makes everyone grumpy. We might disagree on the way forward here, but you're not a lunatic, at least I don't think that, it's probably impossible to be so heavily involved w/o feeling protective of the work done so far, and having strong opinions. At least I doubt you're in it for the big paycheck... On IRC, I should be there briefly tonight and longer tomorow afternoon/evening, in Central time terms. Ryan W

Verbatim textEdit

As part of my concern over addition of new such text, I'm opening a discussion on this article, which has been "grandfathered" in for a while now by my own previous (probably both ill-considered and ill-tempered at the time) request. I'd like to end up summarizing and paraphrasing contents of each PDA in a way that describes their subject in an encyclopedic manner. This might have to be a longish project given I don't have much time to devote to it presently. --Quasar (talk) 17:14, 11 September 2020 (CDT)