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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Lxxl2 (talk | contribs) at 21:09, 7 May 2022 (→Reliability of HLTV: Reply). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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This talk page is for discussing the reliability of sources for use in video game articles. If you are wondering if a video game source is reliable enough to use on Wikipedia, this is the place to ask.

When posting a new topic, please add a link to the topic on the Video Game Sources Checklist after the entry for the site. If an entry for the site does not exist, create one for it and include the link to the topic afterward. Also, begin each topic by adding {{subst:find video game sources|...site name...|linksearch=...site URL...}} in order to provide other users with some easily accessible links to check up on the source.

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Ovicio.com

Find video game sources: "...Ovicio.com..." – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR · free images · free news sources · WP Library · NYT · WP reference · VG/RS · VG/RL · WPVG/Talk · LinkSearch · LinkTo


This is a Portuguese site that covers video games, films and comics. I recently bumped into it when searching for resources for Sonic-related articles. Is anyone here able to determine the reliability of this site?

Here's the English-translated version: https://ovicio-com-br.translate.goog/ MoonJet (talk) 12:18, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sister site https://overplay.com.br/ should also be evaluated alongside. I'm a proponent of us vetting more non-English sourcing, however, I've not been able to find any sort of About Us, Editorial Policy, Staff Page, etc, so far. Not even a directly visible copyright notice anywhere. Both pages link to Facebook profiles that are only created in the last two years. Ovicio.com's archives go back to 2010 though, while Overplay seems to have been spun up in 2020. Clicking on authors takes you to a list of articles they have written with no description or credentials provided about the author. This spree of listicles is not encouraging. -- ferret (talk) 12:50, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It seems they try to suppress the display of it, but I hit one page that did show a watermark and link to a one man Wordpress developer (www.fabiolobo.com.br) who apparently provides the theme/coding for this site, which is indeed Wordpress based. That in and of itself isn't a problem, Wordpress is used everywhere, but it doesn't lend a sense that this is a big operation or established company. Miguel Oliveira appears to be the owner of Ovicio, and he has a testimonial on Fabio's site. The site's involvement is actually documented at https://www.fabiolobo.com.br/trabalho/o-vicio -- ferret (talk) 13:40, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I noticed that. No "About Us" page or anything. Weird. As for the listicle thing, they do pertain to one character each, to be fair. MoonJet (talk) 14:22, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That's kinda the issue though. They are just taking a list of characters for a series/franchise and indiscriminately, one a day, putting out a list. It doesn't suggest any particular importance to any character since they're running through them all. And that's all that particular author does, once a day, a new listicle about a character from the franchise they are currently running through. -- ferret (talk) 14:26, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, they talk about their creation and everything too. I think you need to look beyond the fact that they are listicles. MoonJet (talk) 14:38, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dualshockers

Find video game sources: "Dualshockers" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR · free images · free news sources · WP Library · NYT · WP reference · VG/RS · VG/RL · WPVG/Talk · LinkSearch · LinkTo

Hi! This site is currently listed as unreliable on WP:VG/RS, but there seems to be a very poor consensus as to why. As it was brought up at Talk:Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes#Unreliable sources, I think it would be wise to reassess. The about us page suggests it has an editorial roll. Previous discussions [1] no comments, suggested COI, [2] one comment, also mostly COI, [3] has some comments, but mostly suggesting the previous entries were somehow suitable to suggest it was unreliable. This is seven years ago, so probably needs a better look. The about us page [4] suggests it has a decently strong editorial backbone. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:07, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I don't know why this was concluded to be unreliable. They seem fairly professional, and other reputable sources like IGN, Kotaku, and Gamespot have credited them, going by the about page, which another indicator for reliability. So, I would say reliable. MoonJet (talk) 14:30, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The first two discussions for Dualshockers really didn't establish anything. The third is more in-depth but it's primarily Czar's view and we didn't see much participation from others. I'd say it's ripe for re-evaluation. -- ferret (talk) 14:35, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Esports Insider

Find video game sources: "Esports Insider" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR · free images · free news sources · WP Library · NYT · WP reference · VG/RS · VG/RL · WPVG/Talk · LinkSearch · LinkTo

Esports Insider (About, Team) is a business-focused esports news website, akin to The Esports Observer. Most pieces are on acquisitions, funding, and partnerships. Appears to also write some sponsored content, which is tagged with "Supported by:" at the end of the article (e.g. [5], [6]). Also runs a print and digital magazine, The Esports Journal, in partnership with Latam Media Group. Subsidiary of SBC. I lean reliable; it's a good source for the content it provides. – Pbrks (t • c) 13:13, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • I would also lean reliable. Separating sponcon and non-sponcon, writing team all seem to have experience/training in journalism, etc. Doesn't look like they're doing anything groundbreaking, but no reason to believe their coverage of business moves isn't reliable. Alyo (chat·edits) 14:06, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

NerdCubed

Hello, I would like to ask if NerdCubed, a popular and renowned gamer and game reviewer who is even in charge of his own company that has made 3 games, is a reliable source for video game articles/pages on this site, like his list of Top 100 greatest games of all time.

He doesn't violate any of wikipedia's source reliability rules from what I can tell, and he doesn't seem too different from the already-accepted Electric Playground Network.

Eseseso (talk) 02:23, 27 April 2022 (UTC)Eseseso[reply]

Looking him up, it looks like he's primarily just a Youtuber who self-publishes his own stuff. That's not generally what we look for in reliable/usable sources on Wikipedia. We're generally looking for websites/magazines/publications that have professional credentials and editorial policies, standards, editorial oversight, etc. I'm sure he's a great guy...but he sounds less like any of that, and more like a popular guy who uploads lots of videos straight to the internet. Sergecross73 msg me 03:28, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Serge sums it up. Self-published individual, who happens to be popular. -- ferret (talk) 12:48, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Screenage Wasteland and DigitalDreamDoor

Hello,

Would the sites of Screenage Wasteland (which has done various lists and such that focus on games, including a top 500 games list that begins here) and DigitalDreamDoor (which among other gaming things has its own list of greatest games of all time) be considered "reliable sources"?

Screenage Wasteland definitely seems like a reliable source by this site's standards, and seems no different from other journal/magazine sites that have had their gaming lists accepted.

DigitalDreamDoor was a bit less certain to me, but looking at the lists it seems like they have multiple individuals look over things such as the games put in their ranking lists and use some criteria when listing them. It also seems to follow all of wikipedia's source reliability standards from what I can tell.

Eseseso (talk) 18:29, 3 May 2022 (UTC)Eseseso[reply]

Both unreliable. No reputation for fact checking, no editorial policies, no credentialed staff. The staff page of Screenage Wasteland includes such descriptions as "I'm that guy that writes about Star Wars and shit." and "I like horror and stuff, but I hate most things.". The site is also only 3 years old. Digitaldreamdoor is older but looks like it's just a blog of some sort. No hallmarks to suggest it's reliable, unless someone knows something I don't. -- ferret (talk) 19:19, 3 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reliability of HLTV

Find video game sources: "HLTV" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR · free images · free news sources · WP Library · NYT · WP reference · VG/RS · VG/RL · WPVG/Talk · LinkSearch · LinkTo


This CS:GO related site has been on WP:VG/RS for a while and has been brought up for reevaluation multiple times as well, but no discussion has taken place. The original evaluation mentions a lack of evidence that the writers are "experts in the field," and whilst this may have been somewhat true in 2016, the situation has definitely changed. The current head of operations, Zvonimir "Professeur" Burazin has been hired as an analyst by multiple notable tournament organizers including ESL and PGL (where he was hired for an official Valve sanctioned tournament).

This does not mean their website is reliable per se, but their match database has also been integrated into the official CS:GO client itself.[7][8]

I should also add as a disclaimer that I wrote the original Wikipedia article for HLTV. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lxxl2 (talk • contribs)

I'd really hesitate to put HLTV as anything more than a situational source. While one of the original comments in that evaluation does indeed mention a lack of "experts in the field", I think the bigger issue is actually the second part of the comment about the lack of information about their editorial standards. Now that Mira (who had prior experience at other media organizations) has left, the Editor-in-Chief is a former player with no journalistic training or other experience that I'm aware of. There's no information about their processes, and if you go through the articles under their "news" vertical you'll get pieces written by uhh, who? A random forum member? Who is this? It wouldn't be so bad if these were clearly separated from the pieces written by Professeur et al, but pieces by the EIC are presented right above pieces by forum randos. I will occasionally use HLTV as a source for very basic "XYZ result happened at the Major", but I would almost never use it as a source for the purposes of demonstrating notability and I don't think we can consider it generally reliable. Alyo (chat·edits) 02:08, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I see where you're coming from here, but I would like to point out that a large portion of the HLTV articles that would be used in an article are stating basic results like "XYZ happened at Cologne in 2016." This obviously can't be used to establish notability as then basically every CS:GO player who is somewhat close to notable in CS would get an article of questionable merit like Maikelele, but using it as a source for historical results shouldn't be an issue.
I would add that the in general the HLTV rankings are considered reliable by the community in that hitting the #1 spot is something which is notable. [9][10]. Whenever an analyst mentions the "world ranking" on an official stream they are referring to the HLTV ranking.[11] I have no evidence of this, but if they refer to a player being the #1 player in the world in X year they are also referring to the HLTV ranking. This admittedly places the website in a bit of a murky area as despite being taken quite seriously by the community, in so far as experts in CS:GO like SPUNJ are involved in the presentation of the top 1 award [12], but the person who makes these rankings doesn't really have any credentials[13]. Essentially, what I'm arguing is that being ranked highly by HLTV in their player rankings or winning one of their MVP's for a large tournament could be used to establish notability, and vice versa. Lxxl (talk) 21:09, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

SVG.com

Find video game sources: "svg.com" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR · free images · free news sources · WP Library · NYT · WP reference · VG/RS · VG/RL · WPVG/Talk · LinkSearch · LinkTo


Creating a talk page discussion per Ferret's undo. I had already found and read the previous discussion when I made my undo, and I rather disagree that there's consensus to add there? The only other participant (izno) was responding to the technical question of limiting the search to the site only, and I don't think the standard for addition on this page should be "One person posted and no one objected". In fact, that seems like exactly what our Inconclusive discussions section is for. So while I'm willing to have a discussion on the merits, I also think it's pretty cut and dry that the addition of svg.com isn't backed by consensus at all, and the burden should still be on the person who wants to add it.

That said, on the merits, this site is terrible and I'm strongly opposed to it being considered reliable. Pinging Ferret, Shooterwalker, and Pbrks. Alyo (chat·edits) 16:14, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • I actually used this website as a source recently, blindly, after seeing that it was listed here as reliable. Today, I was about to use it again, but decided to do a double-take, as the website really did seem to have poor standards. The editors and staff are a mixed bad of some journalism education, English degrees, and and no writing-related degrees, along with a very concerning graduated high school and avoided college like the plague entry. They have Fact Checking and Ethics policies, which is reassuring. The articles they write though... I mean, really? I will forgo any "reliable" or "unreliable" vote here, since I am not sure that I can make it unbiasedly at the moment. The biggest issue I have with this whole situation is the addition of SVG.com as a reliable source, even though there was clearly no consensus, which was then reaffirmed since no one opposed or stated it was unreliable. No opposition does not imply reliability. Every source listed a reliable in VGRS needs to have a backing consensus. – Pbrks (t • c) 16:45, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • The reasons stated in the removals was that there was no discussion, by my reading. As a discussion clearly occurred, however unattended, that felt like it was wrong or misguided basis for removal, especially as the entry has been there for some time. Shooterwalker has already given their opinion in the older discussion, but I'm not seeing anything exceedingly wrong with the examples being presented here. Are the facts wrong? Are there major grammatical issues or some other flaw? Explain why these are bad articles. Perhaps there's some churnalism involved, and lord knows I rail against that constantly, and yet despite that we refuse to depreciate Valnet properties. For example, the Elden Ring fisher-price controller article is being highlighted. Polygon, Game Informer, Kotaku, Eurogamer, the Verge and damn near our entire Reliable Source list also covered that. Are they unreliable? -- ferret (talk) 17:01, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with Ferret. There's a consensus that this source has editorial overview, including (as Pbrks noted) fact-checking and ethics policies. There's nothing factually incorrect about any of the articles. To Ferret's point, there is a growing problem of "churnalism" that isn't limited to this one source. It's a combination of journalists being squeezed for revenue as their business model suffers in an increasingly social media driven environment, and thus they are writing about someone who has 2 million followers on Twitch. I don't use twitch, and I don't know who this guy is, and I reserve my criticisms of the individual news articles. But I'm not going to substitute my opinion for policy. And if someone wants to remove it from the reliable source list, they need to cite something in WP:RS that justifies it, instead of simply saying WP:IDONTLIKEIT.
  • There is a wider issue going on in journalism at large, and it is now a perennial issue across multiple sources. We will always need to exercise some editorial judgment even for other reliable sources. If someone wants to suggest a solution to the wider problem of clickbait, social media driven journalism, I'm open to that, and it will necessarily address sites that otherwise do meet the definition of an WP:RS. Shooterwalker (talk) 17:18, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Normally sources that do not have sufficient discussion go in inconclusive (and 1 person is the definition of such). It should be removed or moved until such time as there actually is consensus. --Izno (talk) 17:26, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Please provide an opinion or evaluation of the source. There's little point in moving it just to move it. Let's discuss, get that consensus, then take action. -- ferret (talk) 17:56, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      The default for our actions is to revert to actual consensus. Actual consensus as established by long practice on this page is "inconclusive". It's a trivial action and sets the status quo more appropriately. Izno (talk) 22:48, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I guess I don't see why anyone would want to cite SVG. I checked a dozen articles and they're all summaries of stories published elsewhere. Do they publish their own original content? Their headlines are clickbaity and searching for their articles is a mess. There's no search option on svg.com that I could find, and site-specific Google searches find gossipy trash like https://www.svg.com/126664/the-untold-truth-of-pete-davidson/ which redirects to nickiswift.com. I'm guessing that's because they're all part of the same network and their domains are set up that way, but that's sure to confuse some people. I could maybe understand giving SVG a situational status where we allowed original content written by staff with actual games journalism backgrounds, but everything I've seen so far is churnalism. Woodroar (talk) 17:46, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Other "churnalism" sources like Gamerant are marked as situational, and I'd be comfortable lumping this in the same category. But I think every site has some churnalism to some degree, and we're going to need a wider solution before we start migrating half our sources to "situational" due to clickbait issues. This is much bigger than this one source, IMO. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:11, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, here goes. SVG is the video game arm of Static Media, which is itself a startup specializing in that sort of 'trending entertainment' content ("We give readers what they want, before they want it", "Static Media's content never stands still", etc). In order to do that, they repeat what other more reputable publications say almost verbatim, or else just put down in words something that has happened on a Twitch stream.

Lets look at this piece, as it's a topic that SVG's writers are not likely to have any subject experience in. Sure enough, the piece basically just copies content from the Bloomberg piece it cites and calls it a day. SVG says Microsoft may actually have something to worry about, as FTC Chair Lina Kahn has been an outspoken advocate of a more heavy-handed approach to the regulation of technology companies. Kahn finds that these organizations can often leverage power to devastating effect, exerting control not only within its own business circles but in others as well ... Under Kahn's leadership, the FTC successfully blocked two mergers of tech companies: Nvidia's deal for Arm Ltd. and Lockheed Martin's purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc. Bloomberg says FTC Chair Lina Khan has long advocated for a more forceful approach to reviewing deals, particularly by the biggest technology companies, which she says are able to leverage their dominance in one line of business to gain power in other markets. Under her leadership, the agency has sued to block two major takeovers - NVidia Corp's proposed purchase of Arm Ltd. and Lockheed Martin Corp's deal to buy of Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc. That borders on plagiarism. In their standard pieces, it's only better insofar as it's technically not plagiarism to write down what a streamer says and call it "news". There are so many pieces like this that are just beat-by-beat reconstructions of something that happened in a youtube/twitch video (with timestamps as citations!). Or are just cited to a reddit user's translation of what happened in a video. I truly cannot imagine how problematic it would be to use a piece like this, which just prose-ifies some tweets and videos and then makes genuinely intimate conclusions about a person's life and mental health with the same level of sourcing as a youtube comment section, in a BLP. I'm going to assume I don't need to go through each of these and explain how they specifically violate WP policy about RS's.

What else. This one cites to a fan wiki. This one cites "fan responses" by linking to tweets by utter randos. Their "exclusives" vertical is full of this thing where they do one interview and then cut it up and republish smaller pieces as separate exclusives. They will also interview someone in what clearly seems like a promotional feature, and then publish another piece summarizing a group of those interviews as another exclusive. With all due respect to the editors in this discussion, it seems beyond obvious to me that this is not even remotely close to a RS. There is no expertise here beyond "I can read The Verge and cut it down to ~400 words". There's no evidence that their editorial policy is anything other than "as quick as possible". They don't do their own reporting. If another source gets something wrong, SVG doesn't appear to be in a position to fact checking before hitting publish. The more I look, the worse this gets. I don't think it's even remotely in the same universe as a Kotaku, who at least had a history of good work and whose news/opinion work is much easier to separate. Alyo (chat·edits) 20:37, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thank you. This is a much stronger argument for why would shouldn't use this source. Before, some examples of articles were given with no rationale for what made them bad. In one case, the example was something almost every RS we have covered. But this analysis paints a different picture, and while I don't know if "unreliable" is the right word, it's the term we use when depreciating or forbidden sources, so I guess it is. Or perhaps we recognize them as being a tiertiary source? Ergo, no good for secondary coverage. -- ferret (talk) 22:38, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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