I think contributing to the wiki should be optional for everyone whenever they feel like contributing. Nobody should feel pressured to contribute, or dissuaded from contributing if what they have to contribute is good. It should be as optional as including documentation and guides and readmes with your game. Porting that information from the wiki or the game to its wiki page can be something developers or fans can do freely.
The developer should get the final say on things related to the author’s intended interpretation, as arguments over what the author might have intended when doing X are always annoying, but that’s all, and such information belongs only under the Trivia section on the relevant page. If a developer intended a certain character to be an amazing powerhouse who saves you during your darkest hour he shouldn’t be able to override any attempt to make the wiki’s strategy guide tell players “This character is weak and his abrupt arrival surrounded by dangerous enemies with a high crit chance against him turns an easy rout map into a nightmare where his death ends the run”.
To prevent “Edelgard/Dimitri is the Protagonist/Antagonist!” edit wars before they begin, I don’t think anything related to audience perception or personal interpretation of the writing should be admissible. Something can seem like “The commonly-agreed upon position” in one circle and the opposite in another, opinions can shift over time, the community consensus can even be completely wrong(like when people blamed the presence of Sonic’s friends for mandatory minigames and forced level repetition). “That bugger in Armor at 12,15 is a right bastard who’ll end your run if you let him cook, totally epic pwnzors his ass with teh Armorslayer for the ebin victory royale FTW!” is exactly what an official style guide should say not to do. No low-effort jokes or memespeak. I’d be open to arguments for a ban on Trivia comments that connect things inside the game to things outside the game like “This character also featured in two of the author’s other works” or “This character is a lot like the protagonist of the author’s previous work” or “This character’s name is literally one letter off from Char and bears a striking resemblance in appearance and spirit and story role to Char Aznable from Gundam 2: The Dam Gun”.
Personal opinions like “Cons - does everything the Lord does except worse” and Jokes like “Pros - epic moustache” and “Cons - is literally Char Aznable but blue” should only come after legitimate pros like “One-rounds and doubles everyone in his join chapter. C-Rank Sword skill lets him use his Armorslayer at base. Personal Skill enhances adjacent ally damage. High defense growth. Highest defense growth in the game when reclassed to Armor Knight and promoted to General, typically ceases taking damage 2-3 chapters in”. Jokes should only stay if they’re short and funny. Saying this Combat Art the character learns is “For when you need X shoved/arrowed/stabbed/exploded on command” over and over is unfunny. Guilty Gear Missing Link Potemkin’s cons section saying “Can’t infinite. Can’t approach. Can’t harness his strengths. Can’t reasonably charge. Can’t keep up pressure. Can’t quickly build up meter. Can’t.” is comedy gold that conveys exactly how this character is not just bad relative to the others but legitimately nonfunctional. Every point elaborates on what it means for the character, and it ends in “Can’t” with no elaboration because no elaboration is needed on that point. He just can’t.
The style guide should forbid the official wiki’s guides to individual chapters and the game as a whole from including personal comments like “Oh god, this chapter. THIS CHAPTER! This goddamn chapter… Let me tell you about this chapter! It was agony! Misery! PAIN! Much greater than yours! It took 8 hours, EIGHT HOURS, EIGHT HOURS ACROSS THREE DAYS of resets and savestates before I beat it! It drove me insane and I started talking to myself! If I ever meet the programmer responsible I’m suplexing him into the moon! I’d rather eat a buffalo stuffed with roadkill skunk and down it with tacos! This fucking damn map was hell! This map made me go insane! Ha ha hee hee ho ho they’re coming to take me away! I R teh taco of doom riding a magical rainbow unicorn here to sing the song that ends the universe! Oh… I’ve got a lovely bunch of Marth clones! Here they are all posing in a row! …Oh and to beat the map just rush to the northeast corner to block ambush spawns and pray RNG saves you from the bakas coming from every other corner kthxbai ~fluffles away~”. That kind of obnoxious talk gets in the way of conveying useful information and is exactly what the style guide should explicitly forbid. No Borderlands dialogue, no “youtube angry gamer reviewer fire and screenshake and screaming” moments, no roleplaying as the characters, even if you think it’d be funnier for the guide for the chapter where Odin joins to be roleplayed entirely from Odin’s perspective. Advice for beating the map reliably should come before anything RNG-based like “If you crit the northmost Knight turn 1 this map becomes a lot easier”. Anything related to bugs like “Killing the boss in one hit breaks the script that spawns him in his second phase” should come last.
The map’s guide should ideally allow players to formulate their own plans based on what they have in the moment, micromanaging the player’s moves turn by turn should only be done when the map can only be beaten in one highly specific way requiring a guide like “Move Camilla north of Marth and Reposition him upwards. Move Marth 3 tiles north, pick a God and pray he dodges one attack next turn. Move Kellam north 4 tiles and crit the Knight with a Horseslayer, reset if you don’t crit”.
Valuable information cannot be concealed for the sake of a joke even if it’s in-character for a Ussop-inspired character to claim he is level 999, and even if it’s funnier to make separate pages for Sogeking and Ussop as if they are separate people. If Dan Hibiki is playable in your hack, nobody who reads the wiki page on him should be misinformed into thinking he’s the best character in the game.
Even in the absolute worst-case scenario when a hack has truly awful moments like that Gheb game or Kaga’s dancer moment(if you have to ask, don’t ask), strategy guides and pages on chapters shouldn’t use a biased voice like “To turn this character into a Dancer something truly sickening must be done and I would understand if you refused to do this or skipped the chapter after initiating the event” or author opinions like “I hate that to turn this character into a dancer, you need to do something truly evil, and you shouldn’t move this character to the northeastern village alone to trigger the event or you’re going to hell when you die”. Content warnings belong only on the hack’s main page and a clickable drop-down list should list everything that would upset PEGI and change the age rating if this was a real game. But this isn’t Common Sense Media and shouldn’t contain moral judgements about the hack’s moral fiber or educational value.
The style guide shouldn’t make this a “No fun allowed” zone where all jokes and opinions are forbidden, but any jokes that are present need to be unintrusive, relevant, and legitimately funny.
As for licensing, letting authors make pages only they can edit or decide this specific type of License or that type applies to their own work and whether someone else’s edit violates copyright on someone’s contributions would only cause headaches in the long run. One universal policy to always use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) sounds best.
What License to use and info on it courtesy of AI
The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license:
- Allows Collaboration: Anyone can contribute and modify content, as long as they give appropriate credit and share their contributions under the same license.
- Restricts Commercial Use: Content cannot be used for commercial purposes, protecting your wiki from being exploited for profit.
- Promotes Sharing: Contributors must share modified content under the same terms, maintaining the collaborative and open nature of your wiki.
However, note that this license applies only to user-generated content, such as text and original graphics. It cannot override copyright laws for third-party material like Nintendo sprites or game assets.
Handling Nintendo’s Copyrighted Material
- Use with Caution:
- Slightly-edited or unedited copyrighted assets (e.g., sprites, maps, character portraits) may fall under fair use if used for educational, transformative, or non-commercial purposes. However, this is not guaranteed, and fair use laws vary by country.
- Clearly label such assets as copyrighted by Nintendo, and include a disclaimer stating that your wiki is a non-commercial fan project not affiliated with Nintendo.
- Minimize Risks:
- Avoid hosting large quantities of unedited copyrighted material.
- Prefer fan-made or significantly altered assets over unmodified Nintendo assets.
- Host these assets on third-party platforms or link to external repositories rather than hosting them directly on your wiki.
- Add a Disclaimer:
Include a visible legal disclaimer on your wiki, such as:
“This is a fan-made project created by the Fire Emblem community. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo or Intelligent Systems. All copyrighted materials, such as sprites and game assets, are owned by their respective copyright holders and are used here for non-commercial, educational purposes under fair use.”
Best Practices for Your Wiki
- Contributor Agreement:
Require contributors to agree to a statement like:
“By contributing to this wiki, you affirm that your work is your own or that you have the necessary permissions to share it, and you agree to license your contributions under the CC BY-NC-SA license.”
- Moderation:
Assign moderators to review content and remove anything that might overly infringe on Nintendo’s intellectual property.
- Regular Backups:
Save backups of the wiki regularly in case content needs to be revised or removed for legal reasons.
Limitations of Licensing
No license can guarantee your wiki is immune from takedown requests or legal action if Nintendo objects to your use of their material. However, by:
- Using a collaborative license like CC BY-NC-SA,
- Hosting primarily fan-made or transformative content,
- Including proper disclaimers,
- And keeping the project non-commercial,
You demonstrate good faith and significantly reduce the likelihood of issues.
One idea I had was to encourage artists to draw original images of characters and chapter maps, and use them while forbidding hosting images copyrighted by Nintendo on the site. Then again, the Fire Emblem wikis are able to use game assets just fine, even sprites for characters and skill icons, and drawing our own pictures of every character and version of every ingame chapter would take a lot of effort.
