Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-25330025-20150422032519

Greetings all wikia members and all those viewing this discussion. I would like to present a problem that I've experienced recently which I feel should not be ignored. Malvodion, the administrator of Smite Gamepedia, deleted content that I wished to contribute to the website. After interrogating him about this, his sides of the argument contained disrespectful things, especially in terms of an administrator.

Smite Gamepedia  is a Gamepedia about an online video game known as SMITE, which contains a set of characters. Every so often, at unpredictable intervals, the creators of the game will develop a new character and add them to the game. Recently, the next character planned to be added next was somewhat revealed. The Smite Gamepedia's home page clearly states "The most comprehensive source of SMITE information with 12,749 pages (987 articles) written by 206,504 users." The character that had been revealed, who has been known for quite enough time for someone to add the character, was not present anywhere at surface, where one would usually find such things. So, I attempted to make myself useful and create the character's page, since each character has their own page. This page was very limited in information, for the character revealed has limited information, so there wasn't any content that I added that could be considered "incorrect".

Some time later, I went to check on the page, only to see that it had been deleted by Malvodion, and I was confused as to why he would omit such information. So, like any confused human being would do, I asked him about it:

"Hi. I see you deleted by Ratatoskr page and I don't really understand why. Smitepedia is according to the homepage "The most comprehensive source of SMITE information" yet I see absolutely nothing about Ratatoskr. Even if he's not 100% confirmed, SMITE datamining is mostly accurate about that kind of information, so I find it strange how you don't want Ratatoskr to be a part of the website's information. And it's not exactly "private" if a lot of people know this much about him, for he's been known for a while now. I may be new, but I know a thing or two."

As you can see, my tone was somewhat stern, due to the fact that I contributed to the site with pure intentions, and he had deleted these contributions. Here is his response:

"The god is not confirmed on anywhere else but on one datamining site. There are no images linked to this god either, beyond a bunch of ITEM icons (by the way, the image you uploaded that was featured on that articles was originally from here, they only reuploaded it.) The squirel image they used isn't official placeholder artwork either, it's just an image they found on the internet. Until this character is shown to be properly and undeniable shown to be in the game (like some obvious placeholder artwork like Ah Puch & Medusa had), it won't have a page. Now please stop undoing edits for no good reason."

His argument had one major flaw: his "evidence" of the existence of the character (Ratatoskr) in the game was based on a placeholder image. But, there is other information about this character in the game that the dataminers have found other than said image. Also, the Datamining website he mentioned is honestly the only credible datamining website. If I were to look up "Smite datamining" in Google, that would be the first link to appear. Following it would be someone's datamining Twitter (which is only used and controlled by one person after doing further research) and many Reddit posts of things found in datamining either in reference to the major website or of datamining only done by one person, which usually tends to be minor information. The Datamining website, however, is looked over and contributed by multiple people, and might I repeat, it is its own website, that focuses solely on Smite Datamining. There are other websites I have found, but they are mostly multi-purpose, datamining being only a minority. Also, I would like to mention his last sentence: "Now please stop undoing edits for no good reason." As a member receiving answers from the administrator, this came off as quite rude. And also: I only undid one edit! And that was his deletion of the Ratatoskr page. My counter-argument to this? Well, before this character, was another character, Ah Puch, whom at first we only knew quite little about, only as much as we know of Ratatoskr. Yet, he made an Ah Puch page despite the lack of information and 100% confirmation, which goes against his views on Ratatoskr's addition. In addition, he responded to me a second message, stating this:

"To expand on the acorn icons: There icons are in the items spritesheet (all item icons are bundled up large images, and contained in a single file.), not on the "icons" file, which is the file tha contains all ability icons and other types of icons (like buff/debuff icons, the icons you see on the death recap window, etc). There is nothing that says these icons actually belong to a god."

Again, he is attempting to use the existence of a simple image, which is very likely to be related to the page, as an argument that the page should not exist yet. I don't think it matters where the photo came from, I used it for that reason, since it very likely relates to the page's content. The idea of which photo goes where, also, wasn't pointedly obvious, though at least he explained that to me. I replied with this:

"I don't really understand why you had to explain this whole acorn thing to me. Ratatoskr is a god of squirrels and it would make sense for the use of an acorn. Whatever, if you're that meticulous about having these things that are 100% related to a god, that's your problem."

Yes, I do admit that I started to let anger actually show pretty directly in my text here. This was mainly a simpler way of saying what I said in the previous paragraph, how the use of an acorn, despite what folder it came from, wouldn't be that much of a problem. This is this last thing he said that I feel shouldn't be ignored:

"I just explained the reasons to you on the comment you didn't reply to. I've been working on keeping this site up to date and as accurate as possible for two years, even implying that I don't care about having current info just because I undid your edits, because you can't bring yourself to acknowledge that maybe they were wrong is... just silly."

He still doesn't seem to take things that seriously. The reasons he explained to me were not enough to back his claim that Ratatoskr isn't confirmed. I don't know what he exactly means by "even implying that I don't care about having current info just because I undid your edits" which implies that he doesn't care about current info, though I'm sure he probably meant, "''just because I undid your edits doesn't mean I don't care about current information". "because you can't bring yourself to acknowledge that maybe they were wrong is... just silly.''" I don't think he understood that I did research, especially with my information on the creditability of datamining sites, so if I were to consider my assumptions "wrong", it would go against everything I've found out about Ratatoskr's existence, especially since Malvodion agrees on his existence . His statement is also quite rude with the just silly part, for I don't think that's what anyone should say in this situation, certainly an administrator.

So what do I want to be done about this? I don't want him banned or restricted or given limited power, I don't want to "kill him with fire!" I'm just asking that he is watched more closely for activity like this so that no one else will suffer, because let's be honest, when an administrator says things like this to you, it hurts, escpecially if you think that your contribution to the wikia will have a positive impact.

Thank you, and have a great day.

 