Wikipedia entries related to Fantasy Grounds

[ddavison]

If anyone in the community is familiar with Wikipedia and their editing rules, our page is pretty out of date and missing lots of relevant info. I attempted to edit it to add a list of officially licensed systems and the like, but they blocked my account and reverted the changes as a conflict of interest. Evidently, providing purely fact-based info is not allowed if you have a direct connection to the topic at hand. As the President and Owner of the company, I am unable to make any edits because I receive a financial benefit from the topic I'm editing.

So... if you do not have any conflict of interest and don't receive any financial incentives from Fantasy Grounds or SmiteWorks, you are free to add in the same info that I was basically trying to add.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Grounds

Similarly, there are a number of pages for each of the tabletop RPG systems that we officially license and each of these could be updated with information about how the ruleset is licensed for Fantasy Grounds. They often have a section on video games that rely upon the core material.

For anyone needing a reference to verified dates, you can access that here:
https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FGCP/pages/996638844

[The Canterbury Tail]

So I am an admin on Wikipedia, and if you notice from usernames I responded on your userpage regarding the username and COI issues. Now that I e seen the stuff I’m willing to update the Wikipedia pages within Wikipedias rules, but not to be promotional and not to mention Fantasy Grounds in exclusion of other VTTs on various articles. For instance it would be non neutral of me to add that as an example Call of Cthulhu is on Fantasy Grounds and not that it’s also on Foundry or Roll 20 for example.

One thing that needs to be careful is primary sources. It’s better to have reliable third party sources for a lot of information. So I can check around for other sources on some information.

[ddavison]

I limited my mention of rulesets to official licenses. These have dates and binding contracts between two separate business entities. For instance, Call of Cthulhu is officially licensed for 6th edition and 7th edition for Fantasy Grounds. It is licensed by Chaosium, the owners of the IP. From what I can tell, Foundry lists Call of Cthulhu as an Unofficial ruleset.

Roll20, on the other hand, has an official license as well. Listing the dates when each of these occurred would also demonstrate whether or not one VTT was “the first officially licensed VTT” for any given game system. This is purely factual information that can be easily verified or contradicted if it was proven to be false. Fantasy Grounds is the first officially licensed VTT for a very large number of roleplaying game systems. Some of these link back to Press Releases and others do not.

If you need any information about release dates and you can’t find it from our product listings or our wiki pages, then you can send a request in to our customer support channel to request this. You are free to ask any of our licensed partners for verification of these claims as well.

This effort to update the entries seems an awful lot like work, which is why I was originally volunteering to add those myself. Because of the handling of potential COI at Wikipedia, I will refrain from posting or updating anything there in the future. As a repository of information that is in the public interest, however, I think it should contain as most accurate data as is available.

[bmos]

You might have gotten away with it if you hadn't broken the username policy. Dead giveaway that you were a COI.


Usernames are not allowed on Wikipedia if they:
only contain the names of companies, organizations, websites, musical groups or bands, teams, or creative groups

[ddavison]

You might have gotten away with it if you hadn't broken the username policy. Dead giveaway that you were a COI.

hahaha. Yeah, I thought it would be best to use "FG" as part of the name to show that I was related. I used FGGeneral.

I read the naming part where it recommended against using your real name, but obviously they have a lot more things to read on naming, and policies. I don't really have time to learn the nuances of that system. I still think a potential conflict of interest is something to disclose and obviously look out for stuff like "Fantasy Grounds is the BEST system ever!". I have no problem with Roll20 saying stuff about "over X million users" or whatever, or even, the first VTT to have 1 million users. To me, those are just statements of facts. Sure, they are obviously going to be interested in sharing facts that make their system look good, but I don't see any actual conflict of interest in those sort of statements.

The wikipedia page has a section on Reception and this is something that would seem to be a conflict of interest to write about as the party itself. That sort of information should come from external sources only. When did you release the product? How many users do you have? What is your logo? When did X license system Y? I don't understand how any of those things would ever be considered a conflict of interest to discuss, no matter who the party is. The only important thing is that those are accurate.