Talk:Clockwork Watch

Removed old tags

I removed {{multiple issues|

As this article has been expanded and there are sufficient resources. LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 18:52, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree, thanks, @LoveElectronicLiterature Lijil (talk) 08:46, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Conflict of interest editing, poor sourcing, unintentional advertising

This article was created by Yomster and accounts for half their entire work at Wikipedia. It contains the sentence

"Some participants were tasked with reporting what they had witnessed via our storytelling portal."

(note the our, my emphasis). This clearly indicates that it was written by someone involved in the process. It also contains problematic sections such as

"The Clockwork Watch story also features several brands that have been incorporated into the story universe. One such product is Alchemist Dreams an artisan liqueur, whose fictional background is embedded into the Victorian Clockwork Watch world."

This section is effectively product-placement in Wikipedia, advertising something. At the very least, this should be sourced, but it isn't. Anyone could come along and add "This series features Fred's Fish and Chip shop on Surrey Street Wolverhampton"....

I do think this article needs a massive tidy-up. It's actually quite difficult to find sources. I thought when it turned up briefly, and incorrectly at AfD (it was wrongly nominated by someone whose nominations were bulk-removed) that it would be an obvious keep because of the British Library reference, but there is really very, very little else to be found (not helped by the subject's name, which makes Google-searches difficult). Elemimele (talk) 09:20, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

@Elemimele I think you should avoid accusing Yomster of COI, especially if you don't have a strong evidence and just place a {{advert}} tag instead FuzzyMagma (talk) 10:28, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

also there is quotation at the beginning of the "Some participants were tasked with reporting what they had witnessed via our storytelling portal." sentence. It cam from here FuzzyMagma (talk) 11:06, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

@FuzzyMagma: I'm afraid that's catastrophic for the article. There are two problems. The lesser problem is that lifting these two sentences verbatim is a copyright infringement. The greater problem is that now "our" must refer to the authors of the Tor.com article, which means this article is no longer independent of the subject. And we've got next to no independent sources left, which undermines the very existence of the article. Unless we have in-depth reporting in reliable places independent of the subject, we cannot have an article. I really don't know what to do. Elemimele (talk) 11:49, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

@Elemimele then let's put for deletion discussion based on Wikipedia:The answer to life, the universe, and everything. You have my support put please remove the COI tag, replace it with advrt, also please be careful about how you connect the dots about the author as the right to be anonymous should be honoured/protected (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia is anonymous, quoting from Primefac, "Unless someone has disclosed their real-life identity on-wiki, or it is very obvious, we should not be making claims as to who they are, who they work for, etc" not sure if that is a policy but I trust they know what they are talking about FuzzyMagma (talk) 12:03, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

(1) Just to clear up the outing thing, Clockwork Watch is a "collaborative transmedia storytelling project" with multiple participants in multiple media. The Laser Lace Letters ref even refers to the "Clockwork Watch Team". I did suggest, probably wrongly, that Yomster was one of them, but I didn't in any way suggest which one, or provide any information about who all those participants/team might be.

(2) I'm as daft as a brush. The author of the Tor.com article is Yomi Ayeni, who is also the person who started Clockwork Watch, so the article never pretended to be independent.

(3) The bottom line is that I'm not actually keen to delete this article. I think steampunk and such cultures often struggle to generate mainstream media coverage so there's a risk of systematic bias against them, it's also an example of someone trying to get minority groups better represented in a major modern genre, and the fact that the British Library took it seriously suggests to me that we also should. But it was only in a temporary digital exhibition, not a permanent collection, so it doesn't get automatic notability. I honestly don't know what to do. I'd much rather someone from the steampunk community come up with some better referencing for it. At the moment, we've got six refs; two are the same and written by the subject's creator; the Boing and British Library refs are usable but don't have depth; the laser lace ref is of doubtful independence since it's a funding page written by a group who are an official spin-off of Clockwork Watch, and the remaining IndieGoGo is now a dead link. Elemimele (talk) 12:35, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Just to comment since I was pinged (my comment is being taken very slightly out of context), there is nothing wrong with asking "are you affiliated with XYZ" or make a comment as Elemimele did in their opening statement (e.g. "it's likely based on this statement that they're connected"). My quoted statement was about making a direct connection such as "User:X says they worked for Acme, so they are clearly Joe Bloggs". Primefac (talk) 14:29, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

@Primefac but my tag on Zafar Mahmud was removed and you redacted my comment, which was based on far more direct evidences of COI including the person being accusing writing a page about his father, his company and referencing his own YouTube video, and even mentioning his own name in the article. FuzzyMagma (talk) 14:45, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

And that's not what this is. Primefac (talk) 15:21, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

You know that short non sensical answers become uncool since the 2000s?

Anywwy, to elaborate.. If in my case with far clear evidence you ended up redacting my comment and then someone removed my COI tag because I can’t lay the evidence, how come you think the above is ok?!

connecting the dots based on a huge conjecture (that make sense btw) and placing a COI tag and not an advert. FuzzyMagma (talk) 17:53, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Actually the British Library exhibition wasn't digital, it was physical, as mentioned in this article from The Guardian, which unfortunately doesn't mention Clockwork Watch (it doesn't mention all the works in the exhibit). https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/jun/16/british-library-is-getting-into-gaming-digital-storytelling Lijil (talk) 08:50, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

• I'll have a go at a clean-up. It's going to be a bit tricky as I've been looking for sources and they're not great. It is somewhat unfortunate that the article was written by a user taking the name Yomster and that there is also a web-page of this name[1]. There's not much point in trying to clarify the relationship between the two given that the wikipedia-editor hasn't edited in more than a decade and is unlikely to see anything on their talk-page. Wikipedia was different back then, and I am certain there was no bad faith in any of this, so the best thing is to do what we can to clean up and improve referencing, and leave it at that, I think. Elemimele (talk) 10:21, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

  I've tried to clean up a fair bit as well, and have removed the templates. The COI template isn't relevant since Yomster did the editing ten years ago and the page has been edited by many others since. I found a couple of extra sources, but there actually isn't very much out there. I think that the British Library inclusion along with a couple of other sources are sufficient for notability though. Lijil (talk) 08:55, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Lijil: I'm sorry, I got side-tracked by off-wiki real life things and never came back to this. I did have a look for sourcing and came to the same conclusion as you: after filtering for Wikipedia's requirement for independence, very few potential sources remain, but the British Library one is very solid. I think you've done a great job and dealt with all the major issues. Thank you! Elemimele (talk) 11:15, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks, @Elemimele! And I'm glad we have concensus. Lijil (talk) 09:17, 16 October 2023 (UTC)