Board Thread:Series general discussion/@comment-18014300-20170717032044

So there has always been an unspoken rule in this community to allow for using real-life, non-Assassin's Creed sources for very basic information in articles.

Look no further than the birth dates, death dates, birth places, and places of death of characters in AC who have real-world historical counterparts. We have always included these even when the information isn't given in an Assassin's Creed source. This is technically a violation of standard wiki sourcing policy.

However, we have made exceptions for the sake of completeness and quality. An example I always use is the article on Madrid. If no Assassin's Creed source has ever explicitly said that Madrid is the largest city and capital city of Spain, we technically shouldn't be writing that. Instead, the most we can write is "Madrid is a city in Spain" or, depending on if the source material (i.e. the film & its novelization) had ever even explicitly said the city is in Spain, we might even be forced to write only "Madrid is a city [that hosted a facility of Abstergo Foundation?]."

Madrid example

From that example above, we should note several things. The first is that if Madrid really has never been described as a city in Spain in an AC source hypothetically (though I think it has in Revelations), the sentence does run fine to only say it's a city. But it leaves sort of an awkward taste in our mouths when we know that Madrid is better defined as the capital city of Spain and are forced to refrain from adding just that little more detail just because AC wasn't explicit about that. This is why we have been lenient about proper sourcing for really basic information. Since Assassin's Creed is set in the real-world, sometimes really basic information about things in the series aren't explained because the developers would assume we already know them. They wouldn't feel the need to describe Madrid as a city in Spain necessarily because that is common knowledge in real-life. However, to write that Madrid is the capital city of Spain is still technically in violation of wiki policy if this isn't explicit in an AC source owing to the ridiculous yet remote possibility that Ubisoft would randomly say that this is not the case in AC.

There are many examples of this. Sierra de Cazorla isn't explicitly described as a mountain range, but a quick search on Wikipedia explains that this is what it is. But if we stick absolutely to AC sources, the most we can describe is that it's a region that hosted a base for the Assassins. While this is grammatically fine, it's just not as helpful as explaining more clearly what it really is exactly.

So a simple solution is for us to continue working with this exception to sourcing that we have long since adopted as a convention. However, there are more complicated examples that show that at some point the line between information that is basic enough to merit qualify as an exception and information that isn't basic enough to qualify can be blurred.

War on Terror example

War on Terror is probably the best example. The creator of the article wanted a complete infobox, so he added all those countries and even its leaders... never mentioned in AC sources. At the same time, when I revised the article, I felt compelled to give basic information on what the conflict is. The conflict is only ever mentioned once by name in Assassin's Creed: Initiate, where it features in the backstory of Emmanuel Barraza, so it's entirely canon. However, AC never explains what the War on Terror is. We all know in real-life; it's part of history, or history in the making. But when we have an article on it, and it is significant enough to have an article because it is part of Emmanuel's backstory. While we could've just written "The War on Terror is a conflict where Emmanuel Barraza killed innocent children and became so guilt-written he renounced violence for the rest of his life bla bla bla", again for the sake of quality and completion, it feels more helpful to actually be able to describe what the conflict actually is, so that's why we pull from real-life information.

But in describing the War on Terror, how basic is basic enough? Sure everything in the infobox on participants and leaders seem basic enough, but it's so vast that it doesn't feel quite right. Then you have what I wrote, explaining that it began as a reaction against 9/11 and has expanded to encompass the Syrian Civil War. (Note that I wrote it like that to serve as an exhibit for this discussion). That covers the defining elements of the War on Terror, but is that too much? The line for when something qualifies as part of this "exception to sourcing" can be blurred.

Roanoke Colony

Here's another example. In AC, Roanoke Colony is only ever referenced, but it's never explained clearly that it's an English colony that vanished mysteriously. Instead, the brief reference to it conjectures it was an Assassin colony and that the Assassins "guided the colonists into the wild". Although that certainly does parallel the mysterious disappearance of the colony, if we didn't know what the Roanoke Colony from real history, we might not immediately interpret that the colony was entirely lost to the public. The reference to the Roanoke Colony is cryptic and relies on familiarity with the real-life subject to get its meaning across even though no AC source expressly explains it for us what the Roanoke Colony is.

While I technically could have just written that it was a possible Assassin colony where the Assassins may have guided the colonists into the wilderness, it's just much better for the article, and clearer, to explain the full context of it: that it's an infamous English attempt at a colony that mysteriously disappeared and is thought to possibly have been associated with the Assassins.

Issue

So the issue is that here we have a convention to make exceptions for sourcing only to AC to cover gaps in describing certain things in the franchise that have real-world counterparts. These gaps are there partly because some things are common real-world knowledge that does not need to be explained. Other gaps feel necessary to fill in to enhance the quality or completeness of an article.

It's an issue because it's not clear where the line should be drawn.

Solutions

My proposal is to feel free to cite Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia is not commonly a reliable source to be cited in professional writing, I think that in this case it's different because we're a wiki in and of itself, and so it can be seen as just taking from a sister website. More importantly, I would argue that citing to a less-than-ideal source is actually preferable to not citing at all. Moreover, it would be honest. If people are really taking these basic information like dates straight off from Wikipedia, not citing to Wikipedia because it's not an authoritative source doesn't change the reality that that is where you took your information.

I have already done so with Sierra de Cazorla and Roanoke Colony but only as examples for this discussion.

I know that we normally think that introductions shouldn't have citations, but contrary to popular belief, standard wiki guideline is actually that citations should be in introductions if a piece of information there is exclusive to it and therefore not cited anywhere else.

Of course, we can go instead for the absolute route of being 100% strict with AC sources, but then we would be left with many awkward articles that only describe them being referenced in AC without explaining context that is obvious to us but is not explicit in AC sources because it's assumed as common real-life knowledge. <ac_metadata title="Citing to Wikipedia"> </ac_metadata>