Template talk:Non-free use rationale video game screenshot

Purpose for boxart

You should add a Purpose specifically oriented for boxart. Maybe something like "The image is being used for no purpose other than to identify the subject of the article" (copied from Image:CivIVboxshot.jpg). Also, if you could provide some example rationales for images that aren't low-res, that would be great. SharkD 16:14, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

The default value for the purpose parameter (when purpose is not specified) is "To identify and illustrate the software in its own article or a related article". That should be sufficient. Also, the parameter "hires=yes" causes the template to say the image is high-resolution. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 01:08, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but it lacks a rationale for using a high-res image in place of a low-res one. Wouldn't it be prudent to include one? SharkD (talk) 04:12, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Vgrationale doesn't seek to answer all the questions about why a person could or should use any one particular image over any other - it just seeks to simplify the process of entering a fair-use rationale for VG images. Since it has to be used with {{subst}}, you can always go back and modify the resulting text afterwards. :) — KieferSkunk (talk) — 06:46, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

{{Non-free use rationale}} says, "Images must generally be of low resolution. The rule of thumb for raster images is no more than 300 pixels in width or height, which ensures that the image's resolution is less than 0.1 megapixels. If you are using an image of higher resolution, please explain why. If the image is 0.1 megapixels or less, just put 'Yes'." It would be useful to have some pre-made rationales (e.g., explanations) to justify the use of high resolution images. SharkD (talk) 06:52, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm still not sure I see how we can really account for all the possible reasons why a high-res image is preferable over a low-res one, in any event. Box art should be of a reasonable size, so if it's not, it should be reduced. Therefore, I don't think it's the job of Vgrationale to try to explain why someone is uploading an inappropriate image. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:39, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Currently, the template only says "No: Image is high-resolution", which is not a rationale (e.g., justification) as suggested by {{Non-free use rationale}} (WP:RAT doesn't stipulate this requirement). It's misleading; users will be led to believe they've provided a rationale when they have only made a statement of fact. At the very least, the text should be replaced with something like, "Insert a rationale for using a high resolution image, here." SharkD (talk) 04:36, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

The resolution of an image is not a rationale in and of itself - it is just a factual statement. The actual rationale for an image is stated in its purpose and description fields - the main FUR template only asks if the image is lo-res or not, so Vgrationale just answers that question. The resolution of an image doesn't justify its existence or use, though - any interpretation of the appropriateness of an image's resolution is beyond the scope of this template. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 07:31, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Genre rationale

I've had images removed from Turn-based strategy, citing an invalid fair use rationale for that article. Could you clarify the rationale in this regard? Thanks. SharkD 16:18, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Use this rationale only for specific articles on individual games, not for overview or summary articles. Carcharoth (talk) 16:15, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Could you clarify what you mean by "this" rationale? SharkD (talk) 07:04, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

It seems the entire purpose of the "genre" rationale is for images used in genre articles. Anyway, since I posted the first remark the issue has been discussed at Wikiproject Video games, and they said it was OK. SharkD (talk) 18:30, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

If a specific game's screenshot is being used to illustrate an example of a genre, then you could use {{vgrationale}} to provide the fair-use rationale for the use of that image in the genre article. The proper "purpose" flag would be "example" - {{subst:vgrationale|(Article Title)|(name=Game Title)|system=(system)|purpose=example|subst=subst:}}. Hope that helps. :) — KieferSkunk (talk) — 01:06, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure that purpose=genre isn't in fact the appropriate flag? It seems that that is what it is intended for. SharkD (talk) 04:14, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah, sorry, you're right. And I wrote that documentation, too. Silly me. :) purpose=genre = example of software in the genre. :) — KieferSkunk (talk) — 06:38, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm just curious as to why it's OK to use images in articles about genres. SharkD (talk) 06:56, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Why not? Metal Gear Solid is a great example of a stealth game, and Pac-Man is a great example of a video game in general. Using an image of a video game in a particular genre to illustrate that genre seems perfectly fine to me, just so long as the fair-use rationale is provided for doing so. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:44, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I've had images removed because a user thought it was improper. Carcharoth stated it was improper in the first response in this thread. I would like to know why not not. Something a little more substantial than "it seems perfectly fine to me." E.g., if such a rationale is satisfactory, then why is a rationale template needed? Users can simply state "it seems perfectly fine to me" in the image description page and avoid all the hassle. If I get into an edit dispute with someone over this, I'd like to do a little more than simply post a bunch of links to people saying "it seems perfectly fine to me". SharkD (talk) 05:38, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

I think you're misunderstanding the issue of fair-use rationales in the first place. Fair-use rationales have to be provided for each use of an image in the article namespace. If a particular image is being used in three different articles, it has to have three separate FURs, or else the image may be removed from the articles that it doesn't specify its rationale for. So let me see if we're on the same page: I interpreted your question as "is it appropriate to place a video-game image on a genre page?" And I said that in some cases, I think it is appropriate - again, citing Metal Gear Solid as a great example of a stealth game. My response of "it seems fine to me" was in answer to your question of whether those images could be used there. HOWEVER: My response was not an example of a fair-use rationale, and in fact we're talking about two separate issues here - the fair-use rationale would need to be something along the lines of "this image is being used to illustrate an example of this genre", NOT "it seemed fine to me".

Again, let me reiterate that this template is here to make the process of adding fair-use rationales to images easier, specifically for the video games project. When properly subst'd, though, it's no different than just writing up a complete FUR by yourself using the accepted template, and you're still responsible for knowing what the correct use of a FUR is. I hope that helps. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 07:17, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry. My initial comment here seems to have been wrong. I wasn't aware that the "purpose" parameter had different options like that. I thought this was a rationale template only for images for use on articles about a specific game. The "purpose=genre" type does seem to have a limited use. Carcharoth (talk) 01:20, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

hires=no

The template could use a rationale for the third case, where an area of the image is cropped (retaining the original's resolution) instead of the entire image being resized/resampled. SharkD (talk) 04:18, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

How about if I added a "portion" parameter, which would affect the Portion field in the main template? The options could be:

• portion=full: "The image is presented in its entirety"
• portion=partial: "This represents a portion of the original image"
• portion=closeup: "This is a magnified portion of the original image"

Would that help? — KieferSkunk (talk) — 06:43, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that makes sense. SharkD (talk) 06:54, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Move discussion: Template - Video game screenshot rationale

I just reverted a move from earlier today to Template:Video game screenshot rationale, where the reason for the move was "This template is for video game screenshots only, not for covers". I don't see any evidence that this move was discussed, and the statement in the move is incorrect - the documentation shows how to use this template for box art, online logos, screenshots, and several other types of images.

More importantly, this is a helper template, a wrapper around the standard fair-use-rationale template that just automatically fills in pieces of info to make the process easier for common video-game image types. It's not something that MUST be used, but it's gotten a lot of good feedback for being useful to those who deal with lots of game-related images. If there's a strong reason for making it specific to screenshots, I'd like to know what that is and have a chance to discuss it before we make that change, as the new name for the template severely limits its use.

WP:OWN Disclosure: I originally wrote this template, but it gained widespread adoption among members of the WikiProject Video Games community. The main reason it isn't linked very much is that its proper use is with the "subst" keyword - it replaces itself with its output, so that the final result after using this template is a fully-filled-out main fair-use-rationale template. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 06:38, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Substitution

Why does this template need to be substituted? – czar 20:29, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

@Masem and KieferSkunk, any ideas? – czar 20:50, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Best guess is that substitution assures that regardless of any changes to this template, we always have a working NFC rationale on the resulting file page to prevent NFC bots from jumping on it (since this is not a protected template) --MASEM (t) 20:57, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

There are two reasons, actually:

1. This template itself is not understood by the bots that patrol image use - the only acceptable template (at least at the time this template was written) was the main fair-use rationale template. Therefore, this template's job is to populate the main template. At the time it was written, the only way to do that was via subst.
2. There are some technical issues that arise from the template's internal logic when you don't subst.

It's possible that things have changed such that the template no longer needs to be substituted anymore, but I suspect that the first reason still holds - the bots and admins patrolling NFCC are looking for a specific template to be in place, so images that don't use that template will get tagged for deletion even though someone has written a rationale for it. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 18:26, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

But that's more a bot issue than a content issue, no? I think it's silly to substitute the template because if they're truly being treated as a group with rationales more similar than not, it's more helpful to be able to change a template and replicate the edit over thousands of pages than to try to retroactively edit 2000+ pages that used substitution. Another idea, if it's truly impossible to use multiple rationale templates, could be to pack these defaults into a parameter in the main template (e.g., |vg=yes). My 2¢ – czar 18:53, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

I think getting this template "whitelisted" for approval would be well beyond the scope of its purpose. This was merely meant to be a helper template, not a replacement. It sounds like there are more arguments in favor of getting rid of this template and instructing users to manually type their rationales - additionally, the need for doing rationales en masse has probably long since passed anyway. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 19:12, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Expanding language

@Masem and KieferSkunk, any recommendations for expanding the default language used in this template to something more substantive? czar 05:09, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Could you be more specific on what you have in mind? (Sorry for the delay - I turned off email notifications for things like pings.) — KieferSkunk (talk) — 08:14, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Pinging czar and KieferSkunk. Perhaps to make the template include more "text" than what is shown in e.g. File:C8screenshot.jpg. See e.g. {{Non-free use rationale album cover}}, to make the text in the box sound more "legal text" than just "Yes, screen size is reduced". (t) Josve05a (c) 18:24, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Revert recent change

As discussed at User talk:Lordtobi#Template:Non-free use rationale video game screenshot, this template's formatting (the parameters, not just the text) were just changed without both testing and discussion. The edit summary didn't offer any special rationale for why it needed to change. If there is none, or if there is no consensus to use the new formatting, it should be reverted to its previous form. czar 17:19, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

I see where you're coming from, and I must apologize for not disclosing the properly when editing the template, but the template mark-up and visual appearance were oddly out-of-shape, far inferior to that of sister template Template:Non-free use rationale video game cover,, and since there hadn't been any update to the template since Oct 2015, I thought that it was a good idea to polish aka. replace it with a more suitable version for the current common style for file summary rationales. Since the template requested substitution as default I did not consider the consequence to any templates that did not—wrongfully, yes, but I fixed all ~70 transclusions (not that much either). Testing has been done in an external testing environment, so I considered it safe for new transclusions par-documentation. As stated, all active, non-substituted transclusions have been fixed to adopt the new format (underwhile most File: pages also received fixes that should have been done correctly with the old syntax, but weren't, including format, outdated links, licensing tags, etc.), wherefore a rollback would result in an editors heading back to these pages and changing it to old syntax (not just revert as that would undo the fix changes). As far as the template works as it should, which it does as far as I can see, I hope that it will not be a problem to keep it. Cheers! Lordtobi (✉) 17:33, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

There was agreement to workshop text for a better fair use rationale, not to change the parameters. The Capital Letter Parameters are a bad precedent to loan from the other template—the standard is to use lowercase. I don't agree with or see what you mean by the old appearance being "oddly out-of-shape, far inferior". Fixing the 70 active transclusions isn't the issue (we don't know whether the template was substituted, as it often is, during that time, nor does the change affect the previous subtitutions) but getting consensus for completely revising the template in the first place. Remember that the purpose of this template was to provide a basis for unique fair use rationale, meaning that they were not designed to be one-size-fits all. That was a programatic choice for substitution and requiring customization, not a technical restriction. The post-TfD discussion above was less about rewriting the whole thing than finding a minimal common template text that would cover most screenshot fair use cases. Because if users slap on the FUR without reading it, or even without confirming that the screenshot matches the FUR's terms, then it really is no use at all. Both the template and the text still need work, and should be sandboxed until they're ready to go live. czar 20:46, 24 May 2017 (UTC)