User talk:ExtremoMania

Welcome ExtremoMania

Hi , welcome to Grand Theft Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

We're pleased you've chosen to come to Grand Theft Wiki. We are a little different to many other sites, because we pride ourselves on encouraging every user to pitch in and help out, not just the experts.

Even if you're new and don't know much about how wikis work, we encourage you to get stuck in and start editing away! Any edit can be can be reversed, so don't worry about breaking things too much! Have a practice in the sandbox too if you like.

• If you do need help, check out our Help section.
• If you want to know more about Grand Theft Wiki, see our About page.
• If you're interested in our rules and the way we do things on Grand Theft Wiki, check out our Policy.
• If you'd like to interact with the rest of the community here, check out our Community Hub.
• If you want a safe place to test out editing, have a play around with our Sandbox

Whether you're brand new to wikis or are more experienced, check out our Tasks page, which shows you the sorts of things we need you to help out with on here.

I hope you enjoy being a part of this wiki, and that get involved in the community here! If you need help, ask any of our Staff members and leave a message on our talk/discussion pages. Have fun!

-- gboyers ^talk 15:25, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Re: Can I Edit

In reply to Can I Edit

Hi Karl. Just to give you the background, I created the GTA Wikia back in 2007. In 2010, the community chose to move away from Wikia, because of a number of reasons. However, Wikia did not allow us to move, and decided to keep a copy of our wiki, copy all our content, and run it without any of the users or staff. They also kept the URL that we were using, so a lot of our visitors don't know we moved here, and Wikia refuses to let us tell them.

We do not hate the wiki, because we created it. We just dislike Wikia (the company) for how they have treated us. Almost all of the content on that wiki was created by us and our users. However now, we believe we have the better site.

Of course you may edit here - so long as you as being helpful and positive, there's nothing wrong with that. Just remember that our policy is slightly different, and we do do some things slightly differently. Also, please do not link back to Wikia. Good to see you here - gboyers ^talk 12:56, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

I've made some article edits here and they've been nice to me. And frankly I think grandtheftwiki is better than GTAWikia. Staff has a better command of the in-game facts, and because they have far fewer new editors coming in they're much better able to teach new editors how to be good editors. I think the difference in the wiki is most sharply illustrated by comparing grandtheftwiki's Vehicles in GTA V article to Wikia's "article". Jeff ^{(talk this way)} / _{(stalk this way)} 00:45, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Firstly, you use the word "beat" as if having more articles makes the wiki better. It doesn't. We pride ourselves on having higher quality articles that are easy to understand and have detailed and useful information.

Yes, Grand Theft Wiki has 7,032 articles, whilst GTA Wikia has only 6,881. The count of articles is a good measurement as it excludes stubs, talk pages and other non-content pages. GTA Wikia has more pages but these could simply be useless stubs, user pages and talk pages.

But as for languages, only the English Grand Theft Wiki moved away from Wikia. The English one is the only one that I founded and had any real involvement with. The other languages were started completely separately, by different people, have different staff, different policies, and have not moved. They are completely separate wikis that all happen to be hosted at Wikia. So it would be up to those communities whether they chose to move or not.

As for users/contributors - it's true that GTA Wikia gets more edits and more visitors. This is because of the size of the Wikia network, and how many different sites they have under the "wikia.com" domain. This means Google sees all of Wikia as one huge site, and wrongly perceives it to be a very large and popular site. This means that every Wikia wiki is shown at the very top of Google results - even if they are tiny wikis that have never been edited. Have a look at the Google search for Microsoft wiki - this shows the Wikia site (that I also founded) even though the wiki is very small and nobody ever edits it!

Here at Grand Theft Wiki, we don't mind having a smaller number of users, because our goal is to have high-quality and useful information about GTA. Wikia is a company, and (by definition) their goal is to make profit, so they want lots of page views and adverts, even if the quality and usability is not as high as this site. That is why we left, and we are very happy that we did! gboyers ^talk 16:45, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Regarding the autoconfirmed group, this is applied automatically when a user has fulfilled a number of criteria, including having been here for a certain length of time and the contributions they've made. Don't worry as this will happen once you meet the criteria, but for the moment you are still classed as a new member, partially because you have only made 10 real contributions. Also, please could you use the Preview button more? Quite a few of your contributions have been to the same page, where it appears you have hit Publish several times without previewing. Thanks - gboyers ^talk 17:23, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

RE:Scripts

The scripts are not copyright violations. We are not releasing these for commercial purposes. These are only to inform players on what the in-game characters are saying. The scripts are fine the way they are, and they do not need to be deleted.--MrLanceVanceDance (talk) 03:55, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Just to clarify - we allow transcripts of missions on this wiki because they are useful to players, we're using extracts of the content fairly and accurately, and it\s not being used in a way that harms Rockstar or deters people from buying the games. This is different to (for example) posting a film script, as people could read that instead of watching the film. That is the justification we use on this wiki, which is another thing that makes us different to Wikia. gboyers ^talk 06:09, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Copyright Breach

It has been noted that you have been illegally copying content from Grand Theft Wiki onto the GTA Wikia site.

The incident I cite is your edits to 'Downtown Police Station' on 31st March, which is a direct copy of our Downtown Police Station article. You have not provided any attribution to Grand Theft Wiki or the original authors of the page. This is not an isolated incident, as the breach is also repeated with Little Havana Police Station being copied from Little Havana Police Station.

Under our CC-BY-SA licence, copying content is permitted in certain circumstances, but only if certain criteria are met (such as showing the original editors of the page, and linking back to Grand Theft Wiki). However you have not complied with these conditions, which makes this an illegal breach of copyright.

Section 7 of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license states: "This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License." As a result, the licence to reuse content from Grand Theft Wiki by yourself, your user account, the gta.wikia.com website and the Wikia network is hereby revoked. Full copyright law thus applies to the aforementioned parties, and permission is not given for any Grand Theft Wiki content to be reused.

You must remove all copied content from GTA Wikia immediately, and you must not copy any further content under any circumstances. If you fail to do this, you will be reported to Wikia for them to take action and ensure this does not occur again. As a staff member, and thus a representative of the GTA Wikia, you may be held personally responsible for this and any further breaches. I trust we will have your swift cooperation on this matter. gboyers ^talk 01:38, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply and the swift removal of the plagiarised content. I have no issues with yourself or any GTA Wikia user or staff member contributing to Grand Theft Wiki, but it is imperative that you do not copy or plagiarise our content. As we've discussed before, Wikia is a huge company with lots of money and staff, but at Grand Theft Wiki our content is our greatest asset, and (in my opinion) it's what makes this wiki better, so that is why I will defend our content when it's being copied or stolen. Please could you communicate this to the other GTA Wikia staff to ensure this is not repeated. As I mentioned, we have had several breaches of this in the past, even by multiple GTA Wikia staff members. Whilst I appreciate your attempt to smooth relations between the sites, the relationship is quite complex due to our shared history, and these breaches make it even more difficult to trust each other. Thanks - gboyers ^talk 12:30, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Affiliation

Firstly, you are wrong about the reason we moved. The skin was only a very small part of it. Over the years we were are Wikia, the company (Wikia Inc) kept taking more and more control of the site away from the community and staff, and kept enforcing changes that we did not like. As well as this, they kept adding more and more adverts all over the site, including inside the content areas, which they had specifically told us they would not do. This focus on making profit, rather than making a good site, or listening to the community, was the reason we moved. This all came to a head with the Oasis skin (which was renamed the 'New Wikia Look' and then just 'Wikia'), which we beta-tested and did not like. It had too many adverts, it stopped us customising the site, it focused on 'social' aspects (like showing usernames under images), and it made a lot of important features (like Special:RecentChanges and even Special:SpecialPages) very hard to find. We tried to retain the previous skin, but Wikia ignored us and forced Oasis as the default. We knew we had to leave, we asked the community, and pretty much everyone agreed that leaving would be best.

Now, we have a great site that we have full control of. We can choose and use any skin we like, and customise it however we want. We can have whatever tools and options we want (although most of them are staff tools that make our life INFINITELY easier). We also have some exciting new (secret) developments coming up soon, which would not be possible if we were still with Wikia. So even though Wikia gets more traffic, we have a much better site, and we are all very glad we left!

Monaco was a nice, simple skin that could be heavily customised. For some examples, see this or this or this. You can see the beta of the Oasis skin here - so you can see why we hated it right from the start!

It is not strictly possible to get Monaco working on here, as it's not a publicly-available skin - it's something Wikia made that works with Wikia's heavily-modified code. Some people have made copies, but they aren't the best. I think it's better to have one main skin, so we concentrate on our customised version of Vector on here. Everything is still organised quite similarly to Monaco so there are none of the huge problems we had with Oasis. Yes, some people will always prefer one colour over another, but at least this site is usable!

As for affiliation, what exactly are you proposing? When we first moved, we tried to get the two wikis to co-exist by focusing on slightly different things. Grand Theft Wiki was to cover GTA games, whilst gta.wikia.com was to cover GTA Modifications and similar subjects. That would have been the best option. however, Wikia refused this, and decided to steal all our content and re-use it for their own version of Grand Theft Wiki, without the users who created it, without asking, without discussing it. They banned all the staff, refused any links to Grand Theft Wiki, and were generally a dick about the whole thing. That is why we are upset with the way they behaved. Can you imagine trying to delete your Facebook account, and they decide to keep it, lock you out, and put up your profile (in your name) to use for adverts and marketing, just because you have lots of friends they want access to? That would be ridiculous, but that's the closest analogy to what Wikia has done.

I don't see how the two sites can become affiliated and loving partners when all GTA Wikia is is a stolen copy of Grand Theft Wiki. I'm happy to let the GTA Wikia users and staff edit over here, I'm even happy to entertain discussions, but we will not be linking to or supporting that site for as long as it has stolen our content and competes against the people that founded it. gboyers ^talk 20:14, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Re: Facebook

How dare you come onto this site and lecture me about something that happened long before you joined that site, that you don't even understand. Our anger was at this discussion (the last 2 sections on that page), where GTA Wikia members and staff state sexist and homophobic comments, believing men are better, believing gay men want to be women, and that women should be excluded from playing and appearing in GTA games.

The specific comments left on Wikia by its members and staff include:

• "if any GTA game has a female protagonist I won't buy it and I can guarentee the majority of GTA fans will feel the same way"
• "everyone I know would hate to have a female protagonist"
• "a female protagonist is not as bad as, probably a gay protagonist"
• "I agree that playing as a woman wouldn't be as bad as a gay protagonist"
• "I don't care if it's 2011, men will always prefer playing as men, unless they are gay"
• "women's places in GTA style video games will always be secondary roles"

And to repeat my comments at the time: "I am really disgusted by the comments above. For a start, I really don't see how you can say that 'most' fans would refuse to buy the game if it had a female protagonist. Really? Does it really matter? I didn't really identify with CJ at all, so the storyline wasn't my scene, but I still enjoyed the game loads. Ox is right that race didn't stop people buying San Andreas, IV or TBOGT. I honestly don't think you have to believe you are that character to enjoy the game, especially since there is a lot more to do than just play the storyline missions. I actually think most straight men would enjoy playing as a busty sexy female character, although of course asking them to date men would be a bit too far. I think Lara Croft is very relevant, actually, and Saints Row too. Maybe a GTA with a female character would change things even more. As for "playing as a woman wouldn't be as bad as a gay protagonist" I am honestly disgusted at those comments. So automatically every single heterosexual male is better than every female or non-straight male? That is really the most important thing to you? So even if the game was perfect in every way except the protagonist happened to be gay, you'd never ever play it? What you might not realise is a number of this wiki's previous staff (staff at Grand Theft Wiki) are gay, and they love GTA more than most. Even having to date women in SA and IV didn't put them off. Yes I'm sure some idiots would find it weird but I did not expect to find staff on this wiki spreading hate like that. Your sexist, homophobic, hate-filled comments have lost all my respect for you."

If you support the homophobic and sexist comments left by those other members, and believe GTA should be only for heterosexual males, then I have no respect for you either. If you think that they are just expressing an opinion, then I too am allowed to express my opinion that what they said is wrong. That discussion happened in public, so there's no harm on me commenting on it in public. I am not "insulting" anyone - simply disagreeing very strongly with what they say.

Stay out of things that do not concern you, and please stop trying to act as some sort of messenger or peacemaker between the sites, it is completely demeaning. gboyers ^talk 10:50, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I appreciate your apology and I'm glad to hear that you don't support those comments or what they implied. You need to understand that the dispute between the two sites it not a petty squabble or a silly misunderstanding, it is a complete disagreement on existence since the split of the community. I do not believe that Wikia's copy of GTW should continue to exist after the community moved away; but the new staff there (that were selected after everyone moved away) obviously want to keep the wiki that they are in charge of. That is not a dispute that can be magically resolved by a random user or staff member trying to get us to play nicely together, you should see this discussion for more information. I'm happy for you to contribute here, but try to be a normal user and contribute to the wiki rather than getting involved in the strategic management just yet, okay? gboyers ^talk 11:20, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Y

Re:Upload

Yes, I think uploading GTA game theme tunes would be good, so long as its use is justified (and not used randomly all over the site). I've tested OGG uploads, which work fine. You should use the {{extracted media}} template, and make it clear in the description where the music is from. Please be careful to follow our naming conventions (which are different to those on the other wiki). The files should be File:GTAIV-Theme.ogg etc. You can then use it within articles as you would an image. gboyers ^talk 14:08, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Yesterday I built the {{YoutubeAudio}} template which is probably a better option for embedding audio, as it just requires a YouTube video ID and no fancy ogg to be uploaded or media codecs to work. See the following example: What do you think? gboyers ^talk 15:05, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I think that using Youtube for audio is more reliable than uploading OGGs to this site, and it will work for more people (such as those who dont have compatible OGG players in their browsers or awkward security settings). Your template idea is good, so you should make {{audio}}, but use Error: No video specified as the player inside that. Ideally, the template would also be able to use OGG files (if we dont have a YouTube video of it), and also allow multiple audio streams to make a 'set' of tracks that fit together. That sound good? gboyers ^talk 13:52, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

That's okay, I made {{audio}} which you can now use here to do everything we mentioned (although I haven't made it do multiple tracks yet). gboyers ^talk 17:43, 23 April 2012 (UTC)