Currently, we occasionally cite Discord messages from Wookieepedia's official server using {{Discord}}. But, it's been brought up recently that other official Discords for SW games exist, such as the one for Star Wars: Hunters. On occasion, developers or others who have worked on the game have revealed information there, and I can easily imagine someday it might be a Discord announcement or some such that marks the first "mention" of a subject existing, like how characters occasionally get revealed before their release via authors' social media.
Of course, we probably shouldn't start citing random, private Discords. People could start faking this, that, and the other and claiming it's from Pablo for all we know. For our own server at least, the reason we do cite messages, to my knowledge, is because the Social Media Team keeps a log of who's who and has the DMs with creators on social media to internally prove what an author/creator's handle is.
What was suggested was that we CT a policy stating that we can cite messages from [list of CT-approved official Discords] when said official Discords clearly denote who creators are. That'd be the intent with the Hunters one—and via various sources such as this post, we can prove the Hunters Discord is an official one and not a fan one. And for ease's sake, perhaps we ought to change the Discord template we have now to WookDiscord or something, similar to {{WookYouTube}}, and leave the Discord one usable for other specified servers.
And separately... there may be very limited circumstances in which we choose to deem information from non-official servers as citable. One suggestion was that we make a new Wookieepedia-namespace page similar to Wookieepedia:Social media screenshots with a table of verified screenshots + their URL message links, and individually CT them. Tedious? Yes. But also... it'd be rare. And it's probably one of the only ways to really ensure that we're not just citing air, so to say. For some, like some Leland comments in a private server, do imagine the link would have to be provided and at least some Wookians could go check it out; and after seeing its indeed a legit message in Discord, and that it's at the legit handle/username for the individual in question, then it should pass. If someone comes by with a screenshot unaccompanied by any Discord message link and won't specify what server it came from... then maybe less legit.
Of note to see this SH through now, rather than delayed, due to Hunters (one of the main Discords for this proposal) being shut down. Which means if their Discord is shut down, we may lose some stuff if we don't grab it now (and preferably, doing so while the messages are still live and can be verified by many people is better than trusting screenshots-only later on.—spookywillowwtalk 20:59, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
Discussion
- List of approved official servers — yes. Screenshots — also yes, if they have at least been verified by a trusted (I trust most of you :P) editor, with the usual precautions on edited screenshots/invalid links from a random anon. OOM 224 21:58, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
- Yes. Bonzane10
01:30, 15 March 2025 (UTC)