Talk:Smilegate

Uncited parts sound like advertising

>Crossfire is the world’s most popular online FPS that has reached more than 8 million concurrent users around the world. Crossfire is being serviced in 80 countries worldwide including China, Brazil, Vietnam, Northern America, and Europe.

This sounds like an ad and there are no sources for this claim. Pklingberg (talk) 13:00, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

Recent editor potential COI

Recently an editor added significant MOS:PUFFERY-type content to this article and to Kwon Hyuk-bin. I'll be monitoring both to see that or similar editors return. Need to be mindful of potential undisclosed WP:Conflict of interest. seefooddiet (talk) 08:19, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

Neutrality

Recent edit, while better sourced, has significant formatting issues and overly promotional language. Lot of WP:MISSION-like writing, MOS:PUFFERY, and flowery complimentary language. Suspicion of undisclosed COI is increasing. seefooddiet (talk) 08:20, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

@Publicandcity Could you respond to either this post, the previous one, or my post on your talk page? Are you connected to Smilegate or Kwon Hyuk-bin in any way? Are you an employee of Smilegate? seefooddiet (talk) 08:21, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I am a journalist for a gaming-focused media outlet based in Pangyo and a heavy Lost Ark player.

I have a positive impression of Smilegate and admire its founder, Kwon Hyuk-bin, as well as Director Geum Kang-seon. However, I do not have any personal acquaintance or conflict of interest with them.

While conducting research, I reviewed pages on platforms such as Namuwiki and Wikipedia. I noticed that the English Wikipedia page for Smilegate lacked content compared to its Korean counterparts, which is understandable given Smilegate’s lower international recognition. My intention was simply to transfer relevant information from sources like Namuwiki and the Korean Wikipedia.

In fact, everything I originally added was directly copied from Namuwiki and the Korean Wikipedia. However, in response to concerns raised, I deliberately removed overly complimentary language and exaggerated expressions to ensure neutrality. I hope this clears up any misunderstandings. Publicandcity (talk) 08:47, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Note that you cannot copy text from Namuwiki or the Korean Wikipedia verbatim without proper attribution; that would be a WP:COPYVIO.

I'm still noticing significant issues with formatting and complementary language, so I will keep the templates up. seefooddiet (talk) 08:57, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

The parts I added about Smilegate are generally well-known in Korea, especially among gaming journalists, and most of the related content comes from news articles. Therefore, I did not consider it to be a copyright violation. I will be more mindful of this in the future.

If there are any overly complimentary expressions, please let me know which parts need revision, or feel free to edit them directly. Publicandcity (talk) 09:08, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I said "verbatim"; if you paraphrased things it's not a copyright violation. A copyright violation is if you directly copy text. It doesn't matter if something is well-known, for example if you copy a news article that's a copyright violation.

The overly complimentary parts are like this: to foster an ecosystem that supports creative education, content creation, and youth entrepreneurship WP:MISSION-like writing, just sort of vague pleasant-sounding things.

The foundation partners with esteemed global institutions "esteemed global" is excessively fluffy, as if trying to associate Smilegate with prestigious things.

Guided by the philanthropic vision of founder self-explanatory; fluffy seefooddiet (talk) 09:20, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

The above isn't a complete list. I feel like you should be able to spot these. Again, on Wikipedia you're supposed to remain as dry as possible; we're not here to compliment the company or people, we are an encyclopedia. We're supposed to write on things dryly and neutrally. seefooddiet (talk) 09:20, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

@Publicandcity No game developer pages I know of have a social impact section. Generally most sources relating to a game developer's social impact (such as Expanding Creative Education & Fostering a Creative Ecosystem) would only be reported by the company itself or something like PR newswire, or from sites that regularly repost official announcements from their industry (even if the non-reposted articles are good). Also, most enwiki users cannot read Korean and have no way of evaluating the integrity of the source. Obviously Chosun is a reliable source and mk.co.kr seems to be as well, but what about the others? And how can we verify that the way the article was phrased matches how it is written here? For example, did the Chosun article mention social impact directly or that WP:SYNTH? If it did mention it, did it actually say the initiative has a positive social impact or did it say something like "... the endeavor is what Smilegate calls it's Social Initiative Program."

It's also hard to tell the nature of entrepreneurship programs because unless they are giving it away for free it's more like an investment. Also:

>Smilegate Investment focuses on venture capital investments that create social value, such as job creation and market expansion.

I would be surprised if any reputable newspaper claimed this. It's a simplistic view of the economy.

Really, this is an interesting topic, because if a company gets their social initiative programs covered by a mainstream news site (eg. the two Chosun articles) do we then have to include it in the page? It seems clear to me that these initiatives are not genuine, which is why the always feature most predominantly in investor relations pages, ie. ir.[company_name].[tld] because thats the whole reason they do it. Almost every publicly traded company has these. However, if someone does add these (in a proper way that does not violate eg. WP:MISSION) can you really remove them?

Generally, they aren't added to pages in the first place because readers aren't interested in them. For example, when I was first doing research for this article, I found multiple articles about labor disagreements and the divorce of the founder Kwon Hyuk-bin. Looking at namuwiki, it points to an article about Smilegate not paying workers for overtime. I didn't add these to the article (despite citing both articles for other purposes) because I didn't find the topic interesting. (Actually, I did find the divorce article fairly interesting, I just didn't want to add it.) I was mainly interested in its game engine and also wanted to clean up the article a bit by updating the employee count and fixing some other issues. It would look kind of silly to have both the social impact section and the labor union and overtime pay issues right next to each other. Additionally, (although I hate invoke this term) the most "encyclopedic" thing would probably be not to include either of these things, because they are essentially news. If you think about opening up a real encyclopedia that has an entry for Smilegate in it, do you think you would see anything besides the games they made, the number of employees and the revenue? The subject is only notable for the games they make and that would probably be the whole article. Of course, this depends on the type and scope of the theoretical encyclopedia, which is part of the issue with "encyclopedic" as a term. I do think it's fair to say that no encyclopedia would have multiple paragraphs on a game developer's social impact unless it was actually notable beyond a few news sources mentioning it. Perhaps an encyclopedia would have one or two sentences mentioning something. The difference is that Wikipedia is not constrained by size or time so it should have more information. And there is of course a point where something that is news becomes important enough to the given subject that it should be included. But if we do want to include these ancillary topics, then according to WP:NPOV, we should include all such miscellanea. J2UDY7r00CRjH (talk) 17:01, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

WP:KO/RS btw seefooddiet (talk) 20:09, 21 February 2025 (UTC)