User:Blixibon/sandbox/Help:What the VDC is not

The following guidelines are not agreed upon by any degree of consensus. These are drafts in User:Blixibon's sandbox page which may be proposed in the future.

The Valve Developer Community (VDC) is a developer reference wiki intended for people working with Valve and Valve-adjacent tools or software. The scope of this concept has been taken to mean many things over the years, and it's been stretched or interpreted in controversial ways. Since the VDC can indeed be many things, this article attempts to summarize what it is not. You probably won't need to worry about this unless you're writing new articles or making groundbreaking changes. Inspired by  What Wikipedia is not.

Note that this is a set of guidelines written by the community, not a direct policy by Valve. It's here to provide a central definition for what fits on the VDC after several related incidents and arguments. User and discussion pages are also generally excluded from these rules, as they are mainly dedicated to personal use.

Note:Articles which prompted each exclusion are listed by "Precedent" underneath the associated exclusion. This is temporary, and some of these articles have yet to be fixed or deleted for various reasons. These articles should be worked on or deleted if these guidelines come into use.

The VDC is not a platform for mods

Note:Precedent: Mods which don't fit into Help:Mod Profiles.

Main article:  Help:Mod Profiles

The VDC documents many mods, but it is not necessarily dedicated to them. Mod pages are primarily created based on their notability and relevance to the development community, and they mainly exist for documentation only. Sites such as ModDB or GameBanana are better-suited for general mod publishing.

Please see Help:Mod Profiles for guidelines on whether a mod fits on the VDC.

Todo: Link to page explaining the standards for documenting mod features on regular VDC articles

The VDC is not a general Valve wiki

Note:Precedent: HL2World, Deadwater Gaming, TopHATTwaffle.

The VDC is about Valve, but it is not about all things Valve. It is about modding and development in particular. For example, the following should not have dedicated articles on the VDC:

• Community figures - Information about individual people is typically not relevant to the development process, and articles should not be dedicated to them. However, people can be mentioned inside of an article if they are relevant to it. For example, the authors of a mod should be attributed on the mod's page.
• Non-modding fan websites - Fan websites which are not dedicated to modding are typically irrelevant to the VDC's objectives. The main exception to this is other Valve wikis, which may be used to provide in-world information on game-specific subjects documented by the VDC.

The VDC is not a playground

Note:Precedent: Template:Message, Template:Discussion page.

The VDC's editors are open to change or influence most of the content and standards used by the VDC, and changing the VDC to forward its goals is completely fine. However, the VDC should not be changed just for the sake of change.

Some examples of what shouldn't be done:

• Changing content for the sake of "being more modern" - "Modern" can mean many things, but if "modern" is the best word to describe a change, it probably isn't needed. Whether or not the wiki's general style or appearance should be updated is, for the most part, up to Valve alone.
• Enforcing new standards for talk pages - Talk pages on the VDC use the classic MediaWiki topic and signature system, which may be primitive, but is still part of how the VDC works and should not be challenged by regular editors.
  Todo: Explain what it is that "newer" wikis use which the VDC shouldn't? Referring to specific templates may not age well

The VDC is not Wikipedia

Note:Precedent: Visual Studio Code (revision 391109), Materialize, some other industry tools. These articles have some merit, but many contain irrelevant information

While the VDC may contain some information on general subjects, such as level design theory, the VDC is not a comprehensive source of information for anything that does not have a direct, mutual relationship with Valve's engines. Articles dedicated to subjects with no direct relation to Valve should only be written about their relation to Valve. For example, articles dedicated to tools used in the greater game development industry should be dedicated to how those tools can be used with Valve's engines, such as by listing tutorials or plugins.