Template talk:Leak

Not encyclopedic

I'm uncomfortable with the notion of putting leaked content into articles that are not about the leak event itself. Leaks can absolutely be encyclopedic content, see Hasbro vs. Rutter or the New Phyrexia godbook leak, but those were notable because they were officially acknowledged, and one of them actually litigated. They are historical events documented as part of our coverage of Wizards' business practices. Without the official acknowledgement, a leak on reddit or facebook is fundamentally unverifiable. What guardrails would ensure that claims tagged with this template are actually encyclopedic? How do we handle the circumstance where someone fakes a leak, a wiki editor picks it up as fact, the community takes the wiki at face value, and then it's later proven fake? We can revert the edit and take down the false claim, but the damage to our credibility is done. Corveroth (talk) 17:42, 28 June 2025 (UTC)

A leak can become notable due to being widely discussed in the community. How "widely discussed" it must be is a matter of consensus. A world where professional media about hobbies has been supplanted by social media makes it harder to judge credibility, but it doesn't negate the possibility of validity.

Article text documenting a leak should discuss how it's being received just as much as the contents, which should not be stated as fact, and should use this template no matter how confident any editor is in the source. A self-test on prose style might be "if any editor would feel a little silly removing this after finding out the leak was fake, then it is not written correctly". Similarly, if multiple leaks get added to articles for several sets in a row and most of them turn out to be false, then notability is being judged too leniently.

I would understand adopting absolute prohibition if it became too burdensome to police insistent editors adding spoilers without consensus, or if AI faking become convincing and common such that even widely-believed leaks turn out to be mostly false. One thing I noticed is Spoilers only lists leaks which turned out to be true; is there any way to assess historical data to see how many leaks that were reported on or widely discussed turned out false by comparison?

I'm always wary of applying Wikipedia standards of credibility/verifiability when our fundamental nature is a fan wiki — our threshold of notability for details pertaining to Magic is drastically lower, and our citations are rife with inherent bias because in many cases only first-party sources are available. The concepts and methods of good judgement remain the same, but by necessity the thresholds and standards we hold information to must be different. It feels contradictory to both accept that we are much more limited in sources than general encyclopedic content on Wikipedia, and continue to hold sources to just as high a standard as Wikipedia such that we end up only accepting first-party ones. It'd be practically baking the very non-neutral "the party line is the only line" policy into all of our content about upcoming sets. It lets Wizards policy of silence be veto power over what gets covered here.

I personally tend to be so uninvested in spoilers that it actually irks me to see officially spoiled-but-still-not-completely-understood mechanics "explained" on the wiki before the rules explanations are released. (Looking at you, Battle/Siege mechanics...) And I'm a supporter of spoiler tags for story developments. Yet, I'm still inclined to avoid a hard ban on leak information until it becomes a recurring problem. I guess it just feels too black and white to say "there is NO circumstance worth considering a leak". If the whole community is buzzing about something but we've banned ourselves from touching it, that too can hurt our credibility. Use high standards, but use judgment.

IMO! - jerodast (talk)