User blog:LostInRiverview/The Sims Wiki News - 7th May 2013 Special Edition

 The Sims Wiki - Community Blog Special Edition The official announcement of The Sims 4 on Monday leaves a lot of ground to cover regarding information on the game, and information on how The Sims Wiki will handle the game going forward.

Game news
Yes, it's official! Maxis made the announcement shortly after 15:00 UTC to a wide audience on Twitter and across the web. Maxis chose to reveal the existence of TS4 to a select group of fans and fansite owners a few hours before their public announcement, but generally those sites and people chose not to leak the news early. Later news releases throughout the day have given us a few key pieces of information about the new game:


 * The Sims 4 will release sometime in 2014. It could mean January 2014, or December 2014, or (most likely) sometime in-between. We just don't know... and probably won't know for some time. It's also worth noting that any release date that Maxis gives us later on may only be tentative - the initially published release dates for The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 were both postponed.
 * The Sims 4 is releasing on PC and Mac systems... the announcements so far do not specify whether they will release on both systems at the same time, however.
 * The Sims 4 will not require an always-on internet connection, and the game will be designed to be played as a single-player offline game. There will be networking and social features available at launch, but they will not be core functions of the game and will be optional.

The Sims Wiki news
As you can imagine, the universe of Sims fansites exploded with word of the announcement, and The Sims Wiki's Facebook and Twitter pages were no exception. Comments ranged from criticism of the released promotional images and logo, to anticipation of which features may or may not be in the TS4 base game, to wishes about different features, Sims or ideas to feature in the game. Conversations like these also took place on our announcement blog post.

There will be plenty of talk about TS4 in the months to come, as well as all manner of wishes and speculation about the contents of that game. While these discussions are a natural part of an announcement as big as the one we had on Monday, it's important to remember that the discussion should take place outside of the articles themselves.

The Sims Wiki strives to present factually accurate and verified information, especially about unreleased games, and this rule applies to The Sims 4. Right now, there is simply not much we know for sure about the game, and so there is not much that will be added to articles about the game. The administrative team will be strictly enforcing our Unreleased Games Policy when it comes to information added to our page on The Sims 4 - information added must be referenced and it must be accurate, or it will be removed and the editor adding it will be warned or blocked. This is to ensure that the information we present on The Sims 4 is as correct as it can possibly be.

Along with the announcement came a new image and new logo for The Sims 4. While it may be tempting to quickly upload these images and, in the process, cover up the previous The Sims series logos, I urge editors to refrain from doing this. The Sims series logo is an official logo, used by Maxis in publications and on websites... as far as we know, Maxis has not changed the logo used in those places yet, so the "old" TS3-style logo remains, at least for now, the official logo. If and when Maxis releases a new series-wide logo, please do not upload the logo over the old one we have now - this technique can dramatically change the appearance of pages where the logo is currently used, sometimes against the author's wishes. A better approach is to upload new logos as new files, and to rename files accordingly, to ensure that both old and new logos are hosted on the wiki. Remember, as always, to license the images properly.

As always, thank you to everyone for your enthusiastic discussions of The Sims 4, and your desire to improve The Sims Wiki's collection of knowledge on every facet of The Sims series. Thank you, as well, to those of you who have chosen to 'like' us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and who engage with us there. Hopefully we can all look forward to many great months of discussions, anticipation, and excitement as we await The Sims 4!

--  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 02:46, May 7, 2013 (UTC)