[game_preservation] The role of comment/opinion on referencing game history articles/things

[Andrew Armstrong]

If I could solicit opinions here - I wondered what people's opinions 
were on the use of comment and opinion (as well as tagging, 
categorisation) of historical articles/books/videos/whatever when they 
are noted in some database, or otherwise on a site. Anything but the 
games themselves basically.

I mean, for instance, sometimes data might be incorrect/not reliable, or 
the author might have a conflict of interest commenting on the subject 
(or the article itself being only an opinion - although where you draw 
the line is sometimes hard). I presume these are okay to note, 
especially if they give context for the why.

Of course there is also plenty of opportunity for useful "praise" 
("Contains the most...", "is detailed in the area of...", "Good 
resources to use for..." etc.), however on the other side - there can be 
negative comments about the work ("Too lavish praise of...", "Poor 
assumptions...", "Factually incorrect sources...", "Opinions stated as 
fact...", "arbitrary inclusions and exclusions..."). People generally 
don't like negative criticism, whatever it might be.

Should that negative side be shyed away from? or is it entirely 
justified to make such lists more useful? Of course such additions to 
any kind of link/reference/list would be partially if not wholly opinion 
in many cases (IE: just how can you factually tell the author is a 
fanboy of a certain system?), but if you really needed to find the 
useful information out there, would this be okay?

Does anyone have any experience of this kind of categorisation or 
comment system on resources and how to do this kind of thing? I wonder 
about legal problems to, libel and that, although if you comment on the 
work not the author that's fine right?

I think I've brought this up a bit before, just would be interesting to 
know what people think about saying both good and bad things about a 
historical resource. I know people have commented useful praise and 
negative things on specific books and authors before (just for example) 
- things I never knew that helps me know more about game history :)

Hope that's clear anyway - for myself I'm pretty okay with negative 
points on a piece (especially if it is actually outdated or wrong, and 
needs stating as such) especially if it makes it easier to find things 
later, although straying too far into opinions (about the author, 
motives, etc) can get into trouble thinking where to draw the line. I 
think if there was a way of separating more factual 
descriptions/tags/categories and short pieces of opinion and notes on a 
piece might be the best method.

While I'm not there yet, this would be about the SIG database of 
references I'm still slowly designing and building. :)

Andrew

PS: Wow, that's long winded. TL;DR - would positive/negative opinions on 
things in a history reference DB be good/bad/useful?