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Creatures Wiki:Guidelines/RP Policy

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Revision as of 17:44, 29 April 2006 by Bdonlan (talk) (reformat to match template; fix a typo)
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Editnorn.png This page contains a proposed guideline on the Creatures Wiki.
It is currently up for discussion as to its merit before being made official.
  • Title: RP Policy
  • Summary: Policy on what kinds of non-canonical role-play related articles are acceptable on cwiki
  • Proposed: bd_ 03:45, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Rationale

Recently, there have been a number of role-play articles added to the creatures wiki. Many (for example, Shadox) are only tangientally related to creatures at best, and of rather poor quality. Therefore, I propose the following criterion that non-canonical roleplay articles must meet in order to remain on the creatures wiki:

Guideline

Role-play articles on the creatures wiki must adhere to the following criteria:

  • The topic in question must be common to multiple venues for role-playing. For example, two unrelated forums.
The purpose of this restriction is to ensure that the article is relevant to the general creatures community. If the thing in question is local to one forum, it should be documented on that forum only; if it is exceptionally important, perhaps a passing reference on the forum's article page may be warranted.
  • The article must be written in an encyclopedic style.
The creatures wiki is not a hosting site for fiction. It is an encyclopedia. Its articles should stick to a matter-of-fact, declaritory style. Something like:
[...]
Of course, all this power comes with a price, the weilder must use a quarter of his strength, and stamina, to use those powers. Using the powers too much at once will weaken the weilder severely, so s/he must use cunning stragedy to defeat his foes and have the strength to leave the battlefeild.
Now, back to the subject...
Shadox left to spy on the enemy Kingdom of Xi'Xaviar at the age of 22. He might be snobby at times, but only to other males, other attractive males, to be more precise.
is clearly not the sort of prose expected on a wiki. Of course, this is something that can be fixed by editing - but if such an article is not edited, perhaps there is not enough interest to keep it.
  • RP articles shall be clearly marked as being role-play, using a template.
Not much to say about this one; it's to prevent confusion.
  • RP articles should be cited, or at least have references.
An article introducing a fictional character, or other such thing, but not linking back to any further information, is not useful at all to wiki browsers. Therefore, all RP articles shall be backed by links to forum threads or other sources which back up the information within.

Open questions

Some topics remain open here, and may need to be resolved with further discussion on this proposal, or on a case-by-case basis:

While SAM is originally a form of folklore, it may be sufficiently documented and known to warrant an article about its existence as a folklore element.
  • Where is the line between fiction and RP?

And so on...

Discussion

The above guideline may be discussed in the space below. When a consensus is reached, the guideline will be either rejected or put into effect.

Let's not bring SAM and the rest of the Humour articles into this, but other than that this is a good start. It only lacks being written in a actual guideline format (perhaps you can add the rewrite in a seperate section at the bottom?). The multiple venues restriction seems a bit cumbersome; if enough documentation is provided that it is important to a single forum (such as the Gameware forums which contain a large percentage of the current CC), then this should be acceptible. Otherwise I agree. My, we're going to need deletion guidelines soon, eh? Scary... :( ElasticMuffin 04:09, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
I suppose it just needs to be proven that more than just one person/thread/small group cares about it. As for SAM/etc, I'm mostly bringing it up as it's a possible topic of discussion for this. Personally, I feel that SAM and etc do belong in a seperate domain from RP, though. --bd_ 04:12, 29 April 2006 (UTC)