User blog:Gideoncrawle/ADMIN BLOG POST: Revisiting Rules, and The Future of Featured Quote

Introduction
A number of factors, ranging from my cleanup work on our article and file libraries to an unpleasant dustup we had a couple of months ago, have led me to the conclusion that a number of our rules are in need of clarification and/or revision. There are also situations where we probably need a formal policy, but don’t currently have one. I have floated a couple of revision/clarification proposals in recent months, but I think the end of the school year is as good a time as any to revisit our rules as a whole. To that end, this blog will address a number of rules (or gaps in the rules, as the case may be) and offer proposals. Some of the following proposals are intended mainly as a starting point for discussion, while others are more concrete.

Character Pages
Character pages present several issues.

Minimum Required Content

 * Current rule: Character pages must have more than one sentence.

This is the biggest single problem, in my opinion. During the course of my “janitorial” project, I discovered that a full thousand articles—one out of every six articles on this wiki—were 500 Bytes or less. (It’s down to about 750 now, but the percentage hasn’t changed much.) Most of these are underdeveloped, “barely legal” character pages.

The problem with a rule based on sentence count is that it’s easy to get around. For example, a character page that says, “John Doe is a contestant in Total Drama X, and is on the Killer Whatevers team” is in violation of the current rule, whereas “John Doe is a contestant in Total Drama X. He is on the Killer Whatevers team” is not, even though both give exactly the same information. Compounding the problem is that a lot of people seem to think that just filling out an infobox satisfies the rule. (I don’t really like infoboxes in the first place, because they tend to be chock full of “late arrival” spoilers, but that’s another rant for another time.)


 * Proposed rule: Character Pages must have content that cannot easily be put on the story page. Just filling out an infobox isn’t enough.

In practice, this rule would mean that a character page must have substantial content over and above what’s in the infobox. Is the main reason for having a character page to display a portrait of the character (which I suspect is actually the case more often than not)? It’s just as easy to display those in a gallery on the story page. If all you’re going to do on a character page is tell us the character’s archetype and team assignment(s), it’s just as easy—and arguably easier for the reader—to put that information into the story page’s contestant roster section. If all you have for each character is a three-line bio, that’s just as easy to put in the roster section as well. Do you want to tell us when contestants were eliminated, and where they placed in the competition? That’s already in the elimination table, which the vast majority of competition stories have. Do you want to tell us, in a line or two, why each contestant was eliminated? That can just as easily be a supplement to the elimination table.

With the proposed rule or something similar in place, qualifying character pages would have things like substantial bios, “audition tapes”, summaries of the character’s activities in the story, substantial trivia, or any combination of these. I say “substantial” trivia because we shouldn’t allow one or two lines of fluff trivia to justify a character page. I’ve seen character pages—valid under the current rule, I might add—that justify themselves by telling us things like “John Doe was the 6th contestant to arrive,” with no other text except for the character’s archetype and team assignment. My first thought when I encounter a page like that is along the lines of, “You made a separate page to tell me that?

I suspect a major cause of underdeveloped character pages is that the story author plans to put meaningful content on the page, but then puts it on the back burner and forgets about it, so the page becomes little—or nothing—more than a placeholder. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Pages for Friendships, Relationships, Conflicts, etc.

 * Current rule: Pages for friendships, relationships, conflicts, and so on are not allowed.

Dra was recently granted the first variance to this rule that I’m aware of, because he wanted tabulate his cast’s friendships, conflicts etc. in one place and was willing to make it a subpage of his story instead of a freestanding page. The thought occurs that if other people did this, it might reduce the incentive to create a bunch of underdeveloped character pages.


 * Proposed rule: Each story may have one—and ONLY one—subpage for the cast’s friendships, conflicts and so on. Freestanding friendship pages, conflict pages, etc. are not allowed.

Multiple Pages for a Character
Dra also wants to do something else that I don’t think anyone has ever done before. His two competition stories use the same cast, and he wants each character to have a separate character page for each story. (He originally wanted to make these freestanding pages, but is now inclined to make them subpages to his story pages.) The standard practice for characters appearing in multiple stories has been to have one page for the character, with separate sections for each story that said character appears in.

I think that granting Dra’s request would be a major policy change, and so should be put to a vote of the admins. In any case, character pages set up as subpages would be subject to the same content rules as freestanding pages.


 * Proposed rule (if the admins decide to allow multiple character pages for the same character): If a character has separate character pages for each story that the character appears in, then all such pages must be set up as subpages to their respective stories. In other words, such characters may NOT have freestanding character pages.

I’m inclined to oppose the idea of a character having multiple pages, because even as subpages it could create a lot of needless clutter; but what do the other admins think?

Standalone Characters

 * Current rule: none

There are a fair number of character pages for characters that do not appear in a story. Some of these are in “character libraries” and are routinely auditioned or otherwise made available for other people’s stories. Others are ostensibly intended for a future story, which is sometimes identified and sometimes not. Still others were orphaned when the stories they were attached to got deleted out from under them. Character pages in this last group are usually deleted on sight (i.e. without giving a notice to the page creator) but we have no policy on the other groups. This is a potential problem with the second group, i.e. those earmarked for a future story, because these pages tend to be little more than placeholders, even though they may comply with the letter of the law. This brings us to…

Placeholder Pages

 * Current rule (character pages): Character pages must be more than one sentence.


 * Current rule (story pages): Titles for competition stories may not be made until the previous story has reached the Final 5. Titles for noncompetition stories may not be made until the previous story is 75% complete.

The limitations of the current rule regarding character pages has already been discussed, so this section will deal primarily with story pages.

In practice, the story page rules apply only to sequel stories, as we currently have no restrictions on how many unrelated competition stories a user can have active. An unfortunate result of this is that some users set up story pages as fast as they get premise ideas, and then leave those pages to languish. I have seen users with a dozen or more undeveloped or barely developed (i.e. 2 chapters or less) story pages cluttering up the listings. (In some cases, the user created all of those pages in the span of a few days.) That’s why, when I come across a barely started or unstarted “dead” page from an inactive user, I routinely go through that user’s Contributions listing looking for other such articles. I’ve found a lot of dead fics that way—probably hundreds.

Do I really have to make a case that no one here could work on a dozen stories at once and do them all justice? This brings us to my next proposal:


 * Proposed rule: A user may not have more than three competition stories in progress or “on hiatus” at a time.


 * This limit includes collaborations where the user is the lead author, but not collabs where the user is merely a contributing author.


 * This limit also does not include sequel stories that are waiting for their predecessor story to finish.

By limiting the number of irons a writer has in the proverbial fire, this rule would reduce the chance of their being abandoned. The reason we’d have to count “on hiatus” stories against the limit is because if we didn’t, we’d be creating an exception big enough to swallow the rule. We could conceivably extend the rule to noncompetition stories as well (giving them a separate limit), but I for one don’t think it’s necessary at this time because:
 * 1) People on this wiki start far more competition stories than noncomps;
 * 2) Noncomps tend to be much shorter than competition stories, and so tend to be finished quickly; and
 * 3) Noncompetition stories don’t usually have character pages, so dead/comatose noncomps don’t contribute nearly as much to the clutter problem.

When does a page become a placeholder?
As noted previously, users—even admins—often set up a story page and/or character pages and then, for whatever reason, lets those pages languish with little or no content for months on end. Maybe the user gets distracted, maybe he puts it on the back burner and forgets about it, or maybe she merely loses interest in the idea and doesn’t bother to ask an admin to delete it. Whatever the reason, we have months-old story pages that have a full array of barely-there character pages but no actual story. We forbid placeholding, but we’ve never really made clear just when a page is considered a placeholder.


 * Proposed rule: Except for sequel stories, a new story page must have one full chapter (or equivalent support material) posted within one month. New character pages must have enough content to comply with the preceding rules within one week. Pages violating this rule will be considered illegal placeholders and will be deleted.

Note that the admins might come agree on different timeframes, but we need something specific to be a starting point for discussion. And we definitely need specific timeframes so that people can read the rule and know whether they are in compliance with it.

When is a story not a story?
During my cleanup, I have encountered so-called competition stories where one normal-length sentence is supposed to be the entire chapter. I have seen others where a "chapter" consists of three sentences: one to tell us what the challenge is, one to tell us who wins, and one to tell us who is eliminated. There are other stories--including some quite recent--that read more like teasers from the show's website, with some chapters being as little as 80 words or so. We have Featured Quotes that are longer than that.

In the past, we had at least one noncompetition "story" that consisted of a single sentence. (The "author" later fleshed it out a bit under pressure.) On the other hand, there's a legitimate story type called a "drabble". Although this term is sometimes used interchangeably with "one-shot", the challenge of a true drabble is to set a scene in exactly 100 words--no more, no less.


 * Proposed Rule: The admins need to reach some agreement on where legitimate stories (however poorly written) end and mere summaries begin.

Foreign-language Content

 * Current rule: none

A few users have posted stories and character pages in languages other than English. The problem is that, although a fair number of us know other languages (not necessarily the same ones) this is an English-language website. More to the point, several—perhaps most—of the admins here speak only English, so it’s harder for them to determine whether foreign-language content is in compliance with our rules. In any case, most of our users who speak other languages appear to be reasonably fluent in English as well—certainly more fluent than Google Translate would make them sound—so there’s no clear point to posting stuff in other languages. We also have one guy who has been posting the same story in two languages, on separate article pages.


 * Proposed rule: Story pages and character pages must be posted in English.

Or, if the admins don’t want to go that far,


 * Proposed rule: Users may not make separate pages to post the same or substantially similar content in multiple languages.

If we do decide to allow foreign language content, then I suggest designating specific multilingual admins to oversee it.

Categories

 * Current rule: none

In the course of my wiki cleanup, I have encountered several category-related problems:


 * Proposed rule: Category names must be descriptive enough to give some indication of their content.

We currently have a category called “ACL”. How many people had any clue what this meant without clicking on it to see the listing? (For the record, it’s a category of stuff posted by a user who sometimes goes by those initials.) Categories that don’t want to tell you what they’re about defeat the purpose of having categories in the first place.


 * Proposed rule: Categories must have more than one item. Do not add your user page, user talk page, or blog page to categories. Individual blog posts (as opposed to the full blog page) may be categorized, though.

Categories with only a single item defeat the purpose of having categories in the first place. The usual offenders are single-user categories where the user in question has posted only one story. Single-user categories are fine—I have one myself—but they really serve no purpose until the user starts his second story.

Categories that things are assigned to temporarily would be exempt from this rule. The best example of this is the category, Candidates for deletion.

Although most users know better than to add their user pages, user talk pages or blog pages to categories, there are occasional exceptions. Note that there’s nothing wrong with adding individual blog posts to categories, if the post adds value. Blog posts are most likely to be relevant to categories that are dedicated to a single story.

Story Categories

 * Proposed rule: All finished stories must be assigned to at least one general category. In-progress stories don’t have to be categorized, but it’s strongly encouraged.

“General” category means a category that’s not user-specific, e.g. the category, “John Doe’s stories” wouldn’t qualify. At the very least, finished stories should generally be categorized as either Competition stories or Noncompetition stories. (A notable exception is my own neither-fish-nor-fowl compilation, Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan, but that’s in the Crossovers category, so it’s in compliance.)

In the past, some users have resisted having their stories categorized for reasons that, quite frankly, mystify me. I remember one user being unwilling to categorize his stories because he “prefers to live off the grid”. To that user, I would ask, “If you’re that concerned about having people be able to find your stories, then why are you posting them to a public website in the first place?”

I don’t mean to be harsh, but I find the privacy argument against categorizing stories to be nonsensical. I mean, seriously, if you wrote a book, would you really refuse to let Amazon.com or a public library offer it to their patrons just because they insisted on categorizing it? I didn’t think so.

Character Page Categories
I propose getting rid of the “Male Characters” and “Female Characters” categories unless someone can show that they serve a useful purpose. An argument could be made for keeping the general Characters category (which is currently supposed to contain only subcategories, although we could change that) and putting all character pages in that category to distinguish them from story pages, but that would be a lot of work for questionable benefits. What does everyone think?

Does a general “Characters” category serve any useful purpose? Yes No

Library Characters
A number of users have created pages for characters that are not meant to appear in a story written by the character's creator. TAU’s character library is perhaps the best known example of this, but there are plenty of other characters whose creators routinely shop them around in open auditions for other people’s stories.

I propose setting up a special category for these character pages. We could call it “Library Characters” or “Characters Seeking Stories” or some such, and could mention it on the Rules page or elsewhere as a resource, informing prospective writers that these characters might be available on request. We might also have subcategories for characters whose use requires the creator’s permission and those who do not, if we have enough characters of the latter type to justify a separate subcategory for them.

Team Categories
We currently have a large number of categories that cover only a single team from a single story. Do these serve any useful purpose, now that we allow team pages? Did they ever serve any useful purpose? Or do they just clutter the category listings?


 * Proposed rule: Categories covering only a single team from a single story are not allowed.

I personally believe that single-team categories serve no useful purpose, but what do the other admins think?

Account Blocking Procedures
When I look at the listing of blocked users and IPs, it’s not unusual to see blocks that say nothing about why the block was imposed, even when the block will last for a year or more.


 * Proposed rule: When blocking an account, the administrator imposing the block must give a reason.

Handling Offensive Statements
One of our rules is that we don’t allow “offensive or derogatory statements”. A few months ago, we saw a major problem with this. Specifically, while this rule is meant to be a shield, some people are not above using it as a sword to impose viewpoint discrimination. (Whether they do this maliciously or because they don’t understand reasonable disagreement is, quite frankly, beside the point.) Allowing that to continue could arguably put us out of compliance with Wikia’s non-discrimination policy.

In other words, the current policy does not adequately protect reasonable people who commit the “offense” of expressing a minority viewpoint. (“Minority” for this wiki, anyway, not necessarily for society at large.) The fact that offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder only compounds the problem.

If we recognize that people can—indeed, often do—give offense without meaning to, then it becomes clear that most “offensive” statements could be effectively handled with polite warnings and, if appropriate, removal of the offending commentary, as opposed to the “off with his head” mentality that we saw.


 * Proposed rule: Banning a user for making an offensive or derogatory statement requires solid evidence that the statement was INTENDED to offend or defame. The burden of proof is on the person or persons claiming offense.

Evidence of intent could include things like repeatedly making similar statements and refusing to back down when called on it. Note also that, if someone makes an allegedly offensive or derogatory statement in a belligerent or otherwise uncivil manner, that’s a separate issue and is covered under the prohibition against intimidating/harassing behavior. In other words, what you say can be less important than how you say it.

Other Rules
Is there anything else that needs to be addressed? Then say so in the Comments section.

And, finally, this isn’t a rules question, but it’s regrettably become something that the admins need to address:

The Future of Featured Quote
Last October, the fifth Feature—Featured Quote—was relaunched and enthusiatically received. The ballot was long, and the winning quote had a vote count in the teens. Within six months or so, interest in Featured Quote had pretty much collapsed.

Although vote totals (at least for the winners) remained respectable until recently, nobody seems to want to nominate passages for FQ anymore. In the last few cycles, most of the nominations have come from either me or my DW. While some people may be tempted to blame the use of themes (ala Featured Character) for this lack of interest, that claim doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. There have been cycles where the theme was very broad, or there was no theme at all, and people still wouldn’t nominate. For example, the current cycle has no theme, but we only have five nominations, including one each by Wifey and me.

The crux of the problem is that the FQ revival started with a core of dedicated people, but most of those people have either become much less active, have gone on hiatus, or have left the wiki entirely, and no one has stepped up to replace them. Compounding the problem is that, for various reasons, I haven’t read all that many stories; so when I have to do most of the nominating, the nominees generally come from the same small pool of stories that I know well. That can’t be good for voter turnout, but what else can I do?

Featured Quote stands at a crossroads, and it’s time to decide whether it’s still a viable concept. FQ is currently on life support. Is it time to pull the plug?

How do you feel about Featured Quote? It’s a good thing, and we need to find a way to keep it alive. I like it, but I keep forgetting to nominate and/or vote. I don’t really care that much about it.

FQ is currently the only Feature that we vote on twice a month, instead of once per month. Should we keep it as it is, scale it back, or scrap it? Keep it at two cycles per month. We’ve got too many good quotes to just do one per month. Scale it back to once a month. People might remember to participate if the cycles match the other Features. Kill it. It’s a two-time loser.

(Admins, please state your position in the Comments section.)

If we keep Featured Quote, do you expect to regularly vote on and/or nominate passages? Definitely Probably not No