User blog comment:SpaceWeather/A Few Policy Changes/@comment-1874924-20150524184205

I've long been telling people that 250-300 words per chapter is the minimum for a legitimate competition story. Stories that are actually any good will probably be at least twice that. Admins already have discretion to decide whether an author is trying to game the system, e.g. by including a lot of elimination ceremony boilerplate and little else.

Noncompetition stories can be quite short and still be legitimate stories. (These are called "flash fics".) In fact, although the term "drabble" has become more or less synonymous with "one shot", a drabble is technically exactly 100 words long. The technical challenge is to write a coherent scene within that word count restriction.

With competition stories, you can tell whether a short first chapter is complete by answering two simple questions: The case of the same author recreating a page that has just been deleted is covered under existing policies. It's called "edit warring", and is grounds for a ban on pretty much any wiki.
 * 1) Is there a meaningful description of how the chapter's events unfold? For example, does the chapter tell you who does what in the challenge, or does it just say what the challenge is and who wins? This determination has always been a matter of admin discretion.
 * 2) Does the chapter have a recognizable ending? An elimination, a fade to black, a "tune in next time", an obvious cliffhanger... anything? If not, then the chapter's not complete and the author who tells you otherwise is trying to pull a fast one.

Concerning categories: Concerning character pages:
 * 1) We could set up a category called "New stories" for multichapter stories that have only one qualifying chapter posted, and a "Pending stories" category for pages that have been created but don't yet have qualifying content posted. Sequel stories have special title reservation rules, so we could create a "Pending sequels" category for that.
 * 2) If we want separate categories for completed competition stories and completed noncompetition stories, these should not replace the existing Completed stories category, but should be subcategories to it.

Finally, if you think the Rules page would benefit from a reorganization, I'd say "Go for it."
 * 1) Since we're going to start publicizing characters for hire, I'd say these pages could be kept indefinitely if the creator is still active here, or if an inactive creator has stated that using these characters does not require permission. "Character for Hire" pages should have more content than we require for standard character pages, because these pages need to be able to stand alone.
 * 2) The four-year-old character pages you mentioned were probably used in one or more of the creator's stories, but those stories have since been deleted for whatever reason; so those character pages would normally be deleted when the last story using them is deleted. Exception: Character pages for Featured Characters whose stories have been deleted out from under them may be retained indefinitely if they have enough content to stand alone.
 * 3) The title of a character page has no bearing on the deletion rules, unless the title itself is inappropriate. It has always been that way.