Avatar Wiki:Discussion policy

This page documents an official Avatar Wiki policy. It is a widely accepted standard that should normally be followed by all editors.

Avatar Wiki policies

Content
Categorization • Continuity • Copyrights
Deletion policy • Images • Layout guide
Manual of Style • Spoilers
Template namespace • Verifiability
What Avatar Wiki is not

Interaction
Assume good faith • Blocking policy
Discord chat • Discussion policy
Ignore all rules • Protection policy
Revert policy • Signature policy
User blog policy • User page policy
Voting

Discussion is an important part of Avatar Wiki. It is used to discuss any improvements to the wiki, and to facilitate general interaction between members of the community. Discussion should be used before making any major changes, where practical, and consensus, defined as at least a supermajority in agreement, should be sought.

Conduct

Users must be civil in all interactions. Incivility consists of aggressive behaviors that disrupt the project and lead to unproductive stress and conflict. It may include any of the below.

Direct rudeness, including:

• Rudeness, insults, name-calling, gross profanity or indecent suggestions
• Personal attacks, including racial, ethnic, sexual, gender-related and religious slurs, and derogatory references to groups such as social classes or nationalities
• Belittling a fellow editor, even including the use of judgmental edit summaries (e.g. "snipped rambling crap", "that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen")

Other uncivil behaviors, including:

• Taunting or baiting: deliberately pushing others to the point of breaching civility even if not seeming to commit such a breach themselves
• Harrassment, including hounding, personal or legal threats, posting of personal information, repeated email or user space postings
• Lying or otherwise grossly misrepresenting a truth
• Quoting another editor out of context to give the impression they hold views they do not hold, or to cast aspersions on their credibility or decency
• Attempts to silence differing views on content or the topic

Editors are human and capable of mistakes, so a few minor incidents of incivility from time to time are not in themselves a major concern. However, a studied pattern of incivility is disruptive and unacceptable.

Personal attacks

Personal attacks are a common uncivil behavior. Do not make them anywhere on Avatar Wiki. Comment on the topic or the argument, not on the contributor. There is no rule that is objective and not open to interpretation on what constitutes a personal attack as opposed to constructive discussion, but some types of comments are never acceptable:

• Racial, sexist, homophobic, ageist, religious, political, ethnic, sexual or other epithets (such as against people with disabilities) directed against another contributor. Disagreement over what constitutes a religion, race, sexual orientation, or ethnicity is not a legitimate excuse.
• Linking to external attacks, harassment, or other material, for the purpose of attacking another editor.
• Comparing editors to dictators or other infamous persons.
• Accusations about personal behavior that lack evidence. Serious accusations require serious evidence. Evidence often takes the form of "diffs" and "links" presented on wiki.
• Threats, including, but not limited to:
  • Threats of violence or other off-wiki action (particularly death threats).
  • Threats of vandalism to userpages or talk pages.
  • Threats or actions which deliberately expose other Avatar Wiki editors to persecution by their employer, their school or any others.
• "Outing" an editor, or threatening to do so. This includes, but is not limited to, publicly declaring their identity without their explicit or implicit authorization (implicit means could include posting a link to their Facebook account), making knowledgeable remarks on their financial or marital status, identifying their place of residence or detailing their personal lives.

These examples are not exhaustive. Insulting or disparaging an editor is a personal attack regardless of the manner in which it is done. When in doubt, comment on the article's content without referring to its contributor at all. It is better to be safe than to be sorry.

Assume good faith

Main article: Assume good faith

Content

Message Walls

• Message Walls are not primarily intended to be a facility for social interaction. They are to facilitate individual messages relevant to the users' activity on the wiki. As such, utilizing them for the purposes of social interaction is expressly conditional, and moderating action may be taken if threads do not meet the following guidelines:
  • The given topic is inappropriate, and does not adhere to policy or the principles of common decency and maturity, as is encouraged and typical of the wiki community.
  • The discussion is consistently out-of-scope with the site, with no meaningful elements relating to the series or the wiki, and will most likely grow to unmanageable proportions if allowed to continue - such that other editors may be unjustly inconvenienced.
  • The subject matter is unacceptably tangential and has strayed into the realm of sharing detailed personal information, which should not be discussed on the public Message Wall system.
• For the purposes of pervasive social interaction, which usually does not fall under the above criteria, please use community chat or private emails.
• Message Walls must be the primary way to reach a user on-wiki. User space pages for the purposes of discussion are permitted, but their use may not diminish in any way the emphasis on or the functionality of Message Wall. This principle precludes practices including, but not limited to:
  • Indicating a preference for a talk page and instructing or encouraging users to post there instead, even where this is implicit (simply linking to a user space discussion page and presenting it as an alternative is acceptable)
  • Obscuring any part of Message Wall, even where there is functionality to unhide it
  • Obscuring interface links to Message Wall or otherwise complicating access to Message Wall

Comments

• All comments must be relevant to their associated page topic. Comments should not be social conversations between users. They are to facilitate interaction that is relevant to the topic of the article or blog post. Comments deemed irrelevant are subject to deletion by an administrator or rollback user.
• Avoid commenting on topics of discussion when the preceding post is more than thirty days old. It is unlikely to attract any response. Consider creating a new thread of discussion instead.

Article discussions

There are additional guidelines for article discussion threads (linked at the bottom of canon mainspace articles). In the interests of enhancing the quality of discussion and maximizing free speech, replies may be edited by rollback users and administrators to:

• Fix obvious spelling (and other) typos. This does not include informal and deliberate variations in spelling, unless the variation is highly inaccessible (e.g. l33tspeak).
• Clear obvious and unambiguously accidental coding errors.
• Remove those parts of a comment that are considered "leaked" material.
• Censor specific words or phrases that constitute gross profanity.

All edits of a posted reply must be noted with an additional comment in correspondence to the original explaining that it has been edited. Communication with the user whose reply has been edited should also be sought where editing is done to remove "leaked" material or profanity. Editing a reply is disallowed under these situations:

• Reply is grammatically incorrect, or has errors in capitalization and/or punctuation.
• Reply is difficult to understand structurally.
• Reply is "too mean" and needs to be "nicer".
• Anything else not covered by the limited scenarios where editing is expressly permitted.

In more serious cases, thread replies may be considered for deletion. The following types of comments on articles should be deleted on sight and the user warned by using {{Uw-comments}}.

• Replies that are irrelevant to the topic of the article. This includes unsolicited advertisements (e.g. "check out my website"), social networking (e.g. "good morning everyone!"), and comments on the wrong page (e.g. "i luv katara she is so nice!" on an article titled "Aang").
• Replies that cannot be construed as anything but being "trolling" (e.g. "YOU ALL NEED A LIFE!!!").
• Replies on shipping within article discussions where direct relevance cannot be established (e.g. "katara should have ended up with zuko!!" for a discussion on an article titled "Sokka").

Conventions

These technical conventions are applicable to traditional wiki talk pages only.

• Sign your posts: Users must sign their comments with four tildes (~~~~).
• Headings for new topic: Users should make a new heading for each new discussion topic.
• Indentation: New comments should be at a different indentation to the one above it. (When using source mode for editing, this can be done by typing ":".)
• Replying at the bottom of a thread: User should always reply at the bottom of a discussion thread and refer to previous comments in their post as necessary. Addressing a particular comment directly below it and above succeeding comments is considered confusing.

Users who see an unsigned comment should use this template to establish the identity of the poster of that particular comment. This does not, however, absolve users of the responsibility of ensuring that their posts are properly signed.

Never remove talk page or Message Wall posts. Exceptions to this rule may include:

• Obvious spam, abuse or posts written in grossly inappropriate language
• Conversations that are completely irrelevant to the page topic and/or the wiki topic
• Automatic talk page welcome messages
• Legal or privacy concerns

Discussion pages that are too long, defined as pages that have a large number of sections, or are of a length exceeding 60,000 bytes (identifiable in the page history), should be archived.

Voting

Main article: Voting

Some major changes (such as requests for adminship) and discussions where consensus has not been reached are subject to a final vote by the Avatar Wiki community. See Project:Voting for more details.