Help:Behavioral Policy
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Behavioral Policies
D&Dwiki is a collaborative effort between many users who share a common interest in tabletop gaming. This means that the site has many individuals, each with their own thoughts, personality, and playing style who are trying to work together for the common goal of a wiki that assists and promotes the gaming hobby and lifestyle. As such, a few simple benchmarks for wiki communication should be met to insure that all users have a friendly experience and time while utilizing D&Dwiki.
Civility
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Much of the content on this page was taken from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. |
Civility is part of D&Dwiki's code-of-conduct. The civility policy is a standard of conduct, which sets out how D&Dwiki editors should interact: editors should always endeavor to treat each other with consideration and respect. Even during heated debates, editors should behave politely, calmly, and reasonably, in order to keep the focus on improving the encyclopedia and to help maintain a pleasant editing environment. This policy applies to all editing on D&Dwiki, including user pages, talk pages, edit summaries, and any other discussion with or about fellow D&Dwikians.
Incivility consists of personal attacks, rudeness, and aggressive behaviors that disrupt the project and lead to unproductive stress and conflict. Incivility is disruptive and unacceptable, and as such D&Dwiki follows a zero-tolerance policy towards rude and uncivil behavior. Harassment, belittling, or other condemning actions from one user towards another will result in implementation of the warning system (see below).
The discussions that have the highest chance of devolving into uncivil arguments are typically those discussions discussing balance or "power" of a particular article's content. The best way to avoid this devolution of a discussion is to stay away from generalizations and vague comments, and to make sure that all statements spotlight specific text and give specific reasoning for thoughts. For example, a statement such as "the class's special abilities are stupid" should be avoided. However, being more concise such as "the granted ability at level 3 is similar to the Bard's level 10 granted ability, and here is a suggestion as to make it more original or to make it's granted ability not as powerful as something reserved in core content for higher levels." This keeps discussions focused on specific issues and helps improve articles, and prevents unsubstantiated claims resulting in upset users. It also prevents possible good advice being obfusciated by abrasive writing.
See Help:A Good DM for a closer look at the complexities of balance debates, and Help:Constructive Editing for more on how to express criticism in a positive manner.
Language and Adult Theme
As a website devoted to a community of gamers, our user base and visitors come from all walks of life and range from youth to elderly. As such, we monitor all content to prevent a minor from stumbling upon articles meant for adult games. The adult theme template must be used for any article that references or utilizes material of a sexual, extreme-violent, alcohol, drug-using nature, cont.; including all 18+ years of age topics. Please see Help:Mature Content Policy for more information on this subject.
Additionally, D&D Wiki forbids the use of profane language, however, if and only if its omission would cause an article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate, and no equally suitable alternative is available then such words are permitted as per Wikipedia's offensive material policy. D&D Wikians are urged to utilize alternative wording to express the same meanings of any individual curse word. Just because you or some other users may occasionally "get away with" the occasional curse word does not mean it is acceptable, only that nobody who has seen it has been offended enough to do something about it. Swear words that are "bleeped out" with asterisks or other symbols also fall under this policy. Keep in mind that the vast majority of users do not have usernames and do not make edits to this wiki, but they can still see and read everything you have ever said on this wiki. These people are still people, and so they matter. A user who is offended by cursing or other foul language may not raise an issue with administration- but they may just choose to abandon the wiki instead, and the community would be weakened for it.
If you really want to argue about this, watch this video. Everything that guy is talking about? Don't say any of that kind of stuff here, and please be clear with your language- your audience cannot hear or see you, and they cannot read your mind.
Warning System
Main article: Help:Warning Policy
D&D wiki utilizes a warning system when users violate the Civility and/or Language and Adult theme precedents. The given warning may vary widely depending on the individual situation's severity, but typically it is a system of progressively worse warnings. A user may begin by receiving just a notice warning for initial or non-severe violations, and begin receiving progressively longer bans if more transgressions continue.
User Pages
Each user has a userpage in the User: namespace under User:<!-username->. IP's do not get this privilege.
One's userpage is comparable to one's "home" on D&D Wiki. Each user may customize his or her page however they like; following a few noted regulations. Some users include information about themselves, some create lists of the items they have created, others supply information about their gaming, and even others use subuserpages to store things as needed or create content; a personal sandbox. No universal method to exists for designing or using userpages or subuserpages and we encourage you to be your creative self. For more information on creating subpages, please contact an administrator, as it is a little tricky without any experience or guidance, and can have extremely frustrating results if done wrong.
However a few minor regulations are in existence to prevent ones userpage area from becoming a soapbox. Some of the limitations are as follows:
- No adult content may be present.
- The civility and etiquette guidelines must be followed.
- The only allowed links to conflicting interest or competing sites are links listed on DnD Links; no soliciting. (This policy is enforced on all pages)
- No links or information deemed hateful, terrorist, adult/pornographic, spiritual or political.
- No ranting (spiritual ministering, political, hate speeches, etc).
Unless in an active cooperative project, fixing a formatting issue, or enforcing this policy in the role of administration, it is generally considered inappropriate to edit anothers userpage.
These rules also extend to subuserpages. For more information on what those are, see this section on the editing page.
