Rules
From SW:TOR-RP-Wiki
Contents |
Introduction
There are some rules we'd like every user of this site to respect. If you don't play by the rules, expect not to play at all.
These rules are subject to change, and will most certainly be updated occasionally according to some unforeseen behaviour or problem. The Admin reserves, among others, the rights to delete, change and move content, to ban people and tell them what to do or not to do. We aim to be nice and friendly, but be aware that your toes might get stepped on some day, and that things might happen you really don't agree with.
Keep it nice
This being the internet, it seems to be necessary to remind everybody of common decency. Be friendly, honest, honorable, helpful, careful, thorough, ... Just ask yourself: What would Yoda do (besides talking backwards)?
Keep it clean
There are no strict rules on "adult themes", including violence, sexual content, drug use and swear words among others. Free speech is a good and important thing. However, keep in mind that things of this matter are not only a matter of taste, but also an ambiguous thing to expose younger people to. SW:TOR will probably be rated "teen", which means that readers from 13 up might find their way here. If their parents allow them to freely surf the internet, they'll find much more graphic and shocking material than this site is likely to have. However, readers (of whatever age) might not be looking for stuff of that kind when browsing here - so don't put anything too strong or offensive into your articles.
The Admin suggests that if somebody in your story is to be tortured or raped, drugged or killed, write the story, but don't go into (anatomical) details, don't "advertise" illegal or clearly immoral actions and don't write stories dealing with these matters exclusively or primarily. Keep it abstract; the monster you cannot see is scarier anyhow.
Keep it legal
Please don't put any illegal content on the site - or even content others might consider illegal. This includes unlicensed, copyrighted material, links to questionable sites, diffamations or undue criticism of third parties. When in doubt, think not only about the courage you yourself are showing by (possibly) breaking the law, but also what courage you force us to have. Skydiving is a cool thing, but pushing others out of a plane isn't.
Informative and fun to read (for a legal matter, that is) are Brad Templeton's Top 10 Myths about copyright.
Have respect for other people's creations
This being a wiki, you are able to edit other people's texts. The ability to do this doesn't imply the permission to do so, however. According to the nature of the article, you are welcome to contribute, change or even delete, according to these guidelines:
Individual Articles
These articles represent the work of an individual community member regarding personal topics or works of art. The creator of the article knows best what it should contain, how it is presented and so forth.
Examples: character biographies, stories
Editing: Only the author of the article or anyone authorized by him or her is allowed to edit this page. The only exception is correcting formal mistakes (grammar, spelling) or fixing/updating links, but even there, treat lightly.
Group Articles
These articles are similar to individual articles, but have been created by a defined group of people. Two individual might team up to write a story about their characters, or a group of people might write an essay on shared opinions. They are to be treated with the same respect as individual articles.
Examples: guild presentations, event presentations
Editing: Only the members of the guild or organizers of the event are allowed to edit these pages. Among them, they should set up their own rules. Again, purely formal corrections (grammar, spelling, links) are allowed.
Community Articles
These are general articles about Star Wars Lore, the SW:TOR Game, role playing and other topics of interest to the general community.
Examples: background information, rp guides
Editing: Every registered user is allowed to edit these pages. Be reasonable, however. Don't destroy other people's work. If an article appears to be overly long to you, you may cut out or summarize unnecessary parts, but always aim to improve, not destroy whatever content your fellow users have created. A topic may seem uninteresting, irrelevant or even plainly false to you, but keep in mind that others are allowed opinions, too.
Meta Articles
These articles are about this wiki itself or contain standardized text to be used by other users. In short: Don't touch them, please. A longer, musicalized explanation on the Meta Articles editing rule can be seen here.
Examples:: this article, templates
Editing: These articles are a no fly zone. Keep your hands off of them - suggestions are welcome, but please, please put them in the discussion page or contact the site management directly instead of making any changes yourself.
Uncertain cases
If in doubt, ask! Use the discussion page or contact the author directly. It can't hurt.
Talk pages
- Please don't use the talk pages without a need to. Talk pages are meant to be a to-do-list, contain valuable meta-information and so on; they are not a chat. Showing your appreciation or giving a friendly suggestion is, of course, okay, but don't overdo it. Exchange e-mail adresses or use the forum instead, please.
- Don't post the same thing multiple times. Saying something once should be enough; if that didn't do the trick, don't do it again. Either live with whatever is bothering you, contact the admin or a moderator or change it yourself IF the following rules allow that.
- If you critize somebody's article, please, be as polite as you can be. Your opinion on lore, taste, pictures and so on is yours, not a general rule for everybody using this Wiki. You are, of course, allowed to voice your opinion, but be very aware that you, frankly, are not the one setting the rules here, and that you are not in a position to tell anybody what to do or not to do. Freedom ends where other people's freedom begins, and this Wiki wasn't created to form a common opinion on, for example, Star Wars lore and everybody's obligation to stick to that, but to allow people to post their own stuff. As long as it adheres to the rules in this article, it's pretty much okay.
- Keep on topic. If others are discussing a topic, don't post information on other matters between their posts. If your post isn't worth a new category on the talk page, it's an indication that it doesn't belong there at all.
- Sign your articles. This is done by four tilde keys ("~").Else, people won't know who's even talking to them, and discussions will evolve into complete chaos.
Licensing
For reasons of being able to operate this site without legal troubles and to contribute the growth of the SW:TOR community, the contents of this site have been put under the Creative Commons License (see the SW:TOR-RP-Wiki:About page for details).
The main reason is the following: One sunny day, the Admin decides to move the site to another, better hoster. He needs to copy the contents of the wiki to do that, and as that touches all the contributors' copyrights, he'd need to contact all contributors and ask for their permissions. Besides this being really, really time-consuming, imagine some of them just aren't reachable. This would probably stop him from moving the site legally, as copying it without permission would violate the respective contributors' copyright. This would suck so bad that it would suck the whole internet down the drain of infinite stupidity. Thus, there's the CC license.
And if I'm wrong with the problems detailed above, then we at least have a really confusing license text on the page to threaten people with. ;-) Also, it allows us to put Creative-Common-share-alike-things here.
Anonymity
Less of a rule and more of a piece of advice: Don't post personal information on wiki pages. This includes e-mail-adresses, especially those that show your name. You'll most certainly get spammed, and you also open yourself up to being preyed on by scammers and other criminals, including people who want to extort illegal or sexual favors from you. The internet is nice, but not a very well policed place, and there are a lot of people out there who are most certainly more amoral and possibly more clever than you or I are. Don't get scared off the internet, but play it safe.
The Admin reserves the right to remove information to protect users from their own risky behaviour. Don't mistake that for a promise of protection, though.
Report problems to the Admin
If you've got legal or moral concerns with an article, believe an article to violate the aforementioned rules or not to meet a certain quality standard, experience technical difficulties or something of similar importance, please contact the admin. You can, of course, also post on the talk page or contact the author of an article if he or she has given an e-mail-adress, but please tell the Admin about the trouble, too. Contact information can be found in the About page below.
