STOWiki:Policies

Policy is a term referring to the processes and rules observed involving the creation, editing, and management of articles on STOWiki as well as treatment of other users. This is to be distinguished from a guideline which suggests etiquette and practice to make management and presentation of STOWiki more consistent and streamlined.

Violating a STOWiki policy will at the very least lead to a page being edited to conform to policy. Edits or new pages that are created that do not conform to a specific policy are subject to change by another user (assuming that change conforms with policy) without expectation of appeal to an admin, as is all content within the site. However, it may also lead to the page being deleted or — for the worst offenses — it may lead to the poster being declared a vandal and become banned or blocked. Treatment of users who engage in destruction of content, harassment, or misuse of content (spam) is also governed by policy.

The following policies have been developed over time; mostly as consensus works between STOWiki administrators and users. A few are decreed by administrators.

STOWiki policies
For quicker referencing, the policies also have shorthand links, e.g. "STOW:DNP". They are denoted in the list below.


 * STOW:PSP &middot; Policy status and phases
 * The policy governing policies – how to create new ones, how to change existing ones, and how to recall bad ones.


 * STOW:NAME &middot; The article naming policy
 * How to name articles so that people more easily can guess what to type to get to a particular type of page.


 * STOW:WRITE &middot; The writing policy
 * How to approach different sorts of content. Separated into several sub policies: fleet pages (STOW:FLEET), lore (STOW:LORE), items (STOW:ITEMS), and fanfic (STOW:FANFIC).


 * STOW:EDIT &middot; The editing policy
 * How to make changes to existing pages – what you actually dare doing without asking everyone first and what you really should ask about first.


 * STOW:NPOV &middot; The neutral-point-of-view policy
 * Articles on STOWiki should approach their subject objectively.


 * STOW:DNP &middot; The do-not-post policy
 * Specific items and topics we do not allow on STOWiki.


 * STOW:CAT &middot; The category policy
 * How to categorize pages, and how to name and categorize new categories.


 * STOW:VOTE &middot; The voting policy
 * Votes completed according to this policy are considered enforceable on STOWiki.


 * STOW:DEL &middot; The deletion policy
 * How to nominate pages for deletion and when they are eligible for actual termination.


 * STOW:STUB &middot; The stub policy
 * How to tag pages as stubs and when pages should be tagged as stubs.


 * STOW:VANDAL &middot; The vandalism policy
 * What STOWiki considers vandalism and what we do to vandals. (Not what we would like to do to vandals, though.)


 * STOW:3RR &middot; The three revert rule
 * To avoid edit wars, STOWiki contributors are not allowed to revert someone else's changes too often.

Preference for internal links
External links should be deprecated in favor of internal links. This would mean that we should have articles on many subjects. On each of these pages, we might want a relevant external link to a database site, but an internal link is preferable up until that point.

Usernames
Please see the Wikipedia policy on user names: Wikipedia:Username policy.