Warcraft Wiki talk:Talk page guidelines

New addition to guideline

What can I say?

As long as you stay on-topic, pretty much anything, within reason :)

However, WoWWiki is a wiki for everyone. Unjustified ad hominem (personal) attacks are not tolerated, nor do we tolerate discrimination based upon social status, age, sex, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Insinuating or stating that a user may be racist, homophobic, etc., without good reason is also classed as ad hominem.

Kirkburn added the above. Although it is a guideline, it will be enforced similar to a policy and those who see any attacks should use Project:Violations to report incidents. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:33 PM PST 7 Dec 2007

Original discussion and vote

Wikipedia has a guideline regarding Talk Pages stating that their purpose is to discuss the article itself and ways it can be improved, rather than to provide commentary about the subject itself. While I'm sure we all enjoy such discussions, they do seem to be getting out of control on a few pages, making it difficult to sort out the ongoing discussion directly relevant to the article.

I don't think a policy is needed on this matter, but perhaps on the few problem pages the lengthy treatises which don't discuss the actual articles could be moved to, for example, Talk:Blood elf/Discussion, and a banner template disclaimer added describing the purpose of the talk page. This is not the current {{analysis}} banner:

Template:Analysis

Any thoughts?--Aeleas 14:34, 21 August 2006 (EDT)

I agree that we shouldn't club people over the head for a few random non-editorial comments, but when it gets in the way of editing, that sounds like a very good solution. I'll definitely stand behind a guideline like that. --Mikk 17:23, 21 August 2006 (EDT)

There is naturally a lot of drift and leeway. I've split both Talk:Draenei and Talk:Blood elf into the regular talk page and a separate analysis pages, and I think it helps both the editorial and general discussions to have an individual page.--Aeleas 17:29, 21 August 2006 (EDT)

Let's fire off a standard vote on it and poll people's opinion. It's more likely to get some attention that way :-)   --Mikk 05:45, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

Votes

Yes

1. Yes Aelas - ((added by Mikk, presumably Aelas wants his own proposal))
2. Yes Mikk 05:48, 23 August 2006 (EDT) - ()
3. Yes Emerez 16:42, 23 August 2006 (EDT) - ()
4. Yes Ted 03:27, 27 August 2006 (EDT) - (In my opinion there should be no editorialising (as different from editorial) in the Talk pages. The talk pages are to help orgainse and explain changes to the pages. Peoples opinions on things in WoW are irrelevent and POV. This is a step in the right direction, but I would have all comments not about WoWWiki itself deleted.)
5. Yes watchout 06:10, 27 August 2006 (EDT) - (But, as usual I don't like the style...)
6. Yes Kirkburn 05:47, 28 August 2006 (EDT) - (It's a good idea. It's annoying seeing "BEs suck" comments together with actual useful stuff)

No

Comments

Project:Wikiquette says:

WoWWiki articles are supposed to represent all views. The Talk ("discussion") pages are not a place to debate value judgements about which of those views are right or wrong or better. If you want to do that, there are venues such as Usenet, public weblogs and other wikis. Use the Talk pages to discuss the accuracy/inaccuracy, POV bias, or other problems in the article, not as a soapbox for advocacy.

It seems that this tacitly allows for debating value judgements, contradicts this guideline. -Ted 04:36, 27 August 2006 (EDT)

Hm, point. Though we don't really want to try and emulate Wikipedia where Original Research is outright banned. Some of what we do here is trying to analyze different sources, some of which does tend toward POV. As far as I know, there is no other place doing as much original research on WoW related matters as WoWWiki. Trying to clamp down on that would just be counter-productive, imo.

So, I personally think we can allow a little bit of leeway in this area, as long as it does not get in the way of the actual editorial process. This proposal addresses that, to my mind. (But, yes, some of what's gotten moved to Talk: Blood elf/Analysis and Talk: Draenei/Analysis is just plain delete worthy imo. Ohwell :-))   --Mikk 05:52, 27 August 2006 (EDT)

I agree that we don't want the no original research policy (it has certainly annoys me on Wikipedia), it just that some users treat the talk pages as they were forums or their own personal blogs. It is often interesting, but not necessarily WoWWiki. I guess we'll just see how well this change works (presuming it gets through). --Ted 06:03, 27 August 2006 (EDT)

Proposal accepted. Feel free to hack up the actual guideline page :-)   I propose Project:Talk page guidelines.   --Mikk (T) 00:52, 30 August 2006 (EDT)

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