Talk: Wiki rules/Archive 1

Just noticed

A bunch of these rules arent followed a lot of the time.

• "Pages about very simple things, e.g. "House", "Deleting", "Bed" and others, are not allowed. These topics are very unnecessary as they are plain tasks anybody with a tiny bit of intelligence can do."

There is a page about houses.

• "This includes pages about so-called "games" that are played in Minecraft. The only exception to this rule is Spleef as this is widely played and recognized by the entire community."

Im pretty sure I have seen pages about games on here. I cant remember the names, so i cant check. They might be deleted but I dunno

• "When creating a page, at least include 3 paragraphs of text and, if possible, an image. Pages that don't meet these requirements will be easily removed without a warning due to lack of content!"

Quite a lot of pages dont have 3 paragraphs of text. It is kind of a lot to be asking about most of these articles.

• "Please, use the "Show preview" button before saving your page."

This doesnt have to do with anything, but you are forced to do it now, so should it still be here? lol

• "Stick to the facts - Don't create parodic/comedic/nonsense pages or pages that could mislead players."

Why do we have a joke page template then?

My suggestion is rewrite some and remove some.Toadbert

I can't speak for the last one, but the others are simple demonstrations that the either the rules are out of date, or are reactionary rules that someone has implemented to stop a small number of infractions by users, and that have created double standards among articles that have a right to be there based on the content of the game. A lot of the low-content pages that are here are as a result of a gameplay addition that is either new (and not elaborated on yet) or things that don't have much information or depth to them but are a core part of the game design and as such, should stay.

Also worth mentioning in regard to your notice of "house" existing is because the concept of a house in Minecraft is imperative to staying safe in survival mode and therefore actually more than enough to base an article on, it is fundamentally different in purpose to obvious ones like 'deleting' and 'bed'. Of course this is an error on the writer's part.

You're right, a lot of this needs fixing. The top three are out of date and currently are unenforced (and if they were it'd only harm the wiki akin to shooting the fly with the rocket launcher) and should be modified or removed. In the utopian world this page would be scrapped and we'd have an administrative system set up where users can submit bad information that is under deletion criteria and it can be deleted or put to vote, the same way many wikis (including small community based ones like this one) have in place already. But it would take a lot of work and would require sysop approval.

For now, I think it's safe to say that this list needs to be updated, or if not that, scrapped, for lack of use/reliability.  ANNOYING  11:34, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

the rules are severely messed up. I'm going to organise a staff meeting, seeing as we NEVER have any on IRC. I'll talk to them about the rules.--Kizzycocoa 08:02, 18 November 2010 (CST)

Tutorials-actual consequence

can we make the tutorials rule have a consequence? I have seen two new ones appear just this morning. and over 6 per week. this ALSO outlines a major problem that no new users read the rules.

frankly, if we aren't going to enforce the rule more than a simple "oh, you've done this, let me just put it there for you", it is nothing more than a guideline, and does not belong on this page in the first place in my opinion.

rules are made to be upheld. not to be ignored, with no consequence. not even the equivalent of a slap on the wrist! hell, a 6-hour ban would be nice to get the message across, yet we can't even verbally warn them.--Kizzycocoa 05:19, 21 October 2010 (CDT)

you may verbally warn them even as a non-sysop, wiki's are built on the "be bold" policy and you have every right to point someone to the rules, and also show those pages to a sysop and explain to them that it should be deleted. Nothing wrong with showing initiative.  ANNOYING  05:34, 18 November 2010 (CST)

well, when you have to move a tutorial page every week, you feel that no-one looks at the rules.--Kizzycocoa 08:01, 18 November 2010 (CST)

Yeah, well if rules were in place to allow you guys (I didn't know you were a sysop when I initially replied here and in the above topic, sorry) to officially warn users or ban repeat offenders, then everything would be fine. For now, you might as well wait until the above topic is resolved, as the rules to the wiki may change rapidly if people jump onto the bandwagon. Scykei outlined on his talk page a couple of problems and while I don't really agree with his proposals, he offers some good examples, including UDWiki, of which I'm also an old member. The help and administration setup there works well to streamline a lot of the tasks, and also help to make preventative action against newbies making crappy pages or tutorials. However, it also helps regulars understand the rules too. For example, I would help you move tutorials but I don't know where they are supposed to be moved, a help page like [1] could help.

As for the point of this topic, yeah, consequences for breaking the rules and putting others at an inconvenience to fix it should be punishable by warnings or bans. It's up to the admins on how they want to implement that though.  ANNOYING  19:06, 20 November 2010 (CST)

Dot Points or Numbers?

I often see people citing rule a rule number and I have to count down the page... this isnt a biggie, but can we change the dot points to numbers like this?

1. Anything that is against the Minecraft TOS is not allowed on the wiki, no matter what.

2. Spam/vandalism is an absolute no-no.

3. Pages about very simple things, e.g. "House", "Deleting", "Bed" and others, are not allowed. These topics are very unnecessary as they are plain tasks anybody with a tiny bit of intelligence can do.

3.1 This includes pages about so-called "games" that are played in Minecraft. The only exception to this rule is Spleef as this is widely played and recognized by the community and Notch himself. -F1racer101 03:43, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Donezie. Except for the 3.1 thing, that's not actually possible with html lists (It doesn't allow any special characters like . in the value field), you'd have to make the list manually with a table to have that. User:Ultradude25/sig at 03:09, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

sorry!

just wanna say sorry for breaking it D:! I swear I didn't notice that at all--Kizzycocoa 08:20, 11 December 2010 (CST)

Regionalisation

Due to a recent conflict on the Notch page re date formatting, I'm curious: is the English version of this site supposed to follow any particular standard in terms of language, and if so, should that standard not be mentioned on the rules page?

For example, some sites use British English, and some sites use the American spin-off version. Is a mix of the two different spelling methods acceptable here, or is one preferred over the other?

Frankly I prefer to see the original version in use, myself, for what that's worth. I certainly strongly recommend against using the American date formatting system as it's backwards compared to what the rest of the world uses, making it easy to misread. - Bomb Bloke 07:32, 12 December 2010 (CST)

Usually in wikis I use it's localised to either the server location or the location of the game developer. I don't think a real language argument has ever come up before, though I'd prefer British English over the Americanised one.  ANNOYING  13:37, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I just now happened to come across this, coincidently - there was no real conclusion reached, though it's probably worth a read. - Bomb Bloke 13:51, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

It may just be the way I've set my preferences, but the dates on the talk page come up as "12 December 2010" which is clear and unambiguous. I propose we make this a standard for the way dates are written in the articles on the wiki as well. Most articles will need to be tweaked a little when Beta comes out, it would make sense to set some wiki writing standards now rather than just leaving everyone to decide for themselves how it should look. --DannyF1966 13:56, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

This might also be a useful read, it's from the mediawiki manual. --DannyF1966 13:58, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I would be all for adding a rule that states "Either you write your date as YYYY/MM/DD or DD <monthname>, YYYY or your date gets removed."

As for language, I would rather use British English as it looks much nicer, but as long as the whole article is in the same English I'm sure it's fine. User:Ultradude25/sig at 19:36, 12 December 2010 (CST)

In my opinion, if we write dates in YY MM DD order, then they should be written YYYY-MM-DD rather than YYYY/MM/DD. This happens to be the ISO date standard. —KPReid 13:07, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

That's more of a personal preference since it doesn't actually affect the date. User:Ultradude25/sig at 00:32, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

It does, though - how can you tell whether 10/09/09 is YY MM DD or DD MM YY? -  Bomb Bloke (Talk/Contribs) 16:31, 14 December 2010 (CST)

That's the thing though, you wouldn't be writing it YY, it would be YYYY otherwise it's completely defeating the point of doing it the backwards way in the first place. Whether you use forward slashes or hyphens doesn't make any difference. 2010/12/10 is exactly the same as 2010-12-10 in terms of interpreting the date. User:Ultradude25/sig at 10:26, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Yep, my previous comment was irrelevant nonsense. That's what I get for skim reading; I saw the YY bit and figured that was the point of it - somehow managed to miss the / or - bit. -  Bomb Bloke (Talk/Contribs) 12:14, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I suggest we defer to Notch's spelling/grammar/style in all situations! (rule #18 ? :) E.g. Seecret -- Ephemeris 14:16, 15 December 2010 (CST)

I propose that we write the dates in full, with the month name (i.e. 15 December 2010) - it's completely unambiguous that way. --DannyF1966 23:01, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

as this is the universal date for our sigs, I agree. but I would like to add, the other propose backwards date is RIDICULOUS.--Kizzycocoa 17:19, 15 December 2010 (CST)

Deletion alternative

When a page isn't fully appropriate for a main article but still contains valid/good info, I propose that it instead gets moved to the userspace of the original creating user. This will keep the article around so that any further discussion has something to refer to, and deletions tend to be taken as an affront to the user. --JonTheMon 08:42, 27 December 2010 (CST)

If I may be as bold as to throw my opinion in here, if no-one's READ the rules, surely, they, well, I wouldn't put it as strong as "deserve" it, but a page deletion seems like a minor thing compared to banning for not reading the rules. Idk, maybe I'm talking about an idea where people do read them before editing, but in my opinion, any page that's blatantly not allowed should be deleted.--Kizzycocoa 14:50, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, right, but off the top of my head, I was thinking of the Materials page. It wasn't quite appropriate (somewhat redundant, i believe), but not blatantly disallowed. --JonTheMon 15:25, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

It needs to at least be deleted with explanation, however. Too often there are prolonged edit wars that end with an admin banning a user because the new user has no idea they are dealing with an admin and the admin never bothers to communicate beyond the occasional 'stop this' which doesn't explain aanything. There are a lot of communication issues on this wiki, and a failure to read the rules is one of them, but there are plenty of others! --JohnnyMadhouse 09:26, 27 December 2010 (CST)

failure to read rules is the main one. once solved, all others will be ok.

materials is already split. It is like going into category:items. it is redundant, and it is said elsewhere. –The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kizzycocoa ^{(Talk|Contribs)} . Please sign your posts with ~~~~!

Why not put a link to the wiki rules at the very top of the page with 'read before editing' or something similar? That way more people are likely to see it. The sidebar link is all very well and good, but it's definitely not the main thing users are looking at when they first visit the wiki. As for the materials split, could you link to the discussion elsewhere? This is exactly the lack of meaningful communication that creates butthurt-ness where there should be none. --JohnnyMadhouse 09:36, 27 December 2010 (CST)

A general complaint follows. It won't get better even if users read the rules, because the rules are intrinsically vague. For example, rule 3 states that simple, unnecessary, and plain topics are not allowed. But what's the criteria of that? Now it's only at administrators' discretion which might be understood completely differently by others. Will administrators always be fair and knowledgeable and never make any mistakes? What if a administrator fails to recognize the significance of one topic and immediately delete it? There is no interaction, no consensus, no warning, no chance of appealing. Users come here to voluntarily share knowledge and contribute to the community with content of quality. I understand you may need tighter management considering your userbase, but I don't understand why you must be so arbitrary and hostile to your volunteers and their contribution when you actually need them. Maybe you think they are all inferior than you? I've been a Wikipedian since 2005, in my point of view your way of running this wiki is against the collaboration nature of a wiki community. Xfs 10:18, 27 December 2010 (CST)

Perhaps there needs to be a more formalized deletion policy. Particularly to point out articles that can and can't be deleted without discussion. Some articles are just vandalism or woefully incomplete and off topic, but for others, we should probably stick with the lifeblood of wikis aka discussion. At another wiki i've been at, non-vandal pages are allowed 3 days of discussion (after being tagged) before being deleted. I've just looked at Talk:Materials, and it seems like there the discussion did happen properly. --JonTheMon 11:05, 27 December 2010 (CST)

There was a discussion about the deletion of the original page, yes (which contained notes on about four items and that was it). For the complete rewrite I did later, detailing what you needed to acquire ALL usable resources, whether they were renewable, and what you could make from them? Nothing, it was deleted within five minutes. The page contained plenty of information NOT visible while viewing a category, or any one other single page in this wiki for that matter. I'm lucky enough that I saved a copy of my work before posting it (hence I could at least put it back up within my own userspace), but users such as Xfs have apparently also put in hours of work only to see it removed completely due to a matter of one single person's opinion (and as he didn't make backups (not as cynical as myself it seems), and the admin in concern refuses to allow him access to his own content again, he's stuck - no one else can review what he wrote). -  Bomb Bloke (Talk/Contribs) 18:07, 27 December 2010 (CST)

Rule #6

This rule is going to create problems. It already is in fact. Pages about specific people in the mainspace should be limited to the game developers only. -- Wynthyst talk 12:38, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Rule for mods in articles

I was pretty sure that it is not allowed to mention mods in not mod related articles, but i cant find that rule now. So does there exist such an rule but not mentioned on the rules page or is it allowed?

Asking because i just undid an edit in the sponge article because it stated that sponges are usable in beta with a mod an im unsure now if i was right to do that. DerGraph 23:01, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Templates in signatures

I believe that a "No templates in signatures" rule needs to be added. There are a few reasons why templates in signatures are bad things.

1. They can be used to create signature code that is longer than the average talk page post.
2. They become targets for trolls/vandals.
3. Changes to the templates can cause extreme server load as the changes are parsed throughout the wiki.

A long time, active editor can place their signature on tens of thousands of posts over the life of the wiki. A signature's primary purposes are identification and ease of communication. They are not intended to be a user's creative expression, users have their entire user space to be creative in. -- Wynthyst talk 12:58, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree, the last thing we want is major pageloads along with downtime due to overloads. Signatures should be simple, both visual and behind the scenes.--Quatroking - Garble Garble! 13:01, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree. Images and templates in sigs, have long been forbidden at Wikipedia, for exactly these reasons. -- Ephemeris 20:41, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Comment/question. What are the prior incidences of "downtime due to overloads"? Kytti khat 19:44, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Well, just last week, it was discovered that the Blocks template was causing stress on the server due to it's call of over 70 images and it's transclusion on almost 100 pages... that's why the templates were all changed to use sprites instead. This is not something that is a "current" issue, however, addressing it now, will eliminate it from becoming one in the future. This site is receiving quite a lot of traffic, there are currently 7518 registered users, with 3000 of them being active (editing within the past 30 days). As the game grows, and the community grows, this can become a serious issue on the servers. -- Wynthyst talk 00:19, 20 January 2011 (UTC)