The interpretation of policy literature on Star Wars Fanon is undertaken in accordance with a set of established policy precedents formalized by members of the administrative team and codified publicly herein for the purposes of transparency and accountability. These collated precedents can be considered to have the same weight as the policies to which they refer and thus likewise apply to all users on the site.
Definitions
For the purposes of clarity, terms frequently employed in the precedents below are defined here.
- Administrative team: A catchall term for the community-elected local staff members who interpret and enforce site policies. Within the context of these precedents, the term more specifically refers to those staff members who possess the permissions necessary to delete and restore pages and images, namely Administrators and Moderators, thus excluding more specialized staff positions like rollbacker and Chat Moderator.
- Discussions forum: Within the context of these precedents, the Discussions forum refers specifically to that part of the Star Wars Fanon website constituting the
/f/directory (swfanon.fandom.com/f/). - Mainspace: A portmanteau of "main namespace," the term describing the part of the wiki in which articles are stored. By convention, titles of pages on the mainspace do not exhibit a namespace prefix, meaning any page title that does not begin with "Template," "Category," or another such prefix belongs to an article on the mainspace.
- Page creator: The user responsible for creating a given article on the mainspace through the submission of its initial revision. Page creators possess near-exclusive rights to their pages' content and appearance, bar the restrictions imposed upon articles by the Content Policy, Layout Guide, and Manual of Style.
- Page title parking: The act of creating an empty or near-empty mainspace article for the sole purpose of reserving the name and with the intention of adding content at a later date. This phenomenon is named in reference to domain parking, likewise defined as reserving a domain name with the intention of associating the domain with a website at a later date.
- "The wiki": Within the context of these precedents, "the wiki" refers specifically to that part of the Star Wars Fanon website constituting the
/wiki/directory (swfanon.fandom.com/wiki/). - Transclusion: A technical term in reference to the process by which templates are applied to a given page, generally achieved by placing the name of the template between two sets of curly brackets as
{{Name here}}.
Precedents
Accounts
Handling nonmalicious secondary accounts
Relevant threads: 1901155, 1904865, and 1904667 § 6705551
In cases of users nonmaliciously editing with multiple accounts (as opposed to sockpuppetry, the use of alternate accounts with the intent to deceive), members of the administrative team will notify the user of the Participation Guidelines' restrictions on the usage of multiple accounts and prompt the user to select one (1) account with which to edit. The other account(s) will be permanently blocked by the administrator, who will include an informational notice in the block summary that links to the user's main account and indicates that the block was nonpunitive.
Articles
Article deletion process
Relevant threads: 1956602 § 7035884 ff., 1908964 § 6741265, and 1955111 § 7018508
Articles that violate site policies are tagged with advisory templates that describe the policies and include links to the relevant literature. If violations are judged severe and/or extensive enough to warrant deletion, a member of the administrative team may transclude the {{Comply}} template and assign a pending deletion date by which the article will be deleted if left unfixed.[1] By convention, a week is generally provided to give the page creator time to make corrective edits, though this period may be abbreviated or extended at the discretion of the administrator.
If the policy violations are minor and/or few, the tagging team member may elect to forgo transclusion of the {{Comply}} template at first and simply add the article to the hidden category Articles under observation when applying the initial advisory templates. If time passes and no corrective edits are made to address the policy issues, the article may then be tagged with {{Comply}} and provided a pending deletion date.
Members of the administrative team are not required to issue notices to page creators when tagging articles with advisory templates or marking pages for deletion. It is the responsibility of the page creator to monitor changes and edits made to his/her own pages by other users, just as it is the responsibility of the page creator to ensure that his/her articles comply with site policies in all cases and at all times. It is recommended that users add their articles to their Watchlists for convenient on-wiki monitoring and/or adjust their preferences to receive email notifications every time another user edits their articles.
Claiming titles of deleted pages
- Relevant thread: 1903561 § 6701764
Page titles of articles previously deleted by author request or for violations of site policy may be claimed by any user at any time. Once deleted, articles are treated as though they never existed, meaning that a restoration of a previously deleted page will require recreation at a different page title if the original title has since been claimed by another user during the original article's period of deletion.
Co-opting redirects
- Relevant thread: 1903439 § 6701237
Though article titles are claimed by page creators on a "first come, first served" basis, a redirect linking to another page may be usurped by a user wishing to create an article with the redirect's title. However, the user may only claim the title after using Special:WhatLinksHere to check for links on other pages that link to the redirect and adjusting those links to instead point to the target page to which the redirect itself points. Once all links have been reconciled and no other pages on the wiki link to the redirect, the page title may be co-opted by the user. However, any and all attempts to co-opt redirects without first reconciling all outstanding links will be reverted by the administrative team.
Creating pages in other users' continuities
As an addendum to the "Using other authors' fanon/fan fiction" section of the Editing Policy, users may not create articles set in, belonging to, or existing as part of other users' fanon continuities or fan-fiction settings without express permission. This restriction encompasses both cases in which a user creates a new article with original content but sets the subject matter in another user's continuity and cases in which a user creates a "wanted page" from a redlink found on another user's page using only contextual information derived from the page containing the redlink. Articles that violate this precedent are subject to immediate deletion at the discretion of the administrative team, and their authors may be provided informative warnings and/or blocks in accordance with the Blocking Policy.
Page title parking
- Relevant threads: 1903261 and 1903561 § 6701762
Though article titles are claimed by page creators on a "first come, first served" basis, page title parking is prohibited. Articles that fail to exhibit a suitable degree of content at the moment of their creation are subject to immediate deletion without warning at the discretion of the administrative team.[2] This applies to both cases of a blank page created without any content and a near-empty page created by means of a page creation walkthrough for which the unaltered content of the preload template constitutes the page's only content.[3] Per the Layout Guide, all articles must exhibit at least an introductory paragraph of two hundred words or more.
Prefixing page titles with definite/indefinite articles
- Relevant threads: 1904390 and 1901335
- See also: Wookieepedia:Naming policy
In general, page titles may not begin with an indefinite or definite article ("a," "an," or "the"), even if the subject matter of the page is generally preceded by an article in speech or in writing. However, an article may be included at the beginning of a page title if the article is considered part of the formal title of an in-universe starship/vessel (i.e. The Last Resort or The Lucky Find) or an out-of-universe fan-fiction work (i.e. The Heirs of Mizra or A Flow'r, Once Fallen).
In the case of starship/vessel names, to determine whether an indefinite or definite article should be part of the page title, it is recommended that users ask themselves whether the article would be included in an in-universe conversational mention of the vessel's name; i.e. "I served aboard the The Millennium Falcon." The article should only be included if the user can answer in the affirmative.
Section header content requirements
- Relevant threads: 1903667 § 6702105, 1903649 § 6702046, and 3185398 § 10522609
All text-level section headers—those section headers expected to immediately precede text content, not higher-level navigation headers like "Biography" or "History" that precede nested subsection headers of their own—must exhibit at least a complete sentence's worth of substantive text content. Templates like {{Expand}} or {{Improving}} or plaintext placeholders like "To be added" or "TBD" may not be used as substitutes for text content. Articles that fail to exhibit the required degree of text content under each text-level section header will be tagged with the {{Formatting}} advisory template and eventually nominated for deletion at the discretion of the enforcing administrative team member if left uncorrected. Deletions will be handled in accordance with precedent 2 § 1.
Article titles for former clone troopers
- Relevant threads: 3318348 § 11409841
To resolve the conflict between "[u]se clone troopers' numbers instead of their nicknames in article titles" and "[l]ater names are to be used instead of earlier names" in the Manual of Style's Naming Conventions, SWFanon will employ the following interpretation, adopted from Wookieepedia: "An exception shall be made for clones known to have permanently retired, defected, deserted, or otherwise departed from the service of the Republic or Imperial militaries, whose articles shall be titled by their names even if their numerical designation is known". A clone who continued into Imperial service as a stormtrooper will still be titled with the clone numerical designation.
BBY/ABY pages
- Relevant threads: 4400000000003744054
All BBY and ABY pages, whether created or not yet created, are free-edit by their nature, and must conform to the general standards of all year pages. Users may, however, create their own novel dating systems and new year pages accordingly.
Community
Default time zones governing community votes
- Relevant thread: 1904152 § 6704331
If no explicit time zone is specified in a community vote's provided starting or ending date, the MediaWiki framework's default time zone of GMT/UTC+0 as reported by the {{CURRENTTIME}} magic word variable is implied by default.
Images
Deleted reuploads
- Relevant threads: 1904618 § 6705449 and 1904656 § 6705526
Images previously deleted by members of the administrative team for violating the Image Policy may only be reuploaded to the wiki if they comply fully with the policy at upload time. Reuploads that fail to exhibit wellformed attribution information in the form of properly formatted sourcing and licensing at the moment of their upload to the site are subject to immediate deletion without warning at the discretion of the administrative team. It is recommended that users reupload images via Special:Upload so as to ensure attribution information is automatically added to the image's file description on upload.
Required Image Policy notices
- Relevant thread: 1903565 § 6701771
The members of the administrative team are required to provide an initial informational message to first-time uploaders whose images are not properly sourced and licensed in accordance with the Image Policy. This message, the standardized text of which may be seen in Template:IPN and Template:DT-Image Policy, contains links to the policy and the step-by-step tutorial. However, additional messages detailing users' subsequent violations of the Image Policy are optional and subject to the enforcing administrative team member's discretion.
Templates
Creating new infoboxes
- Relevant threads: 1904034 and 1903881 § 6703186
As a general rule born of the community's dedication to providing a quality mobile experience for contributors and anonymous viewers alike, users are required to restrict their infobox transclusions to officially supported, mobile-friendly templates categorized under Infobox templates. However, users unable to locate an infobox applicable to the subject matter of their respective articles may contact an administrative team member and make a case for a new template's inclusion. If the administration is likewise unable to locate an applicable infobox, a team member with experience in the development of mobile-friendly infoboxes will assemble the template in accordance with content portability and responsive design best practices.
As the development and maintenance of infoboxes lies within the exclusive purview of the administrative team, the creation of such templates is restricted to members of the team. Duplicate or mobile-unfriendly templates created by other users are subject to immediate deletion without warning at the discretion of the administrative team.
Modifying existing infoboxes
- Relevant thread: 1904034
As with the creation of new infoboxes, users may submit requests to members of the administrative team for either the inclusion of new fields or the modification of existing fields in officially supported infoboxes. If the requested modifications are judged likely to enhance the quality, general-purpose usability, and practical utility of the infobox in use-case contexts outside those solely beneficial to the requesting user, a member of the administrative team with experience in the development of mobile-friendly infoboxes will make the requisite adjustments in accordance with content portability and responsive design best practices.
Due to the potential for widespread bugs occurring on account of changes made to highly transcluded infoboxes, the modification of existing infoboxes is restricted to members of the administrative team. Edits made to officially supported infoboxes without the consultation of the administrative team will be reverted at the discretion of the team.
Removing advisory templates
While users may remove advisory templates affixed to their articles by members of the administrative team, this may only be done once the user has addressed the policy-related concerns to which the templates refer. However, due its usefulness as a monitoring tool that automatically adds pages under observation to an administrative category, the {{Comply}} template may only be removed by members of the administrative team.
Users who attempt to remove advisory templates without first addressing the relevant policy issues or who remove {{Comply}} without authorization will be informed of this precedent via Message Wall post, the standardized text of which may be viewed in Template:DT-Advisory Templates. Subsequent impermissible removals of these templates may result in the immediate deletion of the article(s) in question[4] and/or a block in accordance with the Blocking Policy[5] at the discretion of the administrative team.
Notes and references
- ↑ This precedent was established by SavageOpress1138 in 2017 with his initial creation of the {{Comply}} template; see 1022114.
- ↑ This precedent was tacitly established by Goodwood as early as 2011; see deletion log entries here, here, and here.
- ↑ This part of the precedent was tacitly established by Sebolto; see deletion log entries here, here, and here.
- ↑ 1904350
- ↑ 1904350 § 6704840