Forum:New wiki policies proposal

Because the wiki turned into a complete mess, I propose the following policies to fix the wiki:

Articles

 * If possible, articles about the same subject should follow the same layout.
 * All headings in articles should be at least at second level, because the first level is used for article title.
 * Articles (and other things on the wiki) should be placed only in deep categories. For example, if you place an article into "Submachine guns" category, it must not be placed into "Weapons" or "Call of Duty 2" categories. High-level categories are only for categories.
 * Code of an article must be as cleaner, shorter and standardized as possible. Editing wikitext should be more preferred than WYSIWYG editors. Things like images or galleries should be placed by hand.
 * Blank line policy:
 * No more than 1 blank line should be placed between parts of an article to not break the layout.
 * Blank lines between list items must be strictly prohibited since they create another list. Look at this example:

Images and videos

 * Uploading:
 * All images, videos and sounds should be uploaded only using Special:Upload or using "Add a Photo" button in the sidebar of any page (but not sidebar of editing page) with advanced options opened.
 * All images, videos and sounds should have a properly filled information template (example can be found on Combine OverWiki or Wookiepedia), must have appropriate name, licensing and must be properly categorized for easy navigation.
 * All images, videos and sounds should have the highest quality available. Screenshots must never be made using a camera and must be made on highest graphics settings. If a game is available on PC, screenshots must be taken on PC.
 * All screenshots or screenshot-like textures must be in JPG (if their size in PNG is less than 200-250Kb). All simple textures should be in PNG with correct transparency. All flags and other very simple content must be in SVG. Flags copied from Wikipedia in any format other than SVG must be removed on sight and replaced with SVG version.
 * "SOMENUMBERpx-" duplicates must be removed on sight and replaced with full version.
 * All files that are used only by specific users (on user pages, in signatures, etc.) should have "User USERNAME name of file" filename formatting and should be placed in Category:User files (or something similar).
 * Usage in articles:
 * All images or videos in articles should have the same size, but for better usability size should not be set in articles, because default thumbnail size can be set in user preferences.
 * All galleries must look the same and must have the same size. All gallery settings such as "captionalign" (creates useless HTML tags) or "orientation" (makes images unpreviewable) must be removed for usability. Exception can be made to "widths" and "heights" parameters, but their values should be the same on entire wiki and must be dividable by 10 without modulo or power of 2 (120, 140 and 128 are fine).

Punishment

 * At first a warning should be issued for not following style guidelines and rules. Then, blocks ranging from 3 days to 3 months should be issued.
 * Blocks for vandalism and should be much stricter than now and should depend on degree of violation, but not less than 1 month.
 * Simple vandalism (like removing all content from a page) should result in a 1 month block on first violation, 6 months block on 2nd and permanent block on 3rd violation.
 * Vandalism containing profanity and/or pornography should result in a 3 month block on first violation and permanent block on second.
 * Vandalism with insults should result in a 6 months block on 1st violation and permanent block on 2nd.

Other

 * Until CSS3 standard is not complete, all browser-specific CSS options (such as linear-gradient) must be duplicated 4 times for every browser (prefixes are -moz-, -webkit-, -ms- and -o-) and one time without a prefix for forward compatibility.

Discuss. SiPlus 14:07, October 30, 2011 (UTC)