MediaWiki:Policies
From MediaWiki
From now on I'm only editing the wiki while I'm off my meds!Don't do what Donny Don't does
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Teletraan 1 is not Wikipedia
No Wikipedia Articles
MediaWiki's users have decided against using Transformers articles from Wikipedia. There are several reasons.
- Audience — Wikipedia is general Transformers information for people interested in Transformers in a general way. MediaWiki is incredibly specific, detailed and comprehensive Transformers information for fans and creators that love to wallow in the strange, obscure and disturbing back corners of Transformers
- Formatting — Wikipedia has completely different article formatting, markup and structure than we do. An article literally cannot simply be cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia, the end up with little red error messages all over because the Transformers articles on Wikipedia use layout templates for presenting information that that would be impossible to use on Teletraan 1 without simplifying the information to the point it is no longer useful.
- Example: The Wikipedia {{character box}} allows you to list a character's 'Alternate Modes'. Optimus Prime's box lists 6 (one of which is 'a variety of Cybertronian trucks.') He's had over 30[citation needed]).
- Quality — Bluntly, a lot of Wikipedia's Transformers content is vaguely-worded summaries of how the writer remembers it happened, sections of slavish detail alternating with glossed-over simplification and lists. (We hate lists.)
- Copyright — Though Wikipedia's articles are available for anyone to use or edit under a GNU Free Documentation License, we still require that all article content be written specifically for Teletraan 1 to meet Teletraan 1's different standards and unique needs. Taking a Wikipedia article and reformatting it to match our layout and structure does not change the fact it was written to a different standard of quality for a different audience. To prevent this, Teletraan 1 requires that the copyright on all submitted article content be held solely by the uploader.[1]
Mostly this is a legal justification for a policy motivated by reasons stated above however.
Well, some layout templates but we really don't care about that.
Humor
It stays.
We Hate Lists
Lists are barely a form of content. Would you read the Phonebook to learn what the people in your neighborhood were like?
Lists may sometimes be a necessary evil- tolerated because they are useful- but they are never a virtue.
Basic Conduct
- For further information, see: Help:Introduction
Legal Issues
Copyrights
- For further information, see: Transformers Wiki:Copyrights
Footnotes
- ↑ You may notice a few articles on Teletraan 1 (such as Cyclonus) that appear very similar to their Wikipedia counterparts. They are not based on the Wikipedia article- the Wikipedia article is based on an original text written by and © a person who gave Wikipedia permission to use it, and but also rewrote that text for MediaWiki.
Lawyer-to-English Translation: The complete content of the original Wikipedia article was written by a user (probably McFeely) who subsequently took the time to rewrite it to Tenetraan 1's standards. That user holds the copyright on his original work and though he has given Wikipedia the right to fold-spindle-and-reuse it, he has given the same right to Teletraan 1 separately, and our use of that text is is no way beholden to the terms of redistribution of Wikipedia's GNU License. They are instead subject to the identical terms of redistribution of our GNU License. Confused? Good!
