MediaWiki:Captions

A picture is worth 1000 words.

Unlike most Wikis, MediaWiki does not have a complete ban on humor, particularly in image captions where a description saying "a picture of Megatron" would be completely redundant. Instead, we prefer to lighten things up with humorous image captions, because Transformers is inherently ridiculous, and denying this probably isn't healthy.

MediaWiki is a fun community which welcomes new members' contributions with open arms. That said... if your idea of "contributing" is to change the existing jokes to new, "funnier" jokes... don't. This holds true for changing them to blanks or boring, patently-obvious descriptors as well.

Why?

There are several reasons we discourage new users from editing image captions.

• Your jokes aren't funnier.

• Funny image captions are like a fun bonus you get to do when you make a page or a new section or upload a needed image. For the people who wrote the text, or found and edited the images, this is their reward for that hard work. If you're not expanding the article, you really shouldn't be making jokes.

• If you're changing a joke, you're removing content created by a user who's contributed to this community, and replacing it with something from someone (yourself) who has not.

Removing Joke captions

Edits which do nothing but change the funny image captions to new funny image captions, or remove those captions altogether, are reverted back to their original state.

You will be banned if you repeatedly remove jokes simply for the sake of doing so despite warnings given. The humor thing has been discussed at length for quite a long time; the policy will not change, and trying to "make a point" will only result in us removing the troublemaker.

We have guidelines about what level of humor is and is not acceptable; try to stick to "PG-13" or lower. Bear in mind the four-letter f-word indicating copulation is right out.

Adding joke captions

• It is okay for an image to have a factual caption, or *gasp* no caption at all.

Please note that an image without a caption is not an open invitation for anyone to come along and slap in whatever inane thought first crosses their mind. A captionless image is not some grievous error in need of immediate correction. Anonymous and minimal-contributing editors who add captions in such instances are rarely doing the wiki a service.

Also, on occasion, a caption needs to be informative, not irreverent. Sometimes, a descriptor is necessary to describe the contents (such as which of these three unreleased Mini-Cons is "Brakedown"), and a joke will only obfuscate or confuse the purpose of the image.

We allow humor. We don't discourage it. But we certainly don't mandate it, either. The purpose of this wiki is to convey information; the jokes are an occasional bonus, not the driving force.

• Having no caption is better than having an outright dumb, inane, pointless, or unfunny one.

As with pretty much everything else, we demand quality. While humor is highly subjective, a joke caption should generally have some kind of thought, reasoning, or intelligence behind it.

If you can't even punctuate or capitalize, don't bother. If you haven't contributed substantive content, don't bother. If your joke caption isn't funny enough to make you laugh, don't bother. If your "joke" is so obscure or internalized that nobody on Earth will ever grasp it except for just you, don't bother. We have plenty of jokes already.

Regular contributors who decide not to add humorous captions to images they've uploaded or inserted into articles are encouraged to add more "standard", factually descriptive captions instead. We would much rather have that than weak attempts at humor by non-contributing editors. And while "A picture of Megatron" is inane and redundant, "Megatron's box art painting from his 1984 toy", while not necessary (since such detailed information would be part of the image file's content), is at least informative and intelligent.

Captions and jokes we're sick of

Or, ways to earn a quick revert:

• Linking the word "God" to the Primus article. "Oh God, not again!" Overdone? Yes. Funny? No.

• Anything involving "Soundwave superior". Previous caption superior! Your caption inferior.

• Gratuitous word-linking to "To sell toys" and "Ruined FOREVER".

• "Dull surprise!" Yeah, we get it. Thanks. It'll take new depths of awfulness to actually merit using this.

• Changing every single Omega Supreme caption to match his speech quirk. Joke: overdone. Humor: deceased.

• Jokes about how someone is "compensating" for something.

• Remarks about how someone or something is "not" someone or something else that they might look a bit.

• The many things Bonecrusher hates. Which coincidentally includes all of the above.

Jokes we're not sick of

• KNOW that Razorclaw's running gag never gets old!

For further information, see: Transformers Wiki:Policies#De-snarking