Dungeons and Dragons Wiki:Canon Content Requirements
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The DnD Encyclopedia section of this wiki, residing in the Canon namespace, aims to provide descriptions and summaries for the myriad things that have been officially published for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.
We have a few policies and guidelines for these kinds of articles. These restrictions do not apply to other kinds of material, like the Homebrew section or the SRD.
Contents
Canon Article Requirements[edit]
A canon article is based on primary sources, generally official material published by the company responsible for its development. This may be in the form of books, novels, internet articles, or even computer and video games.
Copyrights[edit]
The basis of most Canon articles will be copyrighted, non-free material. And copyrights have to be respected if we want to continue to serve in this capacity. To achieve this, we apply the same rules and guidelines as Wikipedia, as stated at Wikipedia:Copyrights and all its related pages. We especially want to keep in mind the following Wikipedia statement:
Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia, so long as you do not follow the source too closely. (See our Copyright FAQ for more on how much reformulation may be necessary as well as the distinction between summary and abridgment.) However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.
For these reasons we will usually not include statistics of any kind, as they cannot be sufficiently reformulated.
Sources[edit]
All sources of the articles should be stated in the references section. A source tag about which company/companies provided the material should be included in the article for easy references with the help of the Template:Tsrwotc (for material by TSR, Inc. or Wizards of the Coast), or Template:Source (for all other companies). The companies should also be included as categories. For the TSR/WotC, this is done automatically by Template:Tsrwotc. See Canon:Wee Jas for an example.
Citation of specific relevant works is also encouraged for all canon articles, just as if you were citing an event on Wikipedia. The Cite Pub template is generally used for these direct citations.
Categories and Breadcrumbs Guideline[edit]
To be able to apply certain tools, we strive to put Canon articles into categories according to topic and - if appropiate - campaign settings. Many of our infobox templates will apply these categories automatically. Canon:Main gives a list of example categories.
For easy reference we would also like to add breadcrumbs for those topics and campaign settings at the bottom of the article, that include links to the respective categories. See Canon:Moradin for an example.
Other Wikis[edit]
- This wiki is a place for everything related to Dungeons & Dragons. There are, however, a number of other large and successful wikis that are specific to certain campaign settings, namely Eberron Wiki, Forgotten Realms Wiki, the Great Library of Greyhawk, Mistipedia (Ravenloft), Dragonlance Nexus Lexicon and Legend of the Five Rings Wiki (Rokugan).
- Topics that are related to one of those campaign settings only are likely to be maintained in more detail at the respective wiki. Topics in our encyclopedia that would duplicate their work would be a poor use of our time and a missed opportunity to use an excellent resource. Therefore, articles for these sorts of topics should contain only enough information for a non-excited reader to get the basic idea here at D&D wiki, and include a link to more detailed articles in more specifc wikis. For examples see Elminster Aumar or Flanaess.
- Topics from these campaign settings that have become core elements, however, should receive a full article here.
- Birthright Wiki and the Planescape Encyclopedia are large and interesting, but have a somewhat different outlook than our Canon section. Thus those two campaign setting are included in the scope of Dungeons & Dragons Wiki here, while articles about those settings should give links to the respective article of the specialized wikis, where appropriate.
- To our knowledge, other D&D campaign settings have no or small and less-than-vibrant wikis and are therefore all included in the scope our wiki here.
- A good starting point to find out which topics are already covered at campaign setting-specific wikis are the Lists of D&D articles from other wikis. Related Wikis may also be interesting in this respect.
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