Dungeons and Dragons Wiki talk:Editing Policy

Adoption Policy

Two weeks to a month is just too long. I have an idea. It is a bit aggressive, but aggressive is good when it comes to editing. It's always nice to keep the momentum going when you are actually enthusiastic about something.

First off, adoption requires you to post a message on the author's talk page stating your intention to adopt. If the author doesn't reply within 1 day or other users on the wiki on behalf of the author (supposing the article really is good as-is, for instance), the article is now adopted by you.

What if said user comes back from vacation all pissy (or someone on the author's behalf is pissy)? We have 4 options here:

1. Original author agrees to abandon the work and let the adopter keep it
2. We branch the article by taking the last update before adoption and the adopter can move their stuff from PageXYZ to PageXYZ by Adopter.
3. Adopter is all like "sorry bro" and reverts his changes.
4. Original author and adopter agree to try to collaborate on the article. If this fails, there is always 2.

These options should be presented by the adopter immediately if there is any conflict arising over a speedy adoption. We want adoptions to not be some sort of stealth stealing of articles and we want good faith. Luckily, wiki history allows us to be aggressive about allowing edits without worrying that we are destroying an article. The content is still there and is simply a reversion away.

Thoughts? --Aarnott 20:25, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I am all in favor of this policy. It might be a good idea to present the options in advance, though. "I'm adopting this article now, here's what you can do about it if you mind:" or something. --Foxwarrior 21:08, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

That's a good idea. We can have some sort of template that is used by Adopters to notify users they intend to adopt an article. It would contain some canned text, including those options. --Aarnott 21:26, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

It's a step away from the article consistency thing we decided to aim for a while back, but it's worth exploring. I'm a bit concerned over the "1 day" part, but would go along with it to see how it worked out. I would also want the wiki community to be able to step in (as a result of some consensus) and throw down a revert if an adoption slipped through or turned out to be worse than the original. That sort of thing shouldn't be reserved for absent authors only.

I'm not a fan of branching at all though, not unless they look like actually different articles. If they're not substantially different then I don't want it. Having article XYZ and article XYzZ is not a page count increase we need. If there's a disagreement over direction, the original author should win and the adopter can make something substantially different. This shouldn't happen often though, since the point of adoption would be to take it in a new direction or make clean up edits that the author never responded to on the article's talk. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 21:46, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

"It's a step away from the article consistency thing we decided to aim for a while back" --> what do you mean by this? Is that with regard to branching? I really don't expect people to be disputing over the same content, so when a branch happens, it really will be different content. Or at least different enough to warrant two versions.

I definitely agree that the community should be able to step in, which is why I made sure to say that people can speak on the author's behalf. I should have been more clear in saying that the community, in general, should hold the right to defend another author's work, whether or not the author has expressly said that another person can speak for them. Supposing some sort of crazyness where I decided to adopt one of Ghostwheel's pages and Eiji disagreed with my edits after the adoption finished, he can represent the "community" in this sense and he and I will have to reevaluate the adoption (using one of the four ways I put above).

Generally, I think that the regulars here have common sense and this policy isn't likely to get out of hand. --Aarnott 22:00, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

""It's a step away from the article consistency thing we decided to aim for a while back" --> what do you mean by this?"

I mean that it's moving away from articles being largely left alone after they're finished, and from the expectation that you could come back after a few months and not have the article changed by someone else (whether you held that expectation as an author or a player/DM). The 2 week period was intended as an actual road block to keep article contributions stable, in viewpoint if nothing else. If we don't desire that like we used to and want to aim for critique and quality instead, that's fine.

As for community involvement, it was pretty clear that you meant they could block it during the 1 day notice period. Less that you wanted them to be able to revert it later, hence my comment. While I don't mind a single member blocking it, I don't think I want a single member of the community to be able to revert it. I'd want several people annoyed at it before the adopter and the community decided how to split the baby. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 22:46, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Bump. If you want to add anything to this proposed change, please do so :-). - Tarkisflux ^Talk 23:23, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, I haven't heard any serious objections to trying it (I would have asked people on chat to contribute here just so that it is logged in the history). I think we should go ahead and add this policy. If things go sour, we can always re-evaluate it. --Aarnott 16:19, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

I'll get around to writing this in the next week or so, about the same time I do the editing policy changes. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 03:16, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Inaccurate Summaries

It seems to be common for summaries for feats to be copies of summaries for other, completely unrelated feats. I hypothesize that this is because it is sometimes easier for contributors who are new to the wiki to copy the edit section an existing page and replace it with their own content, but that they forget to change the summary text. The real question is, if I see completely unrelated summaries, should it be considered a clarity edit to change them? I don't want to mess around with the feats yet because the wording here is a bit unclear. --Maninorange (talk) 06:07, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

That seems to be a pretty clear clarity edit. Gopher it! -- Eiji-kun (talk) 06:15, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Seconded. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 17:00, 26 July 2013 (UTC)