Board Thread:2015 - A Year of Community/@comment-4050367-20150406215010

Hello friends! I hope you had a good Ester Sunday. I'm so sorry that I couldn't join you, but as you may know, I've been ill for some time now, and it seems to not be going away. However, my illness isn't the topic of this thread.

A fellow administrator has done his usually unnoticed duty of making sure our wiki's content follow the rules, having removed profanity from pages without the Profanity template as an example of his good work. As I was looking at his edits, I paid attention to the reasoning: Alcohol use is prohibited. I thought to myself "Has it been that long that you don't even remember if it's allowed or not?", so I decided the necessary action was to check our rules, of course. Scrolling down and up, as I searched for the answer, I both found and didn't find what I was looking for. The only answer I found was this in the What to Not Put on a Page section of the guidelines: " While the actual words "alcohol use is not allowed" was not on the page, I realized that it had fallen under this category, and that got me wondering. The purpose of the statement as originally written was to not post content that intentionally encouraged users to take drugs (heroin, crack, weed), murder, robbery, etc. In other words, the intention was to ensure our users wouldn't see content that would say "do bad things!". However, it seems as if in this case, it's been taken to say "no mention of any of these".
 * Encouragement for illegal activity - drugs, prostitution, homicide, suicide, arson, vandalism, hacking, fraud, robbery, or anything else illegal.

Take one of my own stories for example, Battle. There were two separate references to alcohol use. One was by a middle-aged man, the other by a Roman Solider who (yes, admittedly was 17) but was written in such due to the context of the times (Ancient Rome) and the fact that he was in the eyes of the Roman Empire, a man now (being a solider). The first example was used simply to describe the state of the character's misery, while the other was to describe what had happened to a character. At no time did either character suggest drinking alochol while underage (according to your national/local laws) was alright, but it was removed regardless.

Now, this may simply be an example of "search, find, edit, and remove" w/o looking at the context, and we should all thank him for removing what he felt was against the rules, few users now a day do such a thing. But it's just another sign that maybe we need to continue reforming how we deal with certain things. First of all, I believe the guidelines should be updated to be more clear on what is not allowed, to allow for transparency, and I'm open for suggestions on this. The second point I need to make also includes the Profanity Template.

I personally believe that "search, find, edit, and remove", although noble, is not the course of action to take. Instead of finding pages, for example, that contains "ass" in it, but no Profanity Template, and removing the word, why not just add the Profanity Template to the page? The idea of trusting every single user to check every single project and add the template isn't logical. If we find a page, why not just add the template to the page rather then edit a user's hard work?

I suggest we create a NEW template that allows one to rate their project as PG-13 (film) or TV-14 (television) and then allow a user to customize the template according to what their project holds, for example, look at the picture on the right.

It's just a quick image I made, but something like this, or more similar to this page (focus on the right with the parts that says "This user" and has the various items). Because I do believe that, in the case of alcohol use, as long as it's not an intentional way of trying to get a user to do a certain thing, and it's for storytelling, then more power to the writer. Also I really don't want to have to have a large Profanity template, a large alcohol use template, and a large lgbt character template on my pages, I'd rather have the one.

I most likely made a mountain of a mole hill (something bigger than necessary), but it's worth pointing out if something productive can come from it. Besides, I can sense the ideas and stories users want to tell on here are beginning to change, and this may just be one (or many) of the changes. And before anyone asks, there is no rule prohibiting the use of any character of any orientation. Just in case someone asks, and even if someone did, everyone was excited for "Gwencaster" when Lego did his Nicole thing. (Hopefully this isn't the main point of the discussion but just throwing it out there).

Please respond if possible, give me all your thoughts, etc. I'm sorry if I got sidetracked on other issues, hopefully I made my points clear. The discussion has no end date in mind, though I'm guessing by the end of April would be best lol. Again, hope you had a good Ester Sunday! 