Wowpedia:Guild pages policy

Wowpedia:Policies
Policy status and phases
Category Copyright Deletion – Speedy deletion Disallowed content – NDA Editing – Disruptive editing External links Fan fiction Images		Item articles Lore Naming Neutrality Personal articles Player character pages Projects Stubs Three revert rule User naming Vandalism Voting
See also: guidelines, administrators

This page is an official policy on Wowpedia.

This policy has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow.

Feel free to propose any changes to this policy, but please make sure that changes you make follow the official process and reflect consensus on the discussion page before you put them into practice. Any big changes need to be Adopted or Decreed to be enforced as policy.
See Wowpedia:Policies for an overview of Wowpedia policies.
See Category:Policies for a list of proposed and adopted policy articles.
Shortcut: WW:GUILD

The goal of a wiki is to be informative and not to allow self promotion or free advertisement. This policy outlines what is allowed, not allowed, and required when a user creates a page for a guild.

Posting a page including info about a guild in an objective manner is fine, but we have all too many wikisquatters starting guild pages on a site meant to be mostly informative. This could even be classified as stealing our bandwidth which is illegal (at least in the U.S.)! Please, if you want a wiki for your guild, ask around; I am sure some generous user will help you get one set up.

When writing a guild article, please consider the boilerplate as a good starting point.

Required

All guild pages will be required to follow these specifications.

Naming

Guild pages must be in the Guild namespace, contain the complete name of the guild, and be followed by the guild's server and EU or US in parentheses.

Example: [[Guild:The Mighty Guild (Arthas US)]].

Note there is no space between Guild: and the guild name. However, there is a space between the guild name and the following parenthetical.

Additional guild articles may be created as a sub article of the guild's main article. The guild page policy also applies to sub articles.
Examples:
[[Guild:The Mighty Guild (Arthas US)/Article1]].

[[Guild:The Mighty Guild (Arthas US)/Article2]].
It is important that guild and server names are accurate. If your guild is incorrectly named, and your guild is not found on the Armory, the page may be marked as a candidate for deletion.

The {{Guild}} tag at the top of the page.
The server the guild exists on.
The faction the guild plays.
At least three (3) sentences in English containing useful information about the guild, such as the purpose of the guild, contact information, recruiting state, rules, and style of play. After these sentences, the main article may be in another language if the intended audience is non-English.

Categorization

The guild page must also be properly categorized as follows:

[[Category:PvE guilds]], [[Category:PvP guilds]], [[Category:RP guilds]] – Choose the one which most closely matches your play-style.
[[Category:Alliance guilds]] or [[Category:Horde guilds]]

Note that using {{Guild}} and/or {{Guildbox}} with the appropriate parameters filled in will automatically categorize your guild page.

Allowed

The information here is allowed and encouraged in order to create an informative guild page:

A (short) list of players to contact for more information
A link to your guild website and/or forums
A list of the progress your guild has made
A list of periodic events that might be of interest to people outside the guild, e.g. prospective new members:
- Guild meeting schedules, instance run schedules, PvP raid schedule
- Note however that the intention is not to allow guilds to replace their own guild sites with WoWWiki pages. The emphasis is still on objectivity and usefulness to people outside your guild.
A summary of the purpose of your guild
Whether you are recruiting or not, and who you are recruiting
A brief summary of guild guidelines
Short stories or history of your guild

This is not necessarily a complete list. We do not mind you publishing other information that is useful or interesting to others; but it illustrates the gist of it: pages in WoWWiki are there for the visitors!

Not allowed

Posting the following types of information will result in your guild page being edited or deleted:

Biased information - The content on a Wiki is meant to be informative, this includes guild pages. Guild pages, like all other, should be written from a neutral point of view and must follow the Neutral Point of View Policy.
A complete list of guild members
Forums, message boards, or other forms of inter-guild communications
In general terms: don't put any material on the page that requires it to be updated frequently, or is only meant for members of the guild.

Disbanded guilds

Articles about disbanded or non-existent guilds can and will be nominated for speedy deletion. If your guild has disbanded but you want to archive the article, please move it to the main author's User: namespace, or the server's namespace, and remove {{Guild}} and any guild-specific category.

Guild stubs

Stubs for guilds can be created in preparation of expanding the article with more information. If you create a stub, use the {{Stub/Guild}} tag at the top of your article. Guild pages marked as stubs which have not been edited to comply with the policy for 30 days will be deleted. Your guild page is a stub if it does not contain the required information.

Enforcing the policy

A page not containing the required information should be marked {{Stub/Guild}}.
A guild page stub should be marked {{Speedydelete}} after 30 days if it has not been fixed.
A page containing disallowed content can be edited to comply, or you can mark it with {{Violation/Guild}}, which places it in Category:Pages with possible policy violations for someone else to fix.
Users that insist on having information on their guild page that is not allowed, and revert improvements others make, will be considered Vandals.
Any pages or images linked to solely from the deleted guild page will also be deleted.

Note: A deleted guild page can be restored (or permitted to be recreated) at an admin's discretion. However, this will not give you an extra 30 days to comply with policy.

Summary

Please remember that WoWWiki is a place where users go to obtain information about World of Warcraft, not get spammed with useless information. Guilds are certainly a large part of World of Warcraft and can be represented here, but they must follow the proper criteria and not participate in spewing useless biased information or Wikisquatting. Your target audience is not yourself or your guildmates, it is people interested in WoW. Your guild page should reflect this!

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