Forum:Policy and help on all Wikias

Every Wikia seems to have different help pages, different policy and different guidelines. There are sometimes reasons for this, e.g. some wikis have special processes, but mostly policy, guidelines and help pages need to be identical on every wiki - having different ones for each simply causes confusion. After thinking about this I realised there was a simple, obvious, solution. Instead of letting each community waste time creating their own pages, why not automatically copy the latest version of the help page stored on central?

This method has many benefits -
 * Wikians don't have to waste time creating such pages instead of doing the fun part of adding real content to the wiki.
 * New Wikians do not have to spend time learning new policy and guidlines very much when they hop to a new wiki.
 * please add mre...

It would also be very simple to put in place, simply create the pages in central and create a page (prehaps at Automatic imported content discuss...) where all pages that should be imported are listed and create different versions of the pages for different languages.

Draft:

why not help expand?

The pages would obviously have to be entirely self contained so not to be destroyed when entering a different wiki. This includes any css (but prehaps the @import function could be used so other wikis automatically include the central wikias one).

The pages would have to automatically be imported (using the import function) via a bot. The bot could have a special type of account created specially for it - i.e. importbot with page protection and import only.

It would add a header saying don't edit this as changes will be erased, and then protect the page (fully). Another list would have to be created which would list every single wiki in each language so the bot would know what pages to edit and which versions to use. Lcarsdata (Talk) 16:21, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm opposed to the idea. Firstly, the contents page contains a number of links, copying that page will create a page with a large number of useless broken links. The Editing page mentioned is actualy multiple pages so copying it will break the other pages, and it lacks enough information to even be used as a editing guide. And that policy page dosen't even exist, plus it will break the policy of other wikia by inserting policy links, and policys that the wiki may have removed and reversed to fit their individual rules. And adding extra languages shouldn't be done for other languages, there are numerous wikis that are strictly single language. The Gaiapedia is English only because the forum we document is english only. If you go to a new wikia you should learn it's own policys, in it's own way, policys that fit the central wikia may not fit other wikia, and forcing rules on a wikia is like a dictatorship of one community over another, that's not what wikia is for. We have our important pages listed in a indexbox on those pages, and our help contents and rules page are both accessable via the sidebar. Dantman (Talk) 19:29, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Importing the help might be a good idea. It definitely sucks for new users to go to a wiki that interests them and have no guidance whatsoever on how things work. However, I don't think it should be mandatory. I also don't think the CSS should be imported or fixed in any way. It's already a pain in the ass to maintain a unique color scheme.

The policies are a different beast. I agree with Dantman, policies are often totally different on different wikis and should not be standardized. Even Wikipedia pillars like Neutral Point of View aren't always valued or used on Wikia. It would be best if each community wrote their own, but I do think it might be a good idea to have a boilerplate set that new founders can import and use until the kinks can get worked out by the community. In fact, it might be useful to have a boilerplate set of policies for each type of Wikia wiki - since game ones are different from TV ones are different from travel ones, etc. --StBacchus 14:22, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

The best thing for the policys would be to add some policy drafts for use in the Starter wiki. If mandatory policy pages overriding current policy pages came out... I'd seriously write a bot to conteract that and besides, the removal of rules could be considered vandalism. (Actualy, the first attempt would be blocking the import bot) Dantman (Talk) 17:45, 14 November 2006 (UTC)