Help:Common mistakes

Here are some mistakes people commonly make on Wikia. Please try to avoid these!

Thinking you own the wiki
Even if you requested the wiki be created, you do not own it. The wikis are owned by the communities, not by any one user.


 * See Ownership.

Protecting pages unnecessarily
The majority of pages on all Wikia should remain publicly editable, and not protected. Pages may, however, be temporarily or permanently protected for legal reasons (for example, license texts should not be changed) or in cases of extreme vandalism or edit warring.


 * See Help:Protection.

Confusing the licenses
All Wikia wikis are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This is not the same as any of the Creative Commons licenses, and compatibility is very limited.

You may:
 * 1) Include any amount of public domain text or images in a GFDL page. See the public domain resources text index and image index on Wikipedia for a list of those.
 * 2) Include text licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) if proper credit is given at the footer of the wiki page. No other Creative Commons license is compatible with GFDL text.
 * 3) Include images under any of the following licenses: public domain, GFDL, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, BSD, GPL, LGPL. You are explicitly not allowed to upload images under licenses which forbid commercial use or the creation of derivative works.


 * See Wikia copyrights.

Applying too many policies
It is not a good idea to try to enforce many policies on a new and small wiki. Some users make the mistake of trying to re-implement the numerous Wikipedia policies on a new wiki. Policies from wikis outside of Wikia do not necessarily apply here. Different Wikia will develop different policies over time. Things like vanity pages may be permitted by some Wikia and not by others.

There is not really a policy that applies everywhere, but certain things such as Wikipedia:No personal attacks or Wiki:DeleteInsults seem to be common practice in most places.

Instruction creep is another common mistake when making policies. For example, while Wiktionary has several formal levels of policies, the original Wiki uses a more informal framework.


 * See Wikia policies and setting boundaries.

Making redundant articles
Before creating a new article, try searching for the topic since you may find a related one that already exists. Consider adding to existing articles before creating an entirely new one.


 * See Help:Searching.

Deleting content

 * Deleting useful content.
 * A page may be written poorly, yet still have a purpose. Consider what a sentence or paragraph tries to say. Clarify it instead of throwing it away. If the material seems wrongly categorized, or out of place, consider moving the wayward material to another page, or creating a new page for it. If you need to remove potentially useful content, it is usually best to move it to the discussion page. The author of the text once thought it valuable, so it is polite to preserve it for later discussion.


 * Deleting without announcing that you're doing it.
 * Remark on it in the edit summary box. Otherwise, other users who care about the page's development will be caught unaware, and may think you're being intentionally sneaky.


 * Deleting without justifying.
 * Deleting anything nontrivial requires some words of justification in the edit summary or on the discussion page.


 * Deleting redirects.
 * If a page has been moved to a new title, an automatic redirect will be left from the old title to the new one. You should usually leave the redirect in place so people who have bookmarked or linked to the old title can easily find the new one.

Spamming
Attracting contributors to your wiki is important, but you must be very careful not to cross the line into spamming. See Caution: Wikipedia for some advice about not over-promoting your site on Wikipedia. Sending wiki messages or emails to people you don't know may be regarded as spam. You may get blocked from other websites for doing this.


 * See Help:Deletion.