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, and everyone is welcome to edit and contribute to the wiki.


 * 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:Page protection.

Confusing the licenses
Most 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.
 * 3) Include images under any of the following licenses: public domain, GFDL, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, BSD, GPL, LGPL.


 * See Wikia copyrights.

Confusing wiki, Wikia and Wikipedia
A wiki is a website anyone can edit. Sites on Wikia.com are examples of wikis. Wikipedia is a specific wiki at wikipedia.org and is not part of Wikia. You can call your site on wikia.com a wiki or a Wikia, but you cannot call it a Wikipedia. The word Wikipedia is a trademark.

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. Instruction creep is another common mistake when making policies.

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


 * See Wikia policies and setting boundaries.

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.

Taking it too seriously

 * Wikis work through the collaboration of reasonable and consensus-oriented people. Flaming people and being rude is rarely acceptable on a wiki.
 * Don't get annoyed if you find some bad articles. Wikis are works in progress; please tolerate our imperfection, and help us improve. There are a lot of smart people editing Wikia sites, and everyone finds they have something to contribute. The best response to a bad page is to fix it!