Policies are the backbone of how we protect user safety on Fandom and ensure a welcoming experience to fans of all backgrounds and beliefs. As part of that mission, we regularly review our policies to ensure that they are as clear as possible and contain all information about how we approach user safety. These reviews can lead to us adding important new clauses to pre-existing policies, creating brand new policies to fill in gaps, or formally documenting rules that are already largely in practice so that our standards can be applied consistently and fairly.
One policy we are releasing today, the Offensive Terms Policy, is a reflection of that last option - it’s not so much a new rule, but it’s formalizing something publicly that has been an area of staff enforcement and focus for years.
On Fandom, users can create wikis on many topics, even ones with mature themes like violence, sexuality, and profanity, as explained in our Community Creation Policy. While it's okay to use quotes, slogans, or other materials directly from the source, sometimes certain words or phrases, especially hate speech, aren't allowed on Fandom according to our Terms of Use.
Thus, this new policy helps clarify Fandom’s position on certain terms and descriptions that we do not permit on Fandom, even if the term or imagery in question is directly used in the source material of a topic.
To learn more about the policy, we encourage you to read the policy fully and ensure your community complies with these rules. There is guidance in that policy about how we permit certain words to be censored as well as information about how we consider reclamation of terms when that’s most appropriate for a particular wiki. Our staff will be enforcing this policy effective immediately, so you may see us making some edits here and there to reflect this.
Of course, we encourage you to be aware of all of the policies that apply to your communities on Fandom to ensure the safety and enjoyment of everyone who uses Fandom. A master list of all relevant policies can be found on this centralized page.
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