Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5488183-20170321190307

Hi all. I just want to remind everyone of a rule which lately has been broken a lot. Note that this applies to people creating one sentence character or animal articles rather than those who have been filling out the infobox for an article. If you take the time to fill out the infobox, you can rest assured that you're not breaking any rules, and you need not worry about this!

This rule is the one that gets broken the most:

'''When adding a new page that will no doubt contain plentiful information, please add at least 3 full sentences to the article. '''

You are also reminded of this rule on the page creation page as well. Even if you add an image or the navigation templates, this rule still stands. There are a few reasons why we have this rule in place, and here are the main reasons why:

1. Articles are meant to be useful to people. I'll use an example for this reason.

Lioness is a lioness who appears in Lions of the Outlands.

Even with a picture, this isn't helpful in the slightest. It just points out the obvious. Articles like these are borderline clickbait to some. And remember - some people have limited internet services. If people keep finding things like this over the wiki, they're not going to bother coming back when they need information, which is our ultimate goal here - to give out good, informative articles.

2. They are used to spam for achievements. This is also against our rules. We disabled achievements once before because people kept spamming for them, we'd rather not do that again (especially when some people are making the effort to log in and make a meaningful/non-spam edit here every day for them).

3. Imagine yourself at work or at school. Then imagine someone dumping a load of work on your desk, saying 'I started these, but I can't be bothered to finish them because I'm starting on something else, you do it'. It's not nice, nor helpful, to dump an unfinished article like that, since it makes more work for someone else (either someone will add to it, or an admin has to delete it). Stubby ones are fine, but just creating them for the sake of it is not.

There are more reasons why they're not helpful, but these highlight the main problems with them.

I know some people just want to help, and that's great! But there are other, more productive ways to help the wiki than to just create unhelpful pages like that. Consider spell checking an article, or adding captions to the images.

If you don't have time to put a little bit of effort into an article, then please don't create it. Someone else will eventually create it themselves regardless. From this post onwards, people will start receiving warnings for breaking this rule. We've been a bit lax about it recently, but waking up to find loads of pages in need of deletion is not particularly fun.

If you have any further questions about this rule, please do post below. Thanks everyone! 