Omnictionary talk:Community Guidelines

From Omnictionary

Hello fellow Nerdfighters - Here are my first thoughts in response to the questions on this page:

What's the goal of this site?

I don't know that this can be answered yet. I suspect that it will be used by different people in different ways. I imagine the site used as a place to post fiction writing and maybe to engage in some collaborative "worldbuilding" to give stories a common setting. I think individual users should try to avoid stepping on other people's toes as we proceed.

What are some things that are considered "impolite"?

There are some big ones I hope we can agree on here: No article defacement, personal attacks, uploading copyrighted material, etc.

Wikis are usually collaborative in the sense that people come through, fix grammatical errors, and sometimes reword passages or dramatically modify content. That makes sense for a wiki. For a project where people are posting original works, it may be a good idea to seek an author's permission before "tweaking" their prose. This might not be as important if authors mark certain articles as "collaborative," or open to amendment.

Another tough call relates to the first question: How will different people use this site? I stumbled across the cancer entry and my first reaction was that this kind of entry didn't hold with the objectives of the site as a collaborative fiction environment. But maybe political speech is what some users will utilize omnictionary for.

I'm certainly not advocating censorship. Some works of fiction will always offend somebody. What do you think about articles like this?

What other things would you like to discuss?

Thinkin'. I'll get back to you.

--71.98.111.49 (My friends call me Grumpy)

Sorry if i interrupt anything, but i think Hank and John might want to add something to the guidelines about how this is not meant to be a chatroom/directory of nerdfighters and nerdfighting. Many nerdfighters seem to have made pages for themselves, and i don't think that's really the point of the omnictionary. Fafnir 13:28, 22 May 2008 (EDT)

You have a point. The ning already exists for chat/directory functions. However, if Omnictionary is going to host Nerdfighters' fiction, it makes sense to have author bios somewhere. If the site is meant to exist within the Paper Towns universe (or a similar parallel universe), explicit references to real people might be problematic. Then again, so long as writers don't try to Mary Sue themselves into the story, their user pages could represent them as Omnictionary editors, much like the editors at Wikipedia.

It depends how the project shapes up. Input from Hank and John would be nice, I agree.

Grumpy Mr. Gruff 23:57, 22 May 2008 (EDT)

Canon

How do you suppose canon articles will be chosen? Will they be voted on? Or do the Green brothers have absolute veto power? (Not to say that they don't already, of course.) Matthew Dryden 01:58, 4 June 2008 (EDT)

Infoboxes and Such

Can you create them?