Guild Wars Wiki:Talk pages/16-12-2008Draft

Guidelines on how talk pages should be handled and used. A talk page exists for all pages and is linked by the "discussion" tab. A talk page is where discussions or comments regarding the corresponding page takes place.

General guidelines

 * New topics should go at the bottom of a talk page under their own section header, unless they would be more appropriate as a subheading of an existing topic or section.
 * Talk page comments should be signed to give proper attribution and identification. Take note of the Guild Wars Wiki:Sign your comments policy.
 * Avoid modifying comments made by other users, even to correct obvious typos.
 * Avoid modifying your own comments, unless it is to correct minor typos or sentence structure. Using strikethrough is much preferable.
 * It is acceptable to edit existing comments to clean up formatting for readability; for example, closing an unclosed tag that is affecting subsequent comments, scaling down large images, removing the leading space character (which encloses text in a dashed box and prevents text wrapping), or modifying the indentation (which should be indicated using reset indent).

Removal of talk page content

 * Users may not remove comments (wholly or partially) from any talk page, with the following exceptions:
 * Removal of clear vandalism and spam.
 * Removal of links to sites containing malicious scripts or patently offensive material.
 * Removal of email addresses (although any request to not remove them should be honored).
 * Removal of personal information posted without the person's consent.
 * Removal of material prohibited by policy in a manner as ascribed by policy, such as Guild Wars Wiki:No personal attacks and Guild Wars Wiki:Copyrighted content.
 * Removal for archiving purposes (see following section).
 * Removal to a more appropriate talk page and marking the move using the moved template in both the source and destination pages.
 * Removal of inapropriate content from volatile talk pages, as described in the next section.
 * If part of a post is removed, a replacement note detailing what was removed should be inserted (such as   or ).
 * If a comment was removed in its entirety due to the above exceptions, there is no need to insert a replacement note, unless the removed comment had received a reply, in which case replacement notes such as   or   should be inserted.

Volatile talk pages
Volatile talk pages, deemed as such by community consensus, are talk pages in which the high number of comments outside the scope of the page is detrimental for its purpose (such as a group of users discussing among themselves in a user talk page belonging to someone else, or large discussions in an article's talk page that are not about said article). Those talk pages follow special guidelines:
 * Discussion is to be aimed only towards the user to whom the user talk page belongs, or only towards the article to which the talk page belongs.
 * "Useful discussion" not following the outline above will be moved to the correct location, with a notice showing the new location and a reason why (can be removed when archiving).
 * Inappropriate discussion (i.e. non-"useful discussion") will be removed entirely (reasons can go in the edit summary).
 * A clear notice should be at the top of these talk pages, with links to relevant pages.

These actions, and conflicts between moves or removals, should be left to admin discretion or community consensus. Those who revert an admin or do not follow the outline may be blocked according to admin discretion (usually based on frequency and scope of violations, and the content within them).

Archiving
An archive is essentially an old talk page. Archiving is used to clean up an excessively long talk page and provide easily accessible references for past discussions. Archives can be added to any talk page on Guild Wars Wiki. This guideline will explain how to archive and offer some tips on what to avoid.

When to archive?
Generally, when the page exceeds 32kb in size. But also when it's otherwise cluttered.

How do I archive a talk page?
See Help:Archiving.

Archiving guidelines

 * Archive a talk page by sections. Avoid archiving a section only partially, since it will break continuity.
 * Archive only inactive discussions. Consider moving relevant sections out of an archive should a topic get discussed again; avoid discussions on archives.
 * Empty remnants of sections moved to other talk pages need not be archived if they are irrelevant.
 * Personal attacks can be removed without archiving as per Guild Wars Wiki:No personal attacks.
 * After archiving, add a visible link on the original talk page to the newly created archive.
 * Explain that you're archiving in the edit summary.
 * An archived talk page is still a talk page. All relevant policies and guidelines still apply.
 * Users should generally not archive talk pages in the user spaces of others without permission.

Research data

 * If a talk page includes a research section, that section and any research-related discussion should go at the top of the page; unless it is very extensive, in which case it should go to a separate subpage.
 * Data in research tables is not considered part of any specific user's comments. As such, tables can be extensively reformatted as long as the existing data is unaltered.