elanthipedia talk:Manual of Style/PCs

I submit to people the following for guidelines on negative information:

==Events and Organizations Involving PCs==
===Negative Information===
While we do not discourage the posting of negative information about Player Characters, we do require that it be added 
in a mature and reasonable way. To this end, if a PC is involved in an organization or an event that is seen as negative, 
proof must accompany that information in the form of a reference, unless the information is added by the player of that 
character.
====Proof====
What constitutes proof may vary from case to case, but some suggestions may be links to forum posts by third parties, and 
references to in-game magazines, books, or other documentation. Logs may be submitted as proof, but only so long as there 
is no objection to whether they have been altered. Disagreement on ''interpretation'' of what logs mean is not sufficient 
to void their value as proof.<br />
Posts from the play.net forum should be copied to <pagename>/Posts (using [[Template:Post]]) to retain them for posterity, 
as should any post from other forums that requires a user name to view.

-Moderator Caraamon Strugr-Makdasi^(talk) 23:21, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Apparently I need to be more clear when speaking to people who aren't the voices in my head. Go figure. Basically what this is about is under what conditions can a group claim something, and individual(s) claim that it is false. This is not about opinions, or feelings, or dislikes, but about under what conditions should be allow posting of negatory (is that better than negative?) modifications? -Moderator Caraamon Strugr-Makdasi^(talk) 02:08, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Looks good to me --Callek 03:58, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for including me in this conversation, Caraamon. As people may have noted I have been completely inactive here for quite a number of months due to a number of personal matters that have dominated my spare time. So I'm not familiar with the underlying issues this guideline may be intended to address, and I am completely ignorant of the context here. But with that proviso, I hereby throw in my two cents ;)

It is a good idea but I'm not sure how effective this guideline will be since by definition it addresses articles with controversial subject matter, ie information that is under dispute between two editors. The word "negative" is also quite fuzzy as it is entirely a matter of perspective whether one person or the other has behaved "negatively" or not. The word seems to go towards the motive of the editor rather than the content (eg writing something about another character with the goal of "outing" him or her in some way), and in my mind that opens up the larger subject of objectivity and NPOV. My other thought is that ideally, the provisions for documentation and proof should apply to all information entered on the wiki, especially when writing about another person's character, and shouldn't necessarily be restricted to controversial topics. Also third-party forum posts aren't in my view a reliable source since they aren't guaranteed to be either authoritative or objective. --Farman 06:04, 22 January 2009 (UTC)