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These guidelines are provisional. We're still working on finalizing them, but you can still use them to guide your editing in the meantime. If you have any questions or comments about them, please feel free to leave them on the relevant post here. |
Articles about living people (ALPs) need more care than other articles. A living person has a reputation and livelihood that can be affected by the information out there on them. And because of the prominence of Otherkin Wiki in search results, having a page here can also expose people to more publicity than they want. These things can be particularly disastrous for alterhumans, who are a particularly maligned group. As a result, we follow a very strict process for creating articles of this type. If you do not follow this procedure, you may be banned from creating articles.
Article creation procedure
Bring it to the community
All ALP proposals must be posted on the community feed. Other editors must agree that this article is worth creating, including at least one admin. We check the community feed regularly, but if you think we've missed your post, please feel free to come to us directly.
Establish notability
Articles about people, living or dead, have more notability requirements than normal articles. Please see the Notability guidelines for people section of our Notability page to learn what they are. We've tried to construct these guidelines in such a way that filters out most ordinary people who shouldn't receive this kind of visibility in the first place.
The guidelines can be subjective, so agreeing that a person is notable is also part of the community discussion process.
Get consent
On websites like Wikipedia, you don't need a person's consent to make an article about them. That's because people who are notable enough for Wikipedia are already public figures who expect attention because of that. Only a very few notable alterhumans already have that level of publicity; most are just ordinary people. The increased attention an article here could bring them may be harmful, especially if they're not prepared for it. Therefore, all potential ALP subjects should be asked for consent to be featured on the wiki.
Once an admin has agreed to the creation of an ALP, they will contact the person who the article is about asking for permission. We will explain what the wiki is, why we think it should have an article on them, and how we handle ALPs. If they decline, the process stops here. But if they consent,
Create a draft
All ALPs must be created as drafts first (ie, don't simply press the Add new page button). Please see the How to create a draft page for instructions on how to do this. You don't have to, but you're encouraged to let other people know about the draft and invite them to help.
Have it reviewed
When you feel like your article is done, post to the community feed again. Other editors must agree that the article is suitable to be published, including at least one admin. When an agreement is reached, the admin will move the article into mainspace for you. Congrats on creating a high quality article!
What information to include
All information included in an ALP must be readily available knowledge. It must also be relevant to the article.
For example, if a person states that they're Canadian offhandedly in a tumblr post that you have to dig for, that's inappropriate. If they state it in their twitter bio, that's safe to include. Even so, if the person's nationality doesn't factor into their alterhumanity or why they're notable, it shouldn't be included. The more information about a person is included in the same place, the easier it is to harass them - excessive inclusion of information may be considered tantamount to doxxing.
If you're the subject of an ALP
If Otherkin Wiki has created an article about you, you are entitled to:
- Ask us to take it down. You may revoke your consent to be featured here at any time. We might want to have a conversation with you about it, because if you're here, you're probably somewhat important to the history and culture of the community, and we'd like to preserve that! But ultimately, we will always honor your request.
- Ask for sensitive information to be removed. We try to keep information included to stuff that's relevant and public knowledge. If you feel there is private or personal information in an article that you don't want to be so visible, we will remove it at your request.
- Edit it. This is usually explicitly forbidden on other wikis. Here, we think that the potential impact of wrong or incomplete information is big enough that the person who knows best - you! - should be able to fix it. Please disclaim somewhere, preferably on the article's talk page and your profile, that you are the person the article is about. Another editor will likely want to check it afterwards to make sure you're not puffing yourself up too much (even if you're not trying to, we're all biased towards making ourselves look good).
What about people mentioned in other articles?
As best as we're able to determine, a person's name or username appearing in the body of an article is not enough to make them show up in search results. Additionally, because they typically only appear to be credited for a source, the amount of information that could be used against them is low. We're relatively sure that the risk of (negative) attention in this instance is low enough that we don't need to ask people for consent in most of these instances. If more information is needed, the same principles of inclusion should still be followed: it should be relevant to the article, and you shouldn't have to dig for it.