Stargate Wiki:Semantic Stargate Wiki is not a forum

"Stargate Wiki is not a forum", means that questions posed in the wiki should not be allowed to turn into conversations prevalent on bulletin boards. This policy covers the "Questions" section of our Episode Guide but also how talk should occur on article's talk pages.

Talk pages
Stargate Wiki, which is powered by MediaWiki software, does not allow for easy review of long threads of comments in a talk page as a chat forum would.

A talk page (whether it be for an article or a user's talk page), generally speaking, is not the place to give critiques or other commentary on an episode, character, or event. Nor is it the place, typically, to ask questions about the article's content. Such comments do happen, but often such question and answer discussions are very brief and typically create a "Frequently Asked Questions" item in the page that is helpful to the article and its readers, relate to very specific issues with an article, or otherwise add to its flavor.

However, when a comment becomes a series of more comments and replies (sometimes turning into debate), the primary purpose of the talk page -- to note problems and resolutions directly related to the content of its article -- becomes diluted.

When a talk page becomes too much like a chat board, any contributor can stop the conversation by reminding people that Stargate Wiki is not a talk forum.

Administrators will also remind contributors, but can resort to more draconian measures to stop a unnecessary discussion or debate on a talk page, including locking the talk page and/or the article itself to slow the debate, or temporarily block the accounts of users who fail to stop a conversation thread and ignore warnings asking them specifically not to continue.

Policy and guideline-related pages are generally given some latitudes in extra discussion and debate as their content forms a record of wiki consensus. Contributors are asked to read other submitted comments and avoid repetition and "Me, too!" replies.

Extended, irrelevant chats on talk pages will be archived and/or deleted at the discretion of the administrators. There are many Stargate-related forum on the net. You are free to chat on some.

Writing Articles
The episode guides at Stargate Wiki are patterned after the Lurker's Guide To Babylon 5 episode guides. As such, the "Questions" section is intended solely for questions -- ideally questions that may be answered in subsequent episodes, which might be linked to once they are revealed. It is not intended for back and forth discussion, analysis, or disagreements. When articles contain such commentary, it reduces the encyclopedic effect of the article where it appears that the article is "arguing with itself."

Questions that have been answered within the episode may be moved down into the "Analysis" or "Notes" section if they are noteworthy. Analysis that stems from questions should also be located in the "Analysis" section. Ideally the "Questions" section will consist solely of a single level of bulleted questions, with occasional links to "Answer"s (from subsequent episodes) or "Analysis".

Sub-questions that are placed in articles against policy can be moved up as a primary question by any contributor, or, if already answered from official sources (not speculation), can be removed by any contributor. Contributors are asked to summarize the removed edit by indicating where the question is answered in the edit summary, or on the article's talk page.

Contributors who repeatedly violate of this policy will receive two warnings before the contributor's account is restricted from editing for a maximum of 1 week. This limitation allows the contributor access to read the Stargate Wiki (in particular, to watch how other contributors properly add questions to an article) but editing will be restricted.

Bad Examples
''The use of sub-questions and argumentative responses such as these create a confusing effect. There's also unsourced speculation here that makes the section worse.''