Quake Wiki:Policy

Here at QuakeWiki we like to congratulate users who give us much of their time in improving the pages here. In order for your edits to be recognized along with the work and time you put in, please consider making an account. It is quick, painless and free. Please read, edit improve the pages with your own ideas or knowledge. Anyone can edit pages, contributing to the growing database of information.

QuakeWiki is a place for fans of the series to visit, read and edit the growing database of information that we offer. In order to make this Wikia safe and informative to everyone who visits, all users must follow these simple guidelines. Failure to do so will result in warnings and bans so please read this page and familiarize yourself with the rules. Should you visit to read our pages or edit them with your own knowledge, these rules ensure that the Wikia is tidy, proper and available for everyone.

Warnings and Bans
QuakeWiki follows a series of warnings for users who break the rules. Those who continually break the rules will get banned. It’s basic common sense, if you don’t want to be a part of the community and help the Wikia, get a life and do something you do have an interest in.

FRIENDLY REMINDER: As the name says, this will be a friendly reminder that you have broken a rule and will be reminded to read this page again to ensure you don’t break another. Failure to heed a friendly reminder will result in a final warning.

FINAL WARNING: A final warning will be necessary if you persist in breaking the rules. Please remember these rules aren’t here to make your lives here a pain. They are here to make QuakeWiki easy and accessible to use by everyone. For every edit you make, you have a responsibility to everyone who visits the Wikia. Failure to heed a final warning will result in a ban.

LIGHT & HEAVY BAN: Depending on the nature of your spiteful posts and attitude, you will be handed a ban if you fail to listen to a final warning. If we feel you would like to return after the ban and be a part of the community, you will get a light ban (1 month). But if we know you have nothing but sordid intentions and have only descended on this Wikia for your own pathetic enjoyment in ruining other people’s work, then you will get a heavy ban (1 year).

Creating an Account
Making your own Wikia account allows you to not only more easily show your contributions to QuakeWiki but also makes you get noticed by our growing community. QuakeWiki is a small community of people who love Quake so join in.

Whilst it is not required to make an account, you will get a 5 edit limit as an unregistered user. Once you have made 5 edits you’ll get a friendly reminder about the benefits of making an account. If you ignore this you will be banned. As stated in terms of use, you must be at age of 13 or older to make an account.

Titles
When creating a new page, always keep the article in singular form for it to be easy to find. If you wish, you can create a plural form page redirecting to the singular form if it is easier to link to; but make sure that the main page is in singular form. Use lowercase letters for the name besides the first letter unless it is a proper noun and has capital letters found elsewhere. -

Grammar & Punctuation
QuakeWiki will be used by those who edit it and those who read it. Users who edit have a responsibility to others to ensure that the information they put on pages is reliable, correct and of acceptable standard of writing. Poor grammar is not tolerated as well as speculation and malicious edits. Whilst the odd spelling mistake will always be a burden on us all, we expect everyone to make an effort with punctuation. Missing commas and spaces will be seen as either maliciousness or inability of basic reading and writing skills. Users are required to be at least 13 and so there is no excuse. With the easy availability of spell-checkers throughout browsers and search engines, as well as Microsoft Word/OpenOffice, the user should be able to spell a majority of the words he/she types correctly.

Please refrain from basing edits on the correction of English grammar or spelling as your society sees fit. There are many variations and all are correct. For example, "color" and "colour", "center" and "centre". Note that American English users use "-ize" or "-yze" whereas the British English users use "-ise" or "-yse".

Right next to the Publish button is a Preview button allowing you to view the page before publishing a glaring mistake, which we recommend you use to fix up your edits before posting. However, certain parts of an article will not work until you publish it, meaning it becomes necessary to publish multiple times to get the correct look. Thus we will not hold a large number of edits to one page against you as long as they are positive.

When linking to a page, always capitalize the links to show that they are proper nouns.

You will get a friendly reminder if you are found to have showed poor sense of reading and writing. If you persist you will be banned. -

Objective & Subjective
While we enforce edits to the Wikia, we also wish the content to be knowledge and not beliefs. If you have an opinion about a certain topic, refrain from adding it unless it was said by one of the people who created the game. Only add information which you believe to be a fact, and not an opinion. -

Consistency
While we promote editing on the Wikia, we also wish to have a consistency between all pages in a similar category. Otherwise the Wikia will be left disorganized and confusing between pages. It is best to follow the templates created by previous pages to create new ones in a similar category. If you wish to edit a page, simply check a page similar to what you are creating to see how it was done. If you have any ideas for improvement be sure to bring it up. Just don't ignore the structure of every previous page, as it can lead to disarray. We are not strict about this rule, as everyone makes mistakes, but we do ask that you try to the best of your ability. Each template created has its own rules and regulations that are displayed throughout each of its articles. Attempt to follow the rules to the best of your ability, but we will not be to hard on you if you make a minor mistake. -

Staying on Topic
When writing an article on a page of Quakewiki, remember that you are talking about Quake, and other games will be found useless unless it serves a specific point. Comparisons are to be held to a minimum, and instead the editors must focus on what the topic is specifically about.

Do not sign your edits. We can easily see who edited a page via recent changes and the pages history, and so it becomes unnecessary to sign any edits to Wikia pages that you have made. -

Source Ports and Official Mods
While this Wikia promotes mods and therefore allows for pages to be written about them, they are to remain separate from the base game information. Quake is a game with thousands of mods, it is in fact one of the highest modded games, which means that putting all the information onto pages involving Quake would result in a lot of useless and perhaps conflicting information. Plus, some mods are done intentionally with a sort of humor that can't be condoned on the base pages. Note that the official expansions are considered mods. While official, they should be contained within the pages involving the expansions; we do not wish for overlap between the vanilla game and the official expansions. Keep Lava Nail facts to that page, as opposed to putting the content on Nails or Nailgun.

When talking about a mod, limit the mods used to that mod unless another one is required to prevent conflict. Some can change data in the game, which means that when writing a walkthrough for a custom level could be nonconstructive if done with a third party source port. It is recommended for regular contributors to keep a separate installation of Quake for testing and uploading such content. Mods, if made by the same person or similar in content, may be mentioned on the page of another mod.

Though focusing on mods, this section refers to any sort of custom content created for Quake. Modern Source ports such as Darkplaces, which convenient, are not permitted to be used when focusing on the base game. If creating information on any page outside of the Source port pages, it is recommended to use an official source port or the base game. While Quake, the vanilla game, can be inconvenient to play due to requiring a DOS emulator, our allowance of WinQuake or GLQuake should nullify the issue. In fact, the current group of administrators primarily play on source ports and can therefore be of great assistance if you are unsure how to set it up yourself. Vorknkx is a great person to ask about the traditionalist WinQuake, while Deathstalker666 can be extremely helpful in setting up and tailoring GLQuake to your specifications. Note that while unofficial continuations of GLQuake have taken place, the Wikia mainly only supports the official versions (up to 0.98).

The Quake page is designed to talk about the vanilla game in particular. Official source ports can be linked there, but beyond external media are not to be used to change information. This is done so that things removed in the source ports, such as Quit Messages, can be placed on the base game page. The source port pages will list the details about what is different between the three editions. Besides these pages, content may be added freely with the vanilla game or a source port. There is no "correct" version, meaning that while resolutions and appearances may be different, all three are permitted. It is asked but not required that the resolution be maximized for the benefit of the viewer. WinQuake's maximum resolution is 1280x1024 (5:4), while GLQuake's maximum resolution is 1920x1080 (16:9). Users of GLQuake should note that setting the maximum resolution will also bump up the color depth from 16 bpp to 32 bpp.

As we allow any official source port, this means we also support QuakeWorld and GLQuakeWorld, though changes to the game and lack of support for Single Player means that they are not normally used. Deathstalker666 has some experience with these two similar source ports, even though he mainly plays with GLQuake, meaning it is advised for any QuakeWorld/GLQuakeWorld questions to go to him. -

Custom Content
Fan artworks can go in their own galleries, but are not to be placed on official content pages. Fan stories/theories should remain on the user pages or in blog posts; we have tried making pages for such in the past only for the page to get bogged down and overwhelmed. Mods can have their own individual pages to document out the various changes it offers.

Custom content, such as a new weapon or enemy, are allowed to have their own pages. Replacements, something that changes something to something else, are considered "modified entities" and should be kept separate from "new entities", the latter of which is defined as actual new content (something added without taking away from the content that already exists).

Note that for most entities, we rely upon in-game messages to determine if it is a new entity or not. If the player is still being killed by a Fiend, it is not considered valid for its own page, even if the Monster looks different. Even if some of the messages are changed, the entity isn't considered valid unless all references to said entity are changed. Note that the lack of messages can still mean this is a custom entity, this specifically is limiting modifications that retain the old messages. Such modifications should be contained to the Custom .MDL Files page or the page for the mod. Hazards may be based on author intent since no custom messages may exist.

Furthermore, it has been decided that the entity must be part of the inherent world and must appear on the initial load of the map. Corpses, for example, are byproducts as they only appear after a Monster has been killed. Similarly, Weapon projectiles only appear after the Weapon has been fired. A Backpack only appears after a player dies. Even if custom messages exist, these entities would not count since they are non-existent without something else occurring. This also means that impulse keys that cause something to appear does not mean said new entity is valid, since it was only a side effect of the impulse key being pressed. This means mods where the player can toss a Backpack or create a holograph can have individual mod pages, but the entities themselves are not considered separate enough to be given their own pages.

Note that the player entity is part of the inherent world and thus Weapons they spawn with (in the vanilla game, the Shotgun and Axe) are considered part of the world in turn. An impulse causes an immediate effect without the ability to choose when to attack, while a Weapon can be held and seen without using it. If a Weapon must be obtained with console commands and has no valid world entity, it is not considered part of the world. Note that the death messages must still be changed for such a weapon to be considered for its own page.

Note that many mods offer different Weapon "modes" of the default Weapons, such as adding pipe bombs to the Grenade Launcher. Pressing the Weapon button twice or more can allow the player to switch between modes. Though this mode can offer new custom messages, it would not be considered worthy of a separate page since it is treated as part of one of the original weapons (and thus a weapon modification instead of a new entity).

For Ammo, new entities are always worthy of their own pages. Modified entities can only be considered if the Weapon is its own entity as well.

Talk Pages
Talk pages are less strict and allow the users to freely converse as long as it is not done in a destructive manner. Ethnic slurs or other forms of hate speech meant purposefully to harm another user are not tolerated due to this being a constructive website built on the love of a game and not the bashing of others. Similarly, we do not hold high regard for users that troll or attempt to provoke negative reactions from others. Spam, such as the usage of continuously repeated messages or large advertisements for completely unrelated subjects will also result in warnings or banning. The violator will be warned/banned for harassment reasons based on the severity and consistency of the violation.

Vandalism
Vandalism is a method of editing that harms the wiki (e.g. removing valuable contents and wiping pages, inserting nonsense/gibberish into pages etc). Such actions will not be tolerated. If you found any vandalism activities please contact an administrator: Deathstalker666 or Vorknkx.