Fables Wiki
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The Fables Wiki has several guidelines to try and ensure maximum quality of its content, but this is to be a fun and collaborative space so all good intentioned contributors have the opportunity to contribute. As with any group of people working together, everyone is expected to follow the rules. We've been doing this since 2009, so we've had some time to work out the kinks. We're aware that the breadth of guidelines we've established over that time is not insignificant, so we hope this page helps new users find what they need to be cooperative and successful editors.

Where do our policies come from?

Generally, Fables Wiki policies come from one of two sources:

  • From a standard or good practice that has been followed subconsciously for some time because it is common sense and has become an established precedent.
  • From a deliberate proposal by a user or a group of users, usually from a forum or blog discussion. Such proposals must achieve full community consensus before being formalized as a policy.

Most of the policies that fall under the first category are derived from similar practices on other wikis.

Things to keep in mind

There are just a few things the administrators ask that everyone keep in mind when editing content and contributing to this community:

  • Keep it civil: Do not make personal attacks on other people. If you need to criticize another user’s argument, do so without attacking them as a person. Do not use bigoted language, including slurs which degrade another person or group of people based on gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, etc. Bullying will not be tolerated under any circumstances - we can have discussions with each other and its best to come to a fair conclusion in a disagreement.
  • Be a productive member of the wiki: Contribute to the wiki in line with the established processes and conventions. Need help? Ask an administrator! Disrupting the wiki with “edit warring” over differing opinions of a topic with another user or group of users is not productive. Edit warring with administrators is forbidden. Administrators generally know what they're doing as viewed as the community's leader(s), and as such, that should be respected. Pages that are subjected to edit warring or counter-productive edits can be locked until a resolution can be reached. Temporary blocks can be enabled if warnings are not followed.
  • Do not engage in excessive self-promotion: The wiki is a collaborative community resource for the topic at hand. It is NOT a free place to advertise your related website, YouTube channel, blog, social media account, etc. Have a question about whether your link would be welcome? Ask an administrator!
  • Do not harass other users: If somebody asks you to stop posting certain content on their wall, respect their wishes. It is their wall.
  • Do not hound other users: Do not hound, bait, or troll. Friendly debate and conversation can be useful tools in creating a resourceful wiki, but deliberately pushing others to the point of breaching civility is not allowed.
  • Personal Information: Asking for personal information, such as your age, your address, your password or phone number isn't allowed. If you see someone doing that, please report it right away.
  • Underage Users: Users aren't allowed to be on Wiki that are under the age of thirteen. Keep it private if you are thirteen or younger, but if the admins find out you are under thirteen, you'll be globally blocked.
  • Sockpuppeting: Making several accounts and trying to dodge bans by doing that is against Wiki policy. There's no warnings. If you made one, please deactivate it or not tell anyone.

Coverage

Fables Wiki covers official productions authorized by each property's rights holders. Fan fiction is not allowed. Also understand that Fables and its spin-offs are, in and of themselves, based on folklore and mythology, not rooted in it. This wiki is oriented to catalog the information as it pertains to the Fable Universe. Any real-world information, at most, is trivia information or reference material.

Style Guide

Keep the following principles in mind when editing articles to help keep the style as consistent as possible.

When a community has established formatting, it’s important to adhere to that, especially when spoiler content is involved. Given the fact this series has been over for several years now, we do not expect this to be a particular issue, but as always contact an Admin if your unsure as to if you're remaining true to this wiki's format. The following are a few format styles we do ask you keep in mind for this wiki:

  • Comics should be referenced, in-text, as follows:
    • Fables #1 - "Chapter One: Old Tales Revisited" in infoboxes, quotes, and references.
    • In an issue's actual article, it is written as "Chapter One: Old Tales Revisited" or "Old Tales Revisited." No need to include the issue number in-text.
    • Fables #1 for character appearance sections and gallery captions; as a placeholder it is also okay to, temporarily, use this format in references.

If you are confused about how to format anything in the wiki, the following are pages are the best go-to's as examples:

Spelling

If you're unsure how to spell anything on this wiki, we go by, in this order, these sources for the proper spelling of characters, places, items, and etc.

  1. Fables Encyclopedia
  2. Peter & Max: A Fables Novel
  3. Fables #150 - "Farewell" pg. 121

Grammar

Entries are expected to be made with proper grammar, capitalization, and spacing. The Fables Wiki community is not as vast as Wikipedia, so your expectation can't be that someone else will come along and fix additions made in haste. Users with excessive violations may see their good faith additions reverted, so please do your best to thoughtfully construct sentence structure.

Some other best practices to keep in mind:

  • Remember to capitalize the letter F in the word "Fables."
  • Don't capitalize the letter M in the word "mundy;" it's a pejorative word in the Fables Universe.
  • Use American spelling (which favors "z" spellings such as "organize" rather than "organise", and "o" spellings such as "color" rather than "colour").
  • Punctuation belongs inside quotation marks. For example:
Bill Willingham created "Fables." is correct.
Bill Willingham created "Fables". is incorrect.

Apostrophes

  • An apostrophe does not accompany any word that ends in s.
  • In cases where apostrophes should be used in words that end in s, please use AP style:
  • correct: Santa Claus' sleigh
  • incorrect: Santa Claus's sleigh

External links

Please don't add links to Amazon or other commercial sites. It's nice to help other Fables fans find the cool products that are available, but we don't want to look like we're trying to sell things. We also don't want to open the possibility to people posting sponsored Amazon links, or links to their own Ebay store. If a product is currently in print and available, you can note that in the article. If that inspires readers to buy the product, then they can find it online themselves. Only link to a commercial site as a means of citing a source.

In the case of legitimate external links, sometimes these expire because the website has either moved or retired the article. If you find one, rather than removing it, check to see if an archive service has the link backed up. archive.org and archive.li are good long-term solutions, while Google Cache may have more recent content.

Editing

  • Edit summaries are helpful for explaining your edits: why you're removing, changing, or adding something. (CE discussion)
  • Wikia offers three editing modes. The first is simple code, and the other two are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors:
    • wikicode (or source editor)
    • Rich Text Editor
    • Visual Editor
  • Please try to avoid disruptive, glamour editing, or excessive editorialization. Sometimes wording needs to be adjusted for clarity, and other times it does not.
  • Try not to edit farm. Editing farming being when a user spams repetitive and unhelpful edits with the sole purpose of artificially inflating their edit count.
  • Try to avoid the over adding of broken links.
  • When adding new content, article pages must have a minimum of 500 words of relevant information (not including infobox material or wikitext) for it to qualify as a legitimate page, otherwise all such characters or information are to be added to the appropriate "list" pages.

With the exception of fixes concerning grammar and factual accuracy, a non-administrative edit (to text or imagery) to be applied en masse to a large number of pages needs to be discussed first, and must have an overwhelming or unanimous community consensus, or administrator approval, that is clearly expressed in writing before executing.

Categories

  • Every article should have a Category.
  • The creation of new categories must first be discussed with the community or an admin. Before considering a new category, check the Category list to see if there's a similar category that already exists.
  • Articles for people should be sorted in categories by the last name.
  • {{DEFAULTSORT:}} can be used to automatically sort the article the same way in each category it's listed in. Locally sorting the category will override DEFAULTSORT, i.e. [[Category:Category Name|Custom Sort Text]]
  • To link to a category within the body of the text without also placing the article in that category, place a colon after the opening brackets, like this... [[:Category:Species]]
  • Major, minor, secondary and one-time characters categories will be deleted from the site and all edits will be reverted. Irrelevant and unrelated categories are also not allowed.

Relevance

Fables Wiki is an encyclopedic project about Fables and every article is oriented around that focus or related ones (see Coverage) to different degrees. As a result, additional quotes, facts, or trivia will be removed, even if sourced, when not directly relevant (irrelevant content is known as "fluff"). A statement can be true without necessarily adding to a Fables Wiki article. This applies even when quoting people who are relevant (voice actors, The Wolf Among Us cast) from interviews, podcasts, or social media. While we hope a lot of this will be evident, here's just a few "for instances," in addition to People coverage guidelines above.

  • Detailed histories of a company's ownership are better left to Wikipedia. For corporate stuff in particular, Fables Wiki uses the names at the time a given company/network/channel actually did anything related to Fables, ignoring subsequent mergers or name changes after the fact. Pending or possible name changes don't count until or unless they happen and the new name is actually on something with the Fables Universe.
  • Voice actors should be sourced to Wikipedia.
  • Podcast comments identifying additional performers or directly relevant information about a project are worth adding. Information not worth adding includes lengthy, quoted passages with repeated phrasing or tangents. Interviews are often built more on entertaining anecdotes and reminiscences rather than the factual approach Fables Wiki uses. Memories about working on a project or with someone (first experience as a co-editor, for example) are usually irrelevant. Passing sentences about enjoying meeting someone or having fun on a project are also not relevant, unless they lead in to factual info.

No filler or fluff

Please don't add "fluff" content. Fluff is unnecessary and irrelevant content that adds zero value to readers. It can take the form of long-winded descriptions, filler words, and irrelevant facts. Fluff words and phrases include flowery text, the writer’s opinion or extra information that prevents the article from coming to the point. Fluff is constituted by words or sentences that do not contribute any meaning to the core content.

Images

FI37 Boy Blue in the Homelands

Here is a good example of a properly named image.

Images need to be named and referenced properly (i.e., Comic Series Title (abbreviated is okay for Fables comic, not for Fairest) followed by the issue number, and then an accurate, sensible description for the image). Images also need to be cropped to include as little "whitespace" as possible. To the right is an example of a proper image.

Please note that if you don't put an image on a page within a twenty-four hour period, it'll probably be deleted. If you aren't going to put an image on a page, don't upload it. We want our unused images section to remain clean and empty, and help adding images that are there right now will be greatly appreciated.

Infobox Images

Infobox images are meant to show the most current, accurate depiction of whatever the content is. For example, on the Snow White page, her infobox picture is, chronologically, her latest appearance in the Fable Universe.

Galleries

Galleries of less than 50 images should be displayed on the appropriate articles under the aforementioned section. If over 50 images are applicable, then a gallery subpage may be created.

Voting Policy

In many cases, changes to wiki-wide policy and/or changes to individual articles will be determined by a vote. In the absence of unanimous consensus, these issues may be settled by a majority or supermajority of those users polled (as mediated by one or more administrators). When an issue is settled by either of these methods, attempts by any individual to counteract or violate these decisions without community support (as determined by a renewed discussion of the issue with participation equal to or greater than the original discussion) will be considered vandalism/disruptive editing under the blocking policy.

Other General Policies

  • Editing userpages that aren't yours isn't allowed, unless you are an admin or have explicit permission from the user - an admin must be able to verify this.
  • Nonsensical blog posts, featuring spam and nonsense will be deleted.
  • Any inappropriate or sexually suggestive language will be removed from the Wiki and treated harshly. This goes for images too.
  • Please keep it civil and respectable in the chat areas of the wiki as well. No overuse of vulgar, sexual, or inappropriate language of any kind will be tolerated.
  • Do not remove warnings on your userpage or message walls by admins.
  • Moving pages to nonsensical, counterproductive, and/or unrelated names without approval of an administrator will be reverted.
  • New pages, with nonsense, unrelated content and spam will be deleted.
  • If you remove a lot of content on a page with no reasoning to it or remove all the content from a page, your edit will be reverted.
  • Please ask permission from an administrator before creating or editing templates.

Blocking rules

  • Good faith edits are always welcome! Nobody's perfect, so editors may make mistakes. If your skills aren't suited to a particular area of editing, such as grammar, there will always be someone to help correct those mistakes, so feel free to do what you can to contribute to the wiki. You will not be banned for making mistakes.
  • Breaking the wiki rules listed above will result in a warning. If you have to be warned multiple times, you may be banned from the wiki.
  • Obvious vandalism, such as page blanking, may result in an immediate ban.
  • Posting threats or excessive vulgarity may result in an immediate ban.
  • Sockpuppetry is not permitted and may result in an immediate ban.
  • Asking for users' personal information such as age, location, etc. is not allowed, and recurring requests for such information may result in a ban.

Blocks will begin at 24 hours and will increase depending on the number of offenses and type of offense. If you feel you have been blocked unfairly, you can reach out to an administrator on their Community Central message wall.

Page protection rules

The majority of pages on this wiki will remain unprotected to encourage all users to edit. Pages will only be protected if there is a specific need, such as:

  • Vandalism has persisted over a long period of time
  • Stopping an edit war
  • To protect the proper display of the wiki (i.e. wiki logo, frequently used templates, the main page, policy pages, etc.)

Unacceptable reasons for protecting pages can include:

  • Disagreeing with an administrator or moderator; this is conflict of interest.
  • Reserving the page to be edited later.
  • Marking a page as done -- wiki pages are never done.

To request that an article be protected or to have the protection level reviewed, please contact an administrator or content moderator on their wall. They can be found on Special:Community.

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