Doom Wiki:Policies and guidelines

Since this wiki is in an extremely early stage, everything on this page is preliminary and SHOULD be challenged. Please add your thoughts on the talk page!

Naming conventions

Article titles and subheadings should be capitalized "Foo bar baz" rather than "Foo Bar Baz" (words should only begin with a capital letter if they are proper nouns). The name of the game itself is written "Doom", not "DOOM" or "DooM" (if this turns into a huge conflict, we could try to bug the Wikicities operators to implement a custom preference ;). For source ports and WADs, the capitalization should be the one used by the creator.

For something related to Doom or Doom II in general, it is unnecessary to add "In Doom, ..." at the beginning of the article or name the page "Doom ...". Such modifiers should however always be added for things related to other games (e.g. Strife), including Doom 3. "In XXX..." or something equivalent should also be used for things pertaining to one specific version of Doom (Ultimate, Doom II, Final Doom, Shareware, 1.2...).

Things that may have articles

The games

Obviously.

Levels, items, monsters, etc from the games

Of course

Terminology

Sure

Statistics and trivia

Things like list of vanilla maps by size are the very purpose of this wiki...

WADs

If released

LMPs

If notable (e.g. 30uv1617)

Editors

There aren't that many, so, sure

Source ports

Sure

People

Anyone with some recorded achievement in the Doom community. For example, having released at least two WADs, or holding at least two Compet-N records. Playing in a clan or having a forum account on Doomworld does not count. Except for id Software people, no biographies please. List people's directly Doom-related activities and nothing else. A link to their personal website might be OK.

Websites

Except personal websites where the only content is about that person.

Neutrality, etc

The neutral point of view policy used on Wikipedia has two huge benefits. Most importantly, it is the best way to handle conflicting viewpoints. The NPOV policy states that if A thinks X and B thinks Y (where X and Y are opinions), we should not write that either of X or Y is fact, but that both X and Y exist. The second advantage is that clearly distinguishing opinions from facts simply results in more professional-looking articles. However, NPOV should be thought of as a guideline rather than a strict rule on this wiki. Since this is a resource primarily created for Doomers, by Doomers, there are some opinions and interpretations around which are nearly universally accepted. What's important is creating great articles!

An important difference from Wikipedia is that original analysis is welcome here. So if you want to add your own subjective opinions about Memento Mori II or write a comparison between Doom and Aliens, feel free to do so. Just be prepeared that others might challenge your assumptions, provide opposing viewpoints and counter-arguments, or rewrite your text.

Images

• Original images should be released under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
• Screenshots may be used on the Doom Wiki, under "fair use"
• Although screenshots are OK, raw graphics from the IWADs are not
• You may only upload screenshots you have created yourself
• Screenshots should be taken in software rendered mode, with settings as closely as possibly resembling vanilla Doom (unless the screenshot is for showing off a port specifically)
• You must add source and copyright information to the image description page for each image you upload. You can use the following tags to specify the copyright status:
  • {{screenshot}} for screenshots of the original Doom games
  • {{GFDL}} for GFDL images
  • {{mapview}} for automap views from the original Doom games
• If none of the existing tags is appropriate, create a new tag (Template:name of the tag here) and list it above.