The Sims Wiki talk:Policy/General Policies

Proposal to add to general rules
Every so often we have a user who admits - either through their userpage or otherwise - that they are below 13 years of age and therefore are not allowed to be members of Wikia and, by extension, this wiki. The few times this has happened, the administrators have usually issued long-term but non-permanent blocks (usually a year-long block). No further actions are taken by administrators after that.

The issue becomes that the administrators are being asked to actively enforce Wikia's terms of service, without rules on the local wiki indicating that administrators will block for that kind of a violation. I know I would prefer that local administrators keep their hands out of that issue, as I think it can lead to unnecessary complications and might get us in trouble with Wikia if they determine that we neglected to inform them of an underage user whom, although blocked on this wiki, is still able to edit elsewhere on Wikia.

With all this in mind, I propose the following addition to the General Rules section of General Policies.

7. All members of The Sims Wiki must conform with Wikia's Terms of Use. Non-conformance may include, but is not limited to a user: In cases where a violation of the Terms of Use exists and is not already addressed by local wiki policies, such as use of the service by underage users, local administrators will refer the matter to Wikia Staff. Local administrators will not issue blocks for matters referred to Wikia Staff, unless necessary to prevent detrimental impact to The Sims Wiki.
 * Registering when under thirteen (13) years of age.
 * Failing to maintain the security of their account.
 * Violating standards of User Conduct, including those standards not already listed in other policies on The Sims Wiki.

This essentially says that we reserve the right to enforce Wikia ToU, but are not bound to do anything except inform Wikia when the ToU is violated and where we don't already address the violation specifically in our rules. We do not address issues of security or age in our policies, so in both cases we would report the matter and only block the user when they cause harm to the wiki. Input? --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 21:05, March 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * Personally, I think we should only report an underage account to Wikia if they're a known cross-wiki vandal. On the vast majority of wikis, local administrators are the ones dealing with blocks related to underage users and Wikia seem to have no problem with that. Furthermore, I've noticed that Wikia seem to have a system where a user's account would be globally banned permanently if they've received a report of a user being under 13; under AGF we only block the user for 1 year.


 * If I could have it my way, there wouldn't be a minimum age limit for a user as long as they're competent but thanks to COPPA, that won't happen. Basically, I think that we should just keep things as they are as it's guaranteed that the user will have a chance to return and it's just much easier than referring it to Wikia every time someone says they're under 13. 21:45, March 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with the disliking the minimum age limit. As for them permanently banning underage accounts, I was unaware that that was their policy - is that a recent change? --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 21:54, March 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * I based it on this forum edit from a Wikia Staffer. The edit was made at the end of December 2011 so you could say it's fairly recent. 22:21, March 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * Alright, in that case I'd suggest either no change, or just a small message saying something like 'Administrators reserve the right to block for behavior not specifically mentioned on local policies that violate Wikia's Terms of Use, or to report that behavior directly to Wikia Staff.' --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 23:02, March 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * Seems like a good addition, I've got no issues with it. I don't really like the idea of reporting underage users to wikia, because 1), some wikis allow them (even though they shouldn't), and 2), it'd be a bit of a bother sending in the email and all that.

Chat rules
I was in the process of writing up a page dedicated to Special:Chat, similar to the one we have for IRC. However, I noticed we don't actually have a ruleset for Chat and it's currently more of a common sense thing. I've noticed our IRC policies are slightly outdated on paper and are slightly more relaxed in reality.

Should we write a new policy aimed directly at Chat? Should we update/revise our IRC policies and run both features on essentially the same policy? Should we just adapt our general policies around Chat? Thoughts? 16:27, August 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * I think since IRC and Chat are similar, the same rules could apply to both, except for references to bots or things which are in the IRC and not Chat. So I don't think there necessarily needs to be a separate policy. --  LiR speak ~ read 17:30, August 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I think we just state that the rules for IRC are the same as for chat, with the exception of the bots part.
 * Okay, I've gone ahead and made it so that both the IRC rules and Chat rules list mainly the same thing, with the obvious differences. The main header is now "Communication features" for the lack of a better term. 18:53, August 21, 2012 (UTC)