Help:Style guide/Community content
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Community content refers to any material created by the Portal community including but not directly supported by Valve.
Usefulness and notability are the gatekeepers for admissibility of topics to the main namespace of Portal Wiki. As applies specifically to Community content, such topics must be sufficiently notable for inclusion in the main namespace, as discussed in the policies below. However, Community content best covered by other sources are not covered within this Wiki. Rather this Wiki will only provide direction to the appropriate sources in such cases.
General rules
As with any article, incompleteness, poor grammar, inconsistent formatting, and other quality issues are completely separate issues from notability. All notable topic pages with quality issues can and should be fixed by normal editing. Severely underdeveloped pages can be moved by authors or custodians to User sandboxes until improved to at least stub quality.
Generally, to neutrally reinforce notability, a Community content page should not be written by anyone who developed the subject of the page.
Community Websites
There are many websites and resources available online that relate to the Portal series. Not all of this content merits coverage on the Wiki. In order to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of information, the Portal Wiki has set out guidelines to familiarize users with the standards we set.
Additionally, existing articles about community websites or resources them should be maintained and adhere to these reasonable quality and notability standards set by the Wiki.
Conflict of Interest
Identifying a Conflict of Interest
A conflict of interest occurs when a user edits an article for any other reason than to improve the quality of the Wiki's content. Typically users with conflicts of interest are directly affiliated with the topic of an article, or are in direct communication with someone who is.
Declaring an Interest
In order to avoid misunderstandings and improve communication with the Wiki, many users have declared an interest in community resources that they are directly involved with. If you would like to declare your interest in the subject of a particular article, you can start by stating your involvement with the content on your user page. You may also wish to leave a note to the same effect on the talk page of the article.
Suggesting Content
It is recommended that users with a Conflict of Interest remain actively involved in their site's article. However, directly adding or removing content could disrupt the neutrality of an article. We suggest that users that find themselves in this situation use the Talk page to suggest content to be added or removed.
Community Modifications / Mappacks
A mod is a Community modification for Portal or Portal 2, which, naturally, are distributed and hosted only by Community developers. Out of the many community modifications that are available to play, we will only document what we deem those with the most community interest. There will of course be exceptions to these guidelines, but only as decided by the Wiki community.
As a factor for notability, a mod may only be noted and granted an article if it meets all of the following criteria:
- Be intertwined or related to the Story in some way.
- Already have expressed community interest and appraisal.
- Example: Being approved for a Steam release
- Be in active development and/or released.
- A demo/teaser release can count towards this.
- Discussion among the community / Reported in game media
- Discussion of the mod must extend beyond the thread announcing its creation and development.
However, a Mod page on this Wiki must not serve as the website for the Mod; the "creators/owners" of the Mod have the responsibilities of supporting the Mod as necessary.
Community Chambers / Maps
As a factor for notability, a Custom Chamber may only be noted and granted an article if it meets all of the following criteria:
- It is used with a notable Community Mod
- It was part of a notable Community Event, e.g. Summer Mapping Initiative
Additionally, custom chambers must conform to all policies and styles applicable to standard Portal chambers. Any media must conform to the naming schemes as well as categorizations, meaning that files are to be prefixed with the mod name, e.g. [[File:Portal Stories: Mel Junk Yard.png]]. In addition to this, custom chambers should be categorized under [[Category:Custom Test Chambers]] along with the mod name, e.g. [[Category:Portal Stories: Mel Chambers]].
Per Policy, media that contains copyrighted material is prohibited and is subject to deletion. See also: Licensing images.
Conflict of Interest
See Conflict of Interest above.