Missouri Academy Wiki talk:Rules

Those are a few things I thought seemed reasonable as starters, feel free to change anything you like, but leave a comment here as to why. --Andy 20:21, 8 May 2006 (EDT)

Regarding the opinions on the Class/Professor pages: I think the personalized style in the What Really Happens bit has an appeal to it that would be lost if we tried to make an "objective" description and then opinions. We're not the Wikipedia and part of what makes this worthwhile is that this is a collection of opinions. Beyond that, if we were to relegate potentially controversial opinions to an Opinions section, we run into the problem of having essentially untouchable material. Any editing of somebody else's bit would border on POV enforcement, and so we'd potentially get large sections of crap that we can't really fix. I think that perhaps the best solution would be have a disclaimer on the front page saying something along the lines of "We're not in any way associated with the Academy administration or NWMSU. This is a collection of opinions, impressions, and general information we think useful to current and future Academy students. We don't pretend to be objective, though we allow for diverging viewpoints." In situations where a teacher or class receives widely differing opinions, we portray them both. I just want to avoid the situations where somebody wants to fix up a part but the part has a sort of immunity because it's signed or it's not that person's specific viewpoint. -Chrax 00:00, 9 May 2006 (EDT)

I think using the link at the bottom of the page is the best way to do the disclaimer. (I like to think of the main page as a collection of pointers to other pages instead of an 'about' page) I also think having a separate disclaimer for class/professor pages could be useful for people who don't bother to read the rest of the site. I don't like giving the idea that *everything* is an opinion because there's a lot of stuff on here like the official descriptions, class lists, required course lists, and other things that are not opinions at all. But we do need some way of separating things that are and aren't opinions. It might be best to have a 'default opinion' policy, at least that way we're covering ourselves. Probably the most important thing we have to worry about is that we don't say anything bad about someone as if it was a fact, because then we could get accused of libel, however we can say whatever we want as long as it's under clear that it's an opinion. see:wikipedia:Libel. Regardless, we should be careful with what we say because we've already had one professor delete the page about them.--Andy 01:32, 9 May 2006 (EDT)

You're right in that having opinions limited to signatures is a bad idea. However, I think it'd still be good to keep profanity (or anything offensive) limited to signatures in order to avoid having people generalize it to the website as a whole.--Andy 01:32, 9 May 2006 (EDT)

The profanity rules you listed cover that fine. You don't edit somebody else's bit in a discussion or their user page. My talk about signing was regarding what's being done so far in extant Opinion sections. People write paragraphs of drivel, and we can't touch them because the signatures imply that it is their own work. -Chrax 02:27, 9 May 2006 (EDT)

Yes, I agree that we can't edit other peoples work, but we just need to make sure people understand that it is their work and not the wiki's. I know someone was talking about how to remake the forum and use it. Maybe it's possible to make the forum more of an opinion place for different professors and leave wiki articles to pure fact with links to the forum for that certain topic on the forum. That way only moderators could edit the messages, etc. I don't know if that is a good idea, just throwing it out there. - Stuey