Please read the guidelines carefully to ensure a chill and collaborative environment.
Wiki Policy
This page outlines the official policies for editing and community conduct on the Aesthetics Wiki. All users are expected to adhere to these guidelines to ensure the wiki remains a collaborative, respectful, and high-quality resource.
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General Conduct
- No Personal Attacks: Criticize ideas, not people. Bigoted language, including slurs or any degrading comments based on gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or other identities, is strictly prohibited.
- No Harassment: This includes, but is not limited to, hounding, repeatedly messaging users after being asked to stop, posting on a user's message wall against their wishes, or making personal or legal threats.
- Respect the Process: Contribute to the wiki in line with its established processes. Do not disrupt the wiki by engaging in "edit warring"—repeatedly overriding another user's edits due to a content dispute. Productive discussion and consensus-building should be prioritized.
- No Provocation: Do not deliberately provoke other users to the point of incivility. This includes repeatedly pursuing arguments across multiple pages or engaging in "rules lawyering."
Definition: Rules Lawyering
Rules lawyering is the act of weaponizing the letter of a policy to violate its spirit. This often manifests as:
- Malicious Deletion: Demanding the removal of a valid subculture by falsely claiming it is "redundant" to a broader umbrella term (e.g., arguing E-Girl is "just Goth" to force a merge).
- Malicious Retention: Defending a prohibited "scope creep" page by adhering to technical minimums (e.g., "I uploaded 5 images, so you cannot delete this," even if the aesthetic is a personal invention with no community adoption).
Editing Policies
- No Plagiarism: Do not post content directly plagiarized from uncited sources. This includes directly copying and "re-wording" text from other websites, books, or articles without proper attribution. Quotes with citations are welcome.
- No Self-Promotion: Do not use the wiki to promote your own website, YouTube channel, social media accounts, or other personal projects. Links should be for citation or resource purposes only.
- Dispute Resolution: Content disputes and discussions about an aesthetic's accuracy should primarily take place on the relevant article's talk page or the wiki's Discord server. This maintains a public and transparent record of editorial decisions. If a discussion becomes uncivil or disruptive, an administrator may move it to a private channel for mediation.
Blocking Policy Users may be temporarily or permanently blocked for violating the wiki's rules. While minor offenses may result in a 24-hour to one month warning block, zero-tolerance violations will result in an immediate, indefinite ban.
Grounds for blocking include:
- Safety Violations (Zero Tolerance): Posting gore, doxxing, hate speech, or engaging in predatory behavior toward minors will result in an instant, permanent ban.
- Vandalism & Disruption: Maliciously adding nonsense content, blanking pages, or uploading irrelevant personal files (e.g., personal photo dumps).
- Spam & Self-Promotion: Systematically adding external links to commercial sites, promoting personal social media/playlists, or using the wiki for reputation management. Newly registered accounts used solely for this purpose are at higher risk of a permanent ban.
- AI Content: Repeatedly uploading AI-generated text or images after being warned.
- Harassment: Persistent disrespectful conduct, including the deliberate use of incorrect pronouns for transgender and non-binary users, aggressive "rules lawyering," or personal attacks.
- Sockpuppetry: Using multiple accounts to evade a block or artificially inflate the consensus of wiki decisions.
Upload & Image Use
- Terms of Use: Do not upload files that violate Fandom's Terms of Use. All images must fall under fair use according to United States copyright law. Do not use images from the public social media accounts of private individuals without their explicit permission.
- Credit: When possible, credit the original artist or photographer in the image caption.
- Quality Standards: All images should be of decent quality. Do not upload images that are overly small, blurry, or pixelated, unless it is a deliberate and defining feature of the aesthetic itself.
- No AI Content: Do not upload images created by AI art programs.
Page Protection Most pages on the wiki will remain unprotected to encourage open editing. An administrator will only protect a page under specific circumstances, such as:
- Persistent vandalism from multiple users.
- To halt a disruptive edit war.
- To prevent POV-pushing in pages relating to contentious topics.
- To protect high-traffic pages and critical templates from accidental or malicious edits (e.g., the main page, core policy pages).
See also
For details on content requirements, prohibited page types, and creation standards, please refer to: