Policy:Moratorium

Revision as of 03:24, 4 March 2021 by Frabby (talk | contribs)

BattleTechWiki is a fan site and has no official relationship with the owners or licensees of the intellectual property rights (FASA, FanPro, Wizkids, InMediaRes, Catalyst Game Labs, and others), nor any individuals employed by those companies. We also reckognize that the IP owners and licensees depend on selling their products.

As such, it is inappropriate for this wiki to compete with official products released by those companies, or even to give the impression of doing so.

Therefore, BTW asks its editors to please refrain from adding information from official titles for two months after the date of publication.

In order to facilitate this process, please place the moratorium tag on the article pertaining to the product in question.

Exceptions

Free products 
The moratorium concept does not apply to free products (free downloads, promotional material, etc.). Its sole purpose is to protect the publisher's interest in selling a new product for money, which is inherently not applicable to free products.
Creating an article for the source 
In contrast to the above policy, Sarna BTW encourages editors to create new articles about new products (with the moratorium notification in place), both so that other editors can be informed that it is under the moratorium period and to increase awareness of new products. Please remember to tag the subject as being under moratorium, and refrain from providing detailed content information such as plot summaries for the duration of the moratorium.
Clarification 
Sometimes information in a new source corrects or clarifies information previously published. In this case, please fix the outdated information as quickly as possible, as Sarna BTW does not wish to be a source of misinformation.
Reprints 
In a few rare instances, books were essentially reprinted with a different title (eg. Technical Readout: 3025 Revised, Classic BattleTech RPG, etc.). It is not necessary to ignore them as sources if identical or virtually identical information is already past the moratorium period. Be careful, however, that no new information is added that could be subject to the moratorium.

Notes for Admins

Administrators, if somebody violates the moratorium policy, do not ban or block them. Simply inform them of the policy and ask them to respect it. Remember to assume good faith. To facilitate this, you can use the pre-generated moratorium violation warning.

Rather than removing the content, text and images may also disabled by placing the "<!---- ---->" code around them. When the moratorium has been lifted, the code is removed, once again allowing the content to be visible.

Usage

Cut and paste {{moratorium|the ending date of the moratorium}} into the top of the article.

For example:

{{moratorium|July 2, 3025}}

Will display: Expression error: Unexpected < operator.