Testmoose1

This is the SCP wiki's site criticism policy, which lays out how everyone is expected to behave in discussion threads and forum comments regarding others' posted works.

This policy is enforced at staff discretion by staff members. Please do not try to enforce these guidelines on other users yourself. Violations can be reported directly via #site17 or through a PM to an active moderator or administrator (listed on the Meet The Staff page).

Rules

These are the hard-and-fast rules for criticizing an author's work that you are expected to know and follow. For other behavioral guides, check the Site Rules.

  1. Critique the work, not the author: Do not make personal statements about the author. Stick to criticizing their writing. As an example, you can tell the author, "This needs work. The main idea's fine except for the X, but addenda are complete crap." Don't say, "You're a terrible writer. Why did you post this?"
  2. Your posts must contain some kind of content: "Meh" on its own does not count as content, because it does not help the author improve their work and is no more informative than a downvote. An emoticon, an insulting macro, or "lol" is not content; it's spam.
  3. Criticism should be helpful in some way: Critique should suggest what the author did wrong and how to improve, or what they've done right that they should continue doing. Good critique should give the author an idea of where to take their next draft or what might make their current article better.
    • Saying things such as "The problems with this article should be obvious!" is unhelpful and rude. If they were obvious to the author, they wouldn't have made them. All you've accomplished is to obliquely call the author an idiot. Keep in mind that growing membership means that many authors haven't been here long. What's obvious to you is probably not obvious to someone new.
  4. Don't try to enforce your personal preferences as How-Things-Should-Be-Done: There's no rule saying someone must use a sandbox before posting to the mainsite, or swear off writing humanoids/-Js/Keters until they're more experienced, or that Author Avatars are not allowed. If a new writer wants to try something risky, let them go for it. The worst that can happen is that their article gets deleted. We want people being ambitious and taking chances.
  5. Content of user posts is what matters, not user status: Avoid judging or belittling users based on their join date. Veterans should not belittle the critique of newer users just because they are new. If a new user is wrong, explain why. Also, users should not ignore the advice of others in favor of only listening to staff members. Some of our best writers are not staff.

In short: Be helpful, civil, and open-minded.

Guidelines

  1. Be as harsh as you need to be: The point is for your criticism to be effective, not to fluff someone's ego. Sugarcoating your criticism may give the author the impression that their draft is in fairly good form in its current stage. If most of the article's bad, you don't need to scramble for something good to say.
    • Harsh ≠ mean, and mean ≠ helpful. The SCP Wiki is a creative writing community - we want to encourage each other to keep writing and to improve our writing skills. Being mean or rude in your critique does nothing but discourage the author from working to be better.
  2. Forum critique should be relatively in depth: Forum threads are made for in-progress drafts, and as such, critique is expected to be in-depth enough for the author to make substantial changes to their article (if necessary).
    • Focusing on one small aspect of the draft (a single addendum, two or three grammatical/spelling errors, etc.) is not considered in-depth critique. Your criticism on the forums should be enough for an author to gauge the quality of their draft in its current form.
  3. Critique on posted articles can be minimal: Articles posted to the wiki are expected to be finished drafts, and as such, do not require critique in order to be made ready to post. Any criticism left on posted articles does not need to be in depth, but must still contain reasonable content.
    • You are not required to explain your vote on an article.
    • Don't dogpile on poorly rated articles - if an article is at -50 and dropping and a ton of people have already said that it's terrible, you don't need to drop in just to let people know that you think it's terrible too.

If you have any questions about this policy, please feel free to leave a comment in the discussion thread, or message a member of staff. Thank you.