Battlestar Wiki:Battlestar Wiki is not a forum

This page is an official policy of Battlestar Wiki. This policy is considered by the community and its leadership to be the status quo of Battlestar Wiki and is not to be countermanded or ignored, though changes to it can be discussed on the appropriate talk page. This policy was implemented on 17 November 2006.

"Battlestar Wiki is not a forum", meaning that questions posed in the wiki should not be addressed in a back-to-forth manner prevalent on bulletin boards. This policy covers the "Questions" section of our Episode Guide.

Overview

The Episode Guides at Battlestar Wiki are patterned after the Lurker's Guide To Babylon 5 episode guides. As such, the "Questions" section is intended solely for questions -- ideally questions that may be answered in subsequent episodes, which might be linked to once they are revealed. It is not intended for back and forth discussion, analysis, or disagreements. Questions that have been answered within the episode may be moved down into the "Analysis" or "Notes" section if they are noteworthy. Analysis that stems from questions should also be located in the "Analysis" section. Ideally the "Questions" section will consist solely of a single level of bulleted questions, with occasional links to "Answer"s (from subsequent episodes) or "Analysis".

Good Examples

• Does Doctor Amorak truly have something on Baltar's involvement in the holocaust?
• Is Six actually in contact with other Cylons, and thus involved in the disappearance / reappearance of the Olympic Carrier?
• What happened to the group of survivors Helo was left with in the Miniseries? (Answer)

Bad Examples

• Billy reports that the number of survivors is down by 300 - some lost through death from injuries, etc., some "lost" through initial inaccurate counts, and the rest have "disappeared." How can people simply "disappear" in the fleet?
  • Perhaps the black market has put them to work. Or this number accounts for the people aboard Prometheus.
    • 300 people is way too few to account for the people aboard Prometheus. Besides, some of the losses actually were due to deaths.
  • Perhaps vigilante justice (like in "Collaborators" was at work?
    • Why would so many be killed on such a large scale when it wasn't even clear that there was a traitor?
      • Obviously there's still at least one traitor aboard...

See also

• Battlestar Wiki:Standards and Conventions - for information on formatting, standards, and conventions used in the creation and continual work on articles at the Battlestar Wiki.
• Battlestar Wiki:What Battlestar Wiki is not
• Battlestar Wiki:Think Tank/Episode pages are not forums - the Think Tank proposal which generated this policy.