Consumer Action Taskforce:Article types

To accomplish the Consumer Protection Wiki's goal of informing people about the practices of companies, individuals, and industries in general, as well as providing a repository of detailed information about specific events, the information collated here must be presented in a coherent and user-friendly manner. This page contains descriptions of the main page 'classes' that exist within the Consumer Protection Wiki, and guides for what scope and content each article should typically have.

The goal here is to create something sensible and navigable, which will lead to link-based navigation through the site being a pleasant experience, and people being presented with a reasonable level of detail for the article which they find themselves on.

The page 'classes' are loosely grouped into three main tiers, as well as a 'tier 0' which covers pages primarily intended for contributors.

Tier 2: Companies, People, and Product/Service/Website/Software articles (or 'entity' articles)

This tier of articles may well be the most useful to the casual reader. This is where someone who googles [insert thing here] consumer protection wiki will usually end up. For example, "LG controversies consumer protection wiki".

All tier 2 articles should be written in a factual, non-accusatory, and legally safe tone. For articles about living people, please refer to the Living persons policy.

Individuals

Sample Individual Article

Articles about an individual should be created to keep track of important people who have substantial relevance to consumer protection. These will typically be lawmakers, prominent members of regulatory bodies, and members of companies who have extensive decision-making powers, who have been directly implicated in the decision-making processes behind multiple consumer-relevant incidents or policies. Keeping track of these individuals and their decisions as they move through, and between, various organizations will give consumers a more informed perspective regarding the management of important organizations.

As discussed in the Mission Statement, high standards will be applied to articles about individuals, particularly living people. (see: Living Persons Policy)

• A brief biography, detailing the various roles held by the individual, and quotations representing their public stance on consumer protection issues.
• A short paragraph for each of the largest controversies the individual has been involved in, detailing their role.
• A list or table directing users to incident pages covering relevant incidents.

Articles about specific individuals will be held to higher standards than the average article. For an individual to have an article on this wiki, it must be shown that they are directly relevant to a large number of consumer-protection related issues, and have, or had, major decision-making capability over these issues. Non-compliant 'person' articles will be moderated heavily, and deleted on sight.

Tier 3: Incident pages

Guides

In certain cases, particularly where an Incident page focuses on forced DRM or bricking of devices, it may be appropriate to create a guide page alongside said Incident, in order to detail how a user can bypass the relevant restrictions, and regain ownership of their product. Such guides may only be created where the Incident page in question is substantial, and well developed - Guides should not be created by themselves.

Guides should be strictly instructional, and should contain no opinions whatsoever, and no factual assertions beyond those strictly neccesary to convey the information needed to replicate its steps.

Approval of Guides, unlike the rest of the Wiki, will be on an approval by exception basis. This means that the default position is that Guides are not appropriate in most cases, and should be approved on a case-by-case basis. Where an external guide exists, it should be linked to rather than reposted on the WIki.

Upon creation, guide articles should not be linked to from the parent article. Guide articles should only be linked to from the parent article once approved by a Wiki mod or admin.

Tier 0: Contributor pages

Sources

Source articles are articles which detail a source of information for the Wiki – these articles will contain a source, an explanation of who that source is and why they produce content which should be adapted, and a list of ‘stuff that you could probably make a wiki article about’. Obvious non-Louis sources may include GamersNexus, or other print sources/websites that are good at standing up for consumers, or have a lot of information about consumer affairs. Ideally, this should be achieved in cooperation with said sources. These articles, while they should be useful to a reader interested in where the information for this Wiki comes from, are primarily intended as a resource for contributors to use when writing other pages.

Transcripts

Transcript articles contain machine-generated transcripts of videos linked in sources. They may also contain machine-generated summaries and tags.

Any pages which are written using information from a transcript article should be linked on the transcript page, to help avoid duplication of page creation.

The need may emerge for other page types, but please use this framework to provide structure and guidance while developing and contributing to the Wiki.