Transformers Wiki:Policies

No Wikipedia Articles
's users have decided against using Transformers articles from Wikipedia. There are several reasons.


 * 1) Audience — Wikipedia is general Transformers information for people interested in Transformers in a general way.   is incredibly specific, detailed and comprehensive Transformers information for fans and creators that love to wallow in the strange, obscure and disturbing back corners of Transformers
 * 2) Formatting — Wikipedia has completely different article formatting, markup and structure than we do.  An article literally cannot simply be cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia, the end up with little red error messages all over because the Transformers articles on Wikipedia use layout templates for presenting information that that would be impossible to use on Teletraan 1 without simplifying the information to the point it is no longer useful.
 * Example: The Wikipedia   allows you to list a character's 'Alternate Modes'.  Optimus Prime's box lists 6 (one of which is 'a variety of Cybertronian trucks.')  He's had over 30).
 * 1) Quality — Bluntly, a lot of Wikipedia's Transformers content is vaguely-worded summaries of how the writer remembers it happened, sections of slavish detail alternating with glossed-over simplification and lists.  (We hate lists.)
 * 2) Copyright — Though Wikipedia's articles are available for anyone to use or edit under a GNU Free Documentation License, we still require that all article content be written specifically for Teletraan 1 to meet Teletraan 1's different standards and unique needs.  Taking a Wikipedia article and reformatting it to match our layout and structure does not change the fact it was written to a different standard of quality for a different audience.  To prevent this, Teletraan 1 requires that the copyright on all submitted article content be held solely by the uploader.

''Mostly this is a legal justification for a policy motivated by reasons stated above however.

Well, some layout templates but we really don't care about that.

Humor
It stays.

We Hate Lists
Lists are barely a form of content. Would you read the Phonebook to learn what the people in your neighborhood were like?

Lists may sometimes be a necessary evil- tolerated because they are useful- but they are never a virtue.