All The Tropes:Content Guidelines

These are the Content Guidelines for All The Tropes. These regulate what you can and cannot write on ATT. While we do believe in free speech and a "censorship-lite" approach to troping, there have to be a few common sense ground rules so that everyone feels welcome.

Absolute Rules
These are the rules that -- if you break them -- will most quickly lead to consequences and restrict your ability to edit.
 * 1) No Pornography directly posted on the site.  This applies to both graphic and verbal porn.  The only time we want to hear technical details about male and female plugs coming together is if you're talking about the coaxial cable to your television.  However -- and this is a big however -- discussion of pornographic works is allowed.
 * 2) If you link to a page containing pornographic or disturbingly violent/gory content, it must be labelled as Not Safe for Work (NSFW).  This label can be directly after the link as a "(NSFW)" tag, or as a general page notice ("All the links below are Not Safe for Work")
 * 3) Do not link to child pornography under any circumstances.
 * 4) No spamming and link-farming.  Links should be on-topic.

Stay on Topic
This is a wiki about tropes in works of fiction and entertainment, which means that most content on the wiki should be about that. A certain amount of off-topic discussion is allowed, particularly in the forums and user pages. Memes and historical figures can have pages or examples, too. But we do want to limit things like unverifiable real life examples or gushing the work pages. As we say in The Troper's Code, we want to keep a balance between education and entertainment. This means it involves a judgement call, so please be civil and respect your fellow editors.

All The Tropes:What we aren't has a list of specific things that are generally considered off-topic on this wiki.

Unpublished Works
Unpublished Works belong in the  namespace in most circumstances, as a subpage of the creator's user page. The circumstance where this doesn't apply is in mass-market works with a known release date, like a famous author's upcoming book or the latest sequel in a movie franchise.

Oddly enough, the requirement here is notability -- if there's been newspaper or blogger coverage, then we might as well put it in the main namespace because other people will be interested in discussing it. Other unpublished work pages are more of a convenience to the author, which is fine and all, but not really suitable for the main namespace.

Guidelines
We have a Style Guide, which is currently pretty limited in content, but will probably grow. In most circumstances, you should follow it, but there are times to bend the rules. But if you break the rules too often, people might get upset with you. Remember that the first rule on Terms of Service is "You promise not to be a huge jerk on our site."

For more specific guidelines, we also have:
 * Creating New Pages
 * Page Templates
 * Trope Workshop Guidelines
 * Works Page Guidelines
 * Creator Page Guidelines
 * Creating Disambiguation Pages
 * Tips for Editing
 * How to Write an Example

Finally, although it should go without saying, the contents of the All The Tropes project namespace are not to be edited by non-admins, as it is home to wiki policy and documentation. If you think you see something that needs changing, bring it up with an admin. If you happen to find an unprotected page in the project namespace and edit it without asking first, that's grounds for a temporary ban.