PublicWongery:Contributing to the Public Wongery
The purpose of the Wongery is to serve as a place where people can share details about their imaginary worlds. You can post articles about fictional settings of your own creation, or elements found in fictional settings. However, there are certain matters you should be aware of before contributing to the Public Wongery.
Rights
You retain the ownership and copyright of anything you post in the Public Wongery. However, by posting your material in the Public Wongery, you agree to release it under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. You also agree that it will be released under an Akinetic Media License, once that license is finalized and available. Note that these are the same licenses under which the material in the Central Wongery is released; the Grandmaster Wongers aren't asking you to do anything we're not doing ourselves.
See Meta:Licensing for more information.
There is no requirement that the material you post to the Public Wongery be exclusive. As long as you have the applicable rights to it, you are free to post material here that is also available elsewhere.
Content guidelines
The Public Wongery is only about descriptions of imaginary worlds and features thereof. You can post here about worlds, creatures, characters, magic systems, anything that pertains to a fictional setting. The Public Wongery is not for product promotion, philosophical rants, or anything else not directly related to imaginary worlds.
Anything you post on the Public Wongery should be your original work. You can build on material by others, but only if the material you are building on is itself released under terms compatible with the Wongery's licensing. This means, essentially, that you can post the following:
- Your own original work, not legally derivative of any other copyrighted work
- Work that draws on material in the public domain
- Work that draws on material released under a CC-BY license
- Work that draws on material from articles in the Central Wongery
- Work that draws from other articles in the Public Wongery (however, see Usage Templates, below)
- Work that draws on material from a Master Wongery, when and if any Master Wongeries exist.
Note that if material is released only under a CC-SA-BY license, that does not qualify it as something you can draw upon for Wongery articles. That is because material in the Wongery will also be released under the Akinetic Media License, which does not include the ShareAlike provision, so relicensing material originally released under a CC-SA-BY license under an AML license would violate the terms of the former. (This isn't an issue for material released under both licenses from the beginning, which is the case for Wongery material.) Nor will we accept arguments that articles drawing upon copyrighted material not released under an applicable license should be permitted on grounds of "fair use". Fair use is of course a real legal principle, but whether a particular usage qualifies is far from clear-cut and generally decided on a case-by-case basis, and it is a quagmire we prefer not to wade into.
If your work draws on material from other articles or material released under the CC-BY license, then you should credit that material in your article's Source page. See the main page of the Source space for more information.
Proscribed Content
The same types of content forbidden in the Forum Rules are likewise disallowed in Wongery articles. In particular, your articles should not promote racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, and like forms of bigotry, or condone or romanticize pedophilia, incest, or bestiality. Articles that violate these prohibitions are subject to deletion, and users who repeatedly post such articles or who post particularly flagrant violations are subject to suspension or banning.
This does not mean your articles can't touch on these topics, if they're handled with discretion and sensitivity. You can write an article about a racist character, if the article does not make the character's racism out to be justified. You can write about a character who was a victim of pedophilia, if it's not presented in a trivializing or titillating way. However, such subjects can be difficult to address appropriately, and if you're not sure you're up to it you may be better off avoiding these topics entirely.
Images
You are welcome to add illustrations to your articles. The method to add images is the same as in other MediaWiki wikis, and you can consult the Help:Images page on the MediaWiki wiki for detailed instructions. As with text, however, you must have the rights to the images you upload, or they must either be in the public domain or released under the same licenses as the Wongery content, or more permissive licenses (such as CC-BY). You may upload images you created yourself, or images from a public-domain repository, or images created by an artist who gave you in writing all the rights to the images, or gave you explicit permission to release them under the appropriate licenses. You may not upload images you found online with no clear licensing information. (Note that this goes primarily for the mainspace of the Public Wongery; the contents of user pages, for instance, are not released under the same licenses as the mainspace content, so if you want to illustrate your user page there's a little more leeway for fair use there.)
You may upload images created in any medium: scans of physical drawings or paintings; digital art created in software like Photoshop, Affinity Photo, or Krita; images of 3D models created in a program like Blender or Maya; or even photographs of physical models are acceptable. (However, in the case of a photograph, make sure that you have the image rights to the object or person in the photograph as well as the photograph itself; you may not, for instance, upload a picture of a real, living person, even if you took the photo yourself, unless that person has given you permission with a signed model release.) The one exception is generative "AI"—images created or heavily modified by generative "AI" are not permitted on the Wongery. (Neither is text created by generative "AI", for that matter, but I expect that would be less of an issue.)
When you upload an image to the Public Wongery, please be sure to give appropriate credit in the image summary; if you created it yourself, say so, and if not, say who did and where you got it. Images without sources or licensing information are subject to deletion without notice.
Usage Templates
Contributors to the Public Wongery may have different preferences as to whether other people can edit or draw on their articles. Some contributors might be okay with anyone editing their articles as they see fit and writing other articles drawing from their own, while others may prefer to keep their content self-contained and reserve to themselves the right to expand on it. To this end, we provide a number of templates users can use to state their preferences. These templates should be placed on the top of the article's Talk page; they can be inserted by simply writing "{{Template Name}}" (without quotation marks), where "Template Name" is replaced by the name of the template.
The usage templates fall into two categories: editing templates that state the creator's preference regarding other users editing their article, and derivative templates that state the creator's preference regarding derivative articles being made. These are independent, and a given article can have one of each type of template; any editing template can be paired with either derivative template.
Here are the names of the existing editing templates, with an example of how they look; you can go to the template's page to see more details about its meaning:
Here are the derivative templates:
Note that these templates only apply to derivative works within the Public Wongery. Again, anything posted to the Public Wongery mainspace is released under the CC-BY-SA license (and will be released under the AML), so legally anyone is able to create derivative works based on it, as long as they comport with the license's provisions. Even within the Wongery, the templates have no legal force; the terms of the license legally allow derivative works within the Public Wongery as they do anywhere else. However, as a matter of courtesy, we ask contributors to the Public Wongery to respect each other's usage preferences. Before editing an article you did not write, or creating another article that draws on it, please check the article's Talk page for the usage templates, and respect the user's preferences.
If the talk page of an article does not have an editing template, you can assume that the user is okay with anyone editing the article. If the talk page of an article does not have a derivative template, you can assume that the user is okay with anyone making articles that draw from it. However, if the article has just been created, you may want to wait at least until it's been a full day; it could be that the author just hasn't added the template yet.
Do not remove or exchange the usage template from a page you did not create. The decisions regarding usage preferences lie with the page's creator.
Name Conflicts
It could be that two users on the Public Wongery want to create articles with the same name, or that one user wants to make an article where another article by the same name already exists. In this case, the preferred solution is to give the pages in question more specific titles, and create a disambiguation page from the general title. For instance, if one user wants to create a page about a superhero named "Black Raven", and another user wants to create a page about an evil sorcerer named "Black Raven", there can't be two pages by the same name. However, the first user can call their page "Black Raven (superhero)" and the second "Black Raven (sorcerer)", and then one of them can make a disambiguation page called "Black Raven" that links to both. If two users want to create pages about characters named "Black Raven" who are both superheroes, then obviously adding " (superhero)" to the title wouldn't suffice, but they can be distinguished by the cities in which they operate, or the names of the worlds or universes in which they exist.
If one of the uses is clearly more prominent than the other, then an alternative to the disambiguation page is the About template, which can be placed at the top of the primary page to alert users to the existence of the other. For example, suppose that the superhero Black Raven is a major character in the first user's world, but the evil sorcerer Black Raven is a very minor character in the other. In this case, both users may agree that the page about the superhero qualifies as the more significant use. Then the superhero's page can retain the name "Black Raven", the evil sorcerer's page can be renamed "Black Raven (sorcerer)", and the About template can be put on the top of the superhero's page as follows: "{{About|the superhero|the evil sorcerer|Black Raven (evil sorcerer)}}". This would produce the following "hatnote":
- This page is about the superhero. For the evil sorcerer, see Black Raven (evil sorcerer).
Users are encouraged to coöperate with reasonable disambiguation requests; it's not acceptable to stake an exclusive claim on a title composed of common words and refuse to acknowledge other articles by that title. However, if you run into a user who's being stubborn or nonresponsive, you can reach out to the Grandmaster Wongers for assistance. (This is a last resort, among other things because the Grandmaster Wongers are very busy and may not be able to address the issue promptly, but it is an option.) If there is no other obvious recourse, the Grandmaster Wongers may change the page title and take care of the disambiguation themselves—normally the Grandmaster Wongers intend to respect user preferences regarding editing their articles like any other user, and would not edit an article with a NoEdit template in the Talk space, but editing a page title for disambiguation purposes (and subsequent editing of links so they don't go to a disambiguation page) is an exception to this rule, since it affects other users' articles as well.