BDWiki:Avoid self-references
Avoid self-references within BDWiki articles to the BDWiki project, such as:
- This BDWiki article discusses ...
- Free content projects, such as this website ..
- While BDWiki is not a dictionary, ... (in an article about a certain term)
- Warning: BDWiki contains spoilers (see BDWiki:Spoiler warning for alternative text)
Such self-references are entirely acceptable on talk pages or in the BDWiki namespace, but they are inappropriate in articles for two reasons. The first is that self-references are often considered disruptive in an encyclopedia because they distract from the topic at hand. A secondary concern is that self-references limit the use of BDWiki as an open source encyclopedia suitable for forking. Put simply, this policy is about remembering that the goal of BDWiki is to create an encyclopedia about BD, not merely to perpetuate itself, so the articles produced should be useful even outside the context of the project used to create it.
Contents
Community and website feature references
While we're often inclined to mention the BDWiki community that we are all part of, as well as the website features we use in creating the articles, these confuse readers of derivative works. In particular, do not refer to the fact that the page can be edited, do not refer to any BDWiki project page or process, do not use specialized BDWiki jargon (e.g. "POV" in place of "biased"), and do not refer to any link in the sidebar or along the top of the screen, such as the talk page, What links here, or history. Remember, articles are part of an encyclopedia, not part of the BDWiki project being used to create them.
However, there are exceptions to this. In particular, an article which is still in its initial development or under dispute often will include tags such as {{stub}}, and {{npov}} to help editors further develop the article, and the text in these templates include self-references. Try, however, to limit such self-references, even in templates.
Neutral references
References which exist in a way which assumes the reader is using an encyclopedia without reference to the specific encyclopedia (BDWiki), or the manner of access (online), are acceptable.
In the Template and Category namespaces
Limited use of self-references are sometimes found in the Template namespace and the Category namespace, such as with disambiguation and stub notices. Expanding this to other areas is not encouraged due to the need of third party users to either delete those templates or modify them to remove the BDWiki references.
When forced to use templates like this, you should use them in a way such that the article still makes sense when the template is removed, in order to facilitate automated removal.
BDWiki project coordination pages should be under Category:BDWiki administration, not in categories which contain main-namespace articles by topic. (A small number of articles about BDWiki are in the mainstream categories, and this is OK.)
Examples of self-references
The following are some examples of self-references in BDWiki's article namespace. They should at least be acknowledged or marked as self-references but not necessarily be deleted as they serve their purpose here on BDWiki.
- Articles that self-reference
- Any article in the article namespace that links to one in the BDWiki namespace
- Any article in the article namespace that redirects to one in the BDWiki namespace
- Articles that mention or are named "article" rather than "topic" and may also refer to BDWiki itself. For example, "List of articles" rather than "List of topics".
- Categories that self-reference
- Category:BDWiki and its subcategories in the article namespace
- User categories such as Category:User en and Category:BDWikians
- Use of templates in the article namespace that self-reference because they link to articles in the user, talk, or BDWiki namespace or that are special articles.
- Various stub messages
- Template:NPOV, Template:long NPOV
- Template:Disputed, Template:TotallyDisputed
- Template:Afd, Template:Cfd, Template:Rfd
- Template:Merge, Template:Mergeto, Template:Mergefrom
- Template:Disambig (Also the text only makes sense online)
- Template:Wrongtitle
- Template:Fact
Self-reference tools
Self-reference templates such as Template:Selfref and Template:In BDWiki provide a way to contain all the self-references as tags. This gives the ability to programatically remove all such references or transform them into external links. Thus, the end product can have all of its self-references removed automatically for users such as forks and mirrors.
