Off-topic

Thinking about this as it relates to individual wiki and yes, this specific wiki. It may be hard to define, but we might know what it feels like. Most wikis' rules about what is on- or off-topic are implied by the about page, which describes the wiki's purpose. There may also be an explicit "Inclusion policy" or "What this wiki is not" page stating what content is acceptable and unacceptable. Sometimes there are dissident users who advocate a "This wiki is a community" policy, but they tend not to prevail in completing eliminating the banning of some off-topic content from the wiki. Sometimes people advocate benign neglect of the issue, thinking that off-topic discussions will tend to peter out on their own if left alone for awhile.

Some off-topic content, especially by users who have made no other contributions to the community, and are deemed unlikely to, may be regarded as spam. The quintessential example would be linkspam added by automated scripts.

External links

• http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/OffTopic
• http://www.communitywiki.org/en/OnAndOffTopic
• wikipedia:Off topic

Rules

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project:About
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project:Inclusion_policy
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project:What_Meta_is_not
• mw:Project:About#What_MediaWiki.org_is_not
• wikipedia:Project:Writing_better_articles#Stay_on_topic
• wikipedia:Project:Talk_page_guidelines#Others.27_comments
• wikipedia:Project:User_pages#Excessive_unrelated_content
• wikipedia:Project:Refactoring talk pages