SmashWiki:Probation

This page documents an official SmashWiki policy, a widely accepted standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. If in doubt, consider discussing changes on the talk page.

Probation is a state that users may be placed into should it be decided that they are spending too much of their time in editing their user pages and/or forums without making constructive edits. While under probation, users cannot edit pages in the User: or Forum: namespaces.

Any administrator can request probation of a user once the following criteria are met:

1. The user has significantly more user and/or forum edits than other edits (mainspace, template, image, etc).
2. The user's constructive edits are not major or significant enough to justify a higher tolerance for user/forum edits.
3. The administrator has suitably warned the user to no appreciable improvement.

There are no hard-and-fast rules for determining these thresholds and are considered on a strictly case-by-case basis. During times where the wiki status is a Yellow or Red, the probation criteria are more sensitive, and both warnings and probation applications should be provided earlier.

To request probation of a user, an administrator simply lists the user's name on SmashWiki:Requests for probation in addition to a short description of the user's behaviour and suggested probation duration. If a bureaucrat deems the request valid, the user should be placed into the probation usergroup as soon as possible. Otherwise, the request is tossed out. A rejected RfP does not grant any sort of protection against future RfPs to the user (e.g. there is no delay before another can be submitted), but admins should have a very good reason to bring up a particular user without a suitable delay.

The length of a probation is dependant on the user's history and the current status of the wiki, and is again entirely determined on a case-by-case basis. In many cases, users deemed to have made no effort to contribute will remain on probation indefinitely until they have made a reasonable effort to do so. In a similar way, users with outstanding contributions have more leeway during times of lower status. When the wiki's status is high, users that are being useful contributors may receive a time-limited probation if they are also spending a lot of time in their userspace, with repeat offenders having successive probations of increased lengths.