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 without making constructive edits. While under probation, users cannot edit pages in the "User:" namespace.

Administrators can probate a user once the following criteria are met:

1. The user has significantly more user edits than other edits (mainspace, template, file, etc).
2. The user's constructive edits (if any) are not major or significant enough to justify a higher tolerance for user 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. Additionally, attempting to circumvent this by editing as a sockpuppets to avoid increasing your user space edits when in risk of probation, will result in an automatic probation regardless.

The length of a probation is dependent 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 disproportionately little effort to constructively contribute will remain on probation indefinitely until they have made a proportionately 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 user space, with repeat offenders having successive probations of increased lengths.

If a user on indefinite probation feels they have made sufficient improvement to no longer warrant probation, they are encouraged to leave a message on the probating admin's talk page to appeal their case, or on another admin's talk page if the probating admin is no longer active. However, if the admin deems the probated user has prematurely appealed or that their contributions have otherwise not been of a satisfactory standard, then the appeal will be denied and the probated user will not be able to appeal again for a determinate length of time (typically for a month, but the appeal lockout can be for any other length of time as deemed merited by the admin, with successive failed appeals likely leading to increasingly longer appeal lockouts).