The FreeSpace Wiki's Veteran Comments policy, in a nutshell, is:
Do not treat the Veteran Comments section like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter.
Verified and useful information is valued. Highly subjective and useless comments are not.
Early in 2008, the FreeSpace Wiki community came to the consensus that many of its Veteran Comments sections had devolved into blogs. Veteran Comments were originally introduced to provide useful information about various ships that were not apparent from their table statistics and/or in-game descriptions. Consequently, contributors were asked to maintain a certain level of quality in their Comments.
A discussion on the Hard Light Productions forums regarding the subject has come to the following conclusions, and some examples of what a Veteran Comment should and should not contain:
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All Articles
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Capital Ship Articles
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| Should Contain |
- Notes for FREDders (e.g. the Nephilim doesn't carry bombs in its default loadout; certain bombers carry Phoenix missiles but the good-secondary-time SEXP must be used to enable them to fire).
- Info on special gun placements and which banks correspond to which guns (e.g. the Ursa's top-right gun is inaccurate against anything small).
- Warnings about any problems with the ship (e.g. the Tauret cannot really use Kaysers due to energy constraints).
- Weaknesses (e.g. the Valkyrie's Comms tends to get disabled when unshielded, which may cause the player to miss critical dialogue).
- Any interesting facts that have not been pointed out elsewhere (e.g. the mediavps version of the Aeolus adds a fighterbay).
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- Blind spots (e.g. in front and ever so slightly above a Moloch, only a single blob turret can reach you).
- Special issues (e.g the Azrael is effectively impossible to disable due to the engine placement).
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| Should Not Contain |
- Blog-like descriptions that point out strengths/weaknesses under rare circumstances.
- Speculation about how powerful the given ship would be if its default armament was changed (e.g. an Arcadia could be more powerful if its blob turrets were replaced with beams).
- Speculation about the motives behind the use of a given ship or weapon (e.g. in-universe speculation of why the NTF use the GTW Prometheus R, or the decommissioning of the GTF Valkyrie)
- Mission-specific comments (e.g. the GTM Trebuchet should be used to destroy the forward flak guns of the Sathanas in Bearbaiting). Comments like these should be integrated into an article related to the mission.
- Highly subjective and debatable statements like "extremely weak" or "totally useless" that are not backed up by facts.
- Vulgarities (e.g. "the GTW Leech Cannon is fucking shit").
- Redundancy with comments already made; if a particular facet of tactics, weapons, or facts about a ship has already been pointed out, do not repeat it.
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This is a Wiki, so Veteran Comments are not handled like forum posts by individual users—other contributors are allowed to edit any Veteran Comments for accuracy, clarity of expression, or grammar. For this reason, do not sign any Veteran Comments you make.
Through all this, remember that this policy is not meant to discourage helpful contributors. Be bold, as they say on Wikipedia. If you are unsure of something, start a discussion on the Talk Page or forums. If you are fairly certain of it, edit the article accordingly. Thanks to the Wiki architecture, errors can be corrected or removed later.
