Guideline:No disclaimers in articles
 | This page documents an BattleIntelligence content guideline. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Warnings about content should not generally appear in articles. All articles are already covered by the BattleTechWiki disclaimers. |
For the purpose of this guideline, a disclaimer is some text or template within an article that is intended to serve as a content warning. Although such content warnings have frequently been proposed, community consensus is that articles should not include additional warnings that duplicate the standard BattleTechWiki disclaimers.
Were they to be permitted, content warnings could create a false sense of security, creating a misleading impression that all potentially problematic content is flagged, and that articles without disclaimers are inherently "safe". The community consensus to ban such warnings also avoids time-consuming debates over subjective issues such as what constitutes "presentable content".
Standard BattleTechWiki disclaimers
Every BattleTechWiki page includes, right at the bottom, a link to the BattleTechWiki:General disclaimer (BattleTechWiki makes no guarantee of validity), which itself provides further links to five other standard disclaimers that apply to all articles:
- BattleTechWiki:Content disclaimer: BattleTechWiki contains content that may be objectionable
- BattleTechWiki:Legal disclaimer: BattleTechWiki does not give legal opinions
- BattleTechWiki:Risk disclaimer: Use BattleTechWiki at your own risk
In addition, by longstanding policy, BattleTechWiki is not censored.
Unacceptable disclaimers
Here are some examples of unacceptable disclaimers. These are not permitted in articles, whether in template form (as illustrated here) or as text:
 | Spoiler alert This article contains spoilers. |
| Warning This article contains vulgar, profane, or otherwise offensive language. |
| Content warning This article contains media that may potentially trigger seizures for those diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy. |
| Malware warning Opening this link may expose you to malware. |
 | Trigger warning Viewer discretion is advised. |
Acceptable warnings
Certain warnings are acceptable. These serve different purposes from the standard BattleTechWiki disclaimers:
- "Technical" warnings assisting the user with display problems, such as containing special characters. These refer not to article content but to display issues that some readers might run in to.
- Temporary current event and temporal templates. These alert the reader that the article may be subject to a flux of recent and upcoming significant changes for reasons beyond the control of BattleTechWiki.
- Temporary cleanup templates, such as {{POV}}, {{copyediting}} or {{cleanup}}. These point to deficiencies in the article that should be corrected promptly. Maintenance templates should not be used to "warn the reader" that a BattleTechWiki editor disagrees with the current state of the article.