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Guideline:No disclaimers in articles

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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 BattleIntelligence 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 BattleIntelligence disclaimers

Every BattleIntelligence page includes, right at the bottom, a link to the BattleIntelligence:General disclaimer (BattleIntelligence makes no guarantee of validity), which itself provides further links to five other standard disclaimers that apply to all articles:

In addition, by longstanding policy, BattleIntelligence 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:

Acceptable warnings

Certain warnings are acceptable. These serve different purposes from the standard BattleIntelligence 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 BattleIntelligence.
  • 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 BattleIntelligence editor disagrees with the current state of the article.

See also