Article Types

To accomplish the Consumer Protection Wiki's goal of informing people about the practices of companies, individuals, and industries in general, as well as providing a repository of detailed information about specific events, the information collated here must be presented in a coherent and user-friendly manner. This page contains descriptions of the main page 'classes' that exist within the Consumer Protection Wiki, and guides for what scope and content each article should typically have.

The goal here is to create something sensible and navigable, which will lead to link-based navigation through the site being a pleasant experience, and people being presented with a reasonable level of detail for the article which they find themselves on.

The page 'classes' are loosely grouped into three main tiers, as well as a 'tier 0' which covers pages primarily intended for contributors.

Tier 1: Themes and Sources

Themes

Sample Theme Article

Themes are a high-level type of article, which should primarily aim to explain and justify core consumer protection concepts and challenges. For example, you would have a Theme article explaining the concept of mandatory forced arbitration, forced EULA modifications, or loss of ownership - how it works, why it’s a problem, and some examples of harm caused. These should be great articles for people to link others to when trying to tell them why a certain practice is harmful.

Theme articles may be a useful tool for determining what is and isn’t suitable for inclusion in the wiki. We are considering a future rule, that any incident discussed should link to one or more Themes (this rule is obviously on the backburner until a sufficient range of Theme articles have been written). Theme articles will be subjected to a higher level of protection than average articles, as it is important that they are high-quality.

These articles should be written with the 'Nice Louis' editorial standard [insert link once these are separated from Mission Statement] in mind.

Tier 2: Companies, People, and Product Line articles (or 'entity' articles)

This tier of articles may well be the most useful to the casual reader. This is where someone who googles [insert thing here] consumer protection wiki will usually end up. For example, "LG controversies consumer protection wiki".

All tier 2 articles should be written with the 'Factual, non-accusatory, and legally safe' tone. For articles about Living People, please refer to our Living Person article policy [link once it exists].

Companies:

Sample Company Article

Company articles should contain:

• A brief overview of the relevant company, how big it is, and what it does.
• A rough appraisal of their attitude towards consumer protection. The exact form of this is not yet established. Feel free to make a proposal for some kind of scale on which a company's attitude towards consumer protection can be measured.
• A short paragraph for each of the very largest controversies relevant to that entity.
• A list or table directing users to the pages covering their controversies and practices, or to their product line pages in the case of a very large company.

For companies which are very large, such as Apple or Sony, it may make sense to not have a list of everything they’ve ever done all on their home page, instead linking to their various product lines, which then have the controversy lists. Subsidiary companies should have their own pages when they are sufficiently distinct from the main entity (e.g., while Škoda Auto may be a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group, it is sufficiently distinct to warrant its own company page). Such relationships should be documented where they exist.

Product lines

Sample Product Line Article

Product line articles are to be created when it would be too cumbersome to discuss the full activities of a company within its article. For example, it would be unreasonable for Sony's article to list every consumer protection issue relating to each of their product lines in a single article; it would create an article which is simply too large. Instead, separate articles for product lines e.g. the Playstation systems should be created.

• A brief overview of the relevant product line.
• A rough appraisal of the extent of consumer protection problems generally associated with the product line.
• A short paragraph for each of the largest controversies relevant to the product line.
• A list or table directing users to incident pages covering relevant incidents.

Individuals

Sample Individual Article

Articles about an individual should be created to keep track of important people who have substantial relevance to consumer protection. These will typically be lawmakers, prominent members of regulatory bodies, and members of companies who have extensive decision making powers, who have been directly implicated in the decision-making processes behind multiple consumer-relevant incidents or policies. Keeping track of these individuals and their decisions as they move through, and between, various organisations will enable consumers to get a more informed perspective regarding the management of important organisations.

As discussed in the Mission Statement, high standards will be applied to articles about individuals, particularly living people. (see: Living Persons Policy)

• A brief biography, detailing the various roles held by the individual, and quotations representing their public stance on consumer protection issues.
• A short paragraph for each of the largest controversies the individual has been involved in, detailing their role.
• A list or table directing users to incident pages covering relevant incidents.

Articles about specific individuals will be held to higher standards than the average article. For an individual to have an article on this wiki, it must be shown that they are directly relevant to a large number of consumer-protection related issues, and have, or had, major decision-making capability over these issues. Non-compliant 'person' articles will be moderated heavily, and deleted on sight.

Tier 3: Incident pages

Incidents

Sample Incident Article

An Incident page will cover an event, or chain of events, which surrounds one instance of anti-consumer activity (or anything else, such as the passing of a law, which is relevant to the wiki). These will make up the bulk of the pages on the wiki, though likely not the bulk of the traffic. These pages should be able to be referred to as something of a ‘historical record’ and should have a good deal of factual content relating to the event(s) in question, complete with links to, and citations of, various contemporary sources.

The key components of an incident page will be:

• The business practice in question.
• An explanation of the harm caused by the business practice, along with a link/reference to any relevant Themes.
• A brief history of how the practice came to the public’s attention.
• The immediate aftermath of the incident, and the company’s reaction to it (this will be short in most cases, but may be substantial if there was, for example, a protracted legal battle).
• Whether the offending party continues the anti-consumer practice to this day, or whether they have changed their approach to the issue in question.

These Incident pages are the areas where citations and ‘receipts’ in general will be most important, as they will form the factual basis for the conclusions reached in the Tier 2 articles discussing the companies and people involved.

Incident articles should be written with the 'Factual, non-accusatory, and legally safe' tone.

Tier 0: Contributor pages

Sources

Source articles are articles which detail a source of information for the Wiki – these articles will contain a source, an explanation of who that source is and why they produce content which should be adapted, and a list of ‘stuff that you could probably make a wiki article about’. Obvious non-Louis sources may include GamersNexus, or other print sources/websites that are good at standing up for consumers, or have a lot of information about consumer affairs. Ideally, this should be achieved in cooperation with said sources. These articles, while they should be useful to a reader interested in where the information for this Wiki comes from, are primarily intended as a resource for contributors to use when writing other pages.

Transcripts

Transcript articles contain machine-generated transcripts of videos linked in sources. They may also contain machine-generated summaries and tags.

Any pages which are written using information from a transcript article should be linked on the transcript page, to help avoid duplication of page creation.

The need may emerge for other page types, but please use this framework to provide structure and guidance while developing and contributing to the Wiki.