Halopedia:What Halopedia is

Halopedia is first and foremost an online encyclopedia for all things related to Halo, and, as a means to that end, an online community of people interested in building a high-quality Halo encyclopedia in a spirit of mutual respect. Please avoid the temptation to use Halopedia for other purposes, or to treat it as something it is not.

Halopedia is not a fanfiction site
Halopedia is designed for the incorporation of canon from the Halo universe. Its users and administrators work hard to ensure that every article contains information that has been officially recognized to exist in the Halo world. Many people on the site are working on fanfiction of their own, but fanfiction items themselves do not have a place among Halopedia's articles. You are free to add a link to your own FanFiction Halo related stories, but no articles incorporated into Halopedia about them will be kept.

Halopedia is not a speculative forum
The intrigue behind the Halo series is its mystery; there is a great deal of the storyline that has not been revealed to the world. Bungie developers have promised to continue making products that add more details to that storyline.

Because of this, many Halopedia articles contain speculation as to the nature or actions of certain characters or storylines. However, Halopedia articles are designed to display informtation, not speculation. If you have a theory about something related to the Halo universe, the best place to put it would be in the Talk Page of the article. This way, various speculation on the article can be left to a minimum; lots of speculation on an article page makes it long, confusing, and counterproductive.

Halopedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information
The content of Halopedia is based entirely of items that have been mentioned in the Halo universe. Though there are many potential items that could be included in Halopedia, they are not added because this may clash with future developed storylines.

An example of this is Neptune. Neptune is a world in the modern solar system that has not yet been mentioned in Halo. Its presence has never been implied or directly stated, yet we all know it to exist. Neptune does not have an article for two reasons; the first is that there is no information on Neptune that is related to Halo, so the article would be pointlessly short and have few links to Halo related items. Second, future storylines could reveal any number of fates for Neptune between modern times and the time in which Halo takes place. It could have been destroyed, or even populated. There is simply no way to know the fate of modern things in the Halo universe. Those things will never be known for sure until they are mentioned.

Halopedia is not a history book
Many things seen in the Halo universe are depicted as homage to the past. Ships, planets, and even people have been named after past events. But that does not mean that these events deserve an article in Halopedia. An example of this is the UNSC Trafalgar. The ship itself is named likely in homage to the battle of Trafalgar, but the battle itself has little to do with the Halo universe other than the namesake. Therefore, the battle of Trafalgar does not warrant an article on Halopedia simply because it has possibly been the source of the name of a Halo related object.

Halopedia is not a social network
Halopedia is a reference wiki for all things related to Halo. It is an interesting project and is always growing. Please remember that users are here to contribute and get information, not to socialize. Therefore, please keep all comments on the discussion pages of articles on the topic of the article. If you wish to talk to another user outside of Halopedia, give them a way to contact you that does not interfere with the project pages, such as on their talk page.

Halopedia is not Wikipedia
Halopedia is not Wikipedia or Wookiepedia or any other Wiki site. Halopedia is an independent Wiki and it follows its own set of guidelines as outlined in the Help:Contents section. Halopedia sometimes takes ideas from larger and more developed Wikis, but Halopedia policy is always the highest authority on this website.

Halopedia is not a democracy
Like virtually all wikis, Halopedia is not a democracy. Most of our popular issues (Such as Halopedian of the Month and Featured Articles) are put up to a user vote, important decisions are made based on discussion, not consensus. The reasoning for this is that legitimate concerns cannot be ignored in light of important decisions, and one opinion is not necessarily equal to another, particularly when experience plays into the decision. These details must be ironed out in discussion before a decision is made.