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Editorial Guidelines
This document is intended to serve as a set of guidelines to help make editorial contributions to this project. Guidelines are not rules, which is to say that there is no penalty for not following one of the provisions from this document. Instead, think of this as a set of best practices for deciding which fortunes to keep, how to organize them, and when to edit a fortune's content.
Background
Historically, contributions to fortune-mod have had a less-than ideal quality
control process, and as such, many of the fortunes that a user may receive from
the program read more like cryptic inside jokes, or at the very worst,
locker-room banter. As a contributor to fortune-kind one of major tasks is
defining and applying a somewhat more rigorous moderation and editing process
to the fortune adoption workflow.
Methodology
For the purposes of this project, we would like you to consider the three
primary tasks required of contributors interested in sorting through the
fortunes from oldtunes:
- moderation: considering the appropriateness of the content
- editing: considering the correctness of the content
- placement: considering where a fortune should go
Moderation
For the purposes of this project, we encourage contributors to consider a few key questions when reviewing a fortune:
- Does this fortune make sense? Would the average person, having only the
information contained in this fortune, be able to understand what its trying
to say? Fortunes that lack enough context are probably inside jokes and
should not be adopted into
fortune-kind - Does this fortune offer anything to the audience? Does it bring joy, provide a new perspective, offer useful advice, or invite contemplation? Answering "yes" to any of these questions is a hint that this fortune is of higher quality.
Tricky Topics
While reviewing fortunes in oldtunes, you will probably run into fortunes and
jokes that haven't aged well and don't do either the audience or the speaker
much credit. In these cases, we ask contributors to consider this additional
set of questions:
- Would you share this fortune with a child?
- A loved one?
- If the fortune is a joke, and if it applicable, would you in good conscience share it with the person it is about?
Answering "no" to any of the question above does not automatically mean that
this fortune should be excluded. Instead, it means that the fortune should
probably be placed in the off directory ("off" for "off-color"), but only if
the fortune still has some intrinsic value. If the fortune is an offensive joke
masquerading as a fortune, it probably does not belong in fortune-kind.
In short, if the fortune begs for a content warning, it probably belongs in
off. If the fortune doesn't pass this project's Code of Conduct, it probably
doesn't belong in the project at all.
Editing
It can be difficult to determine the so-called "correctness" of a contributed fortune or the way it is intended to be read or the type of language or words it should use to convey its meaning. For those purposes, we encourage contributors to instead focus on a fortune's punctuation, syntax, grammar, and word choice with respect to the language the fortune is written in.
If you don't know (or can't find a trustworthy reference for) the language a fortune is written in, it's probably best not to edit it at all.
Placement
This document has already touched on where fortunes covering tricky topics should go, but for the sake of organization outside of that scope, we ask contributors to consider these questions when deciding where a fortune should go.
- Does this fortune's topic matter belong in the file you found it in?
- Does this fortune not belong anywhere, or does it seem to belong in multiple places? If this is the case, it is probably better to leave it where you found it or seek confirmation of its placement in your pull request.
- Does this fortune need a content warning? If it does, we ask you to review the "Tricky Topics" section of this document.
Revision Policy
We value the accuracy and appropriateness of each fortune. If you, as a contributor or user, spot something that appears to be a mistake, please follow our revision policy:
- Report the Issue: Submit a issue highlighting the specific fortune in question, its current content, and the perceived mistake. You might also consider submitting a PR directly, but try to avoid doing so for potentially contentious edits.
- Collaborative Review: Once reported, the fortune will undergo a review by a reviewer or group of reviewers. Comments from users and contributors are welcome, as long as they remain topical. This helps ensures that the matter is assessed from multiple perspectives, as needed.
- Edit, Move, or Remove: If the reviewer(s) agree that the content is indeed a mistake, it will either be edited for clarity and correctness, moved to the appropriate place, or removed entirely, depending on the nature of the error.