THIS IS AN OFFICIAL POLICY. PLEASE DISCUSS CHANGES ON THE TALK PAGE. UNAUTHORIZED CHANGING OF THESE RULES IS PROHIBITED.
To be considered high-quality, WNRs must have at least one high-quality image, an infobox, and basic information about the operating system in the body of the article. Examples of basic information include the release date as well as new features and purpose if applicable. OS series pages (ie. Windows 7x, LavaOS) are not included.
WNRs failing the requirements may be deleted. Additionally, dates must comply with the Manual of Style.
Image requirements
An image will be considered low-quality if it meets any of the following criteria:
- Grainy image quality (the whole image or parts of it)
- Misplaced elements
- Poor composition
- Hand-drawn elements
- Bootscreen/desktop could not be plausibly used for the given mockup (say, if someone were to use a Windows 7 bootscreen for a future mockup or something). This is quite subjective and one should only delete under this criteria if no reasonable person would disagree with the assessment.
Pages that contain only a simple logo consisting only of geometric shapes and/or text shall be deleted. This will not apply to editions of operating systems. Exceptions may be granted if the page's concept is well fleshed-out in the body. Complex logos must also be plausible; do not create a complex logo if it would not make sense to do so.
Originality requirements
Mockups must demonstrate that they are substantially different from the previous operating system. See Windows 98 Second Edition. If there is more than one operating system in the series, then the series will be evaluated starting from the first operating system; in other words; OS 2 will be compared to OS 1, OS 3 will be compared to OS 2, and so on.
Alternatively, they must show a clear purpose; for example, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition was intended for x86-64 PCs.
Low-quality content indistinguishable from the original operating system, including most "remastered" operating systems, will be deleted.
LLM-generated text
AI-generated content is allowed, provided it is indistinguishable from human-written content. In other words, it's fine if we can't tell just by reading it. It should not violate any copyrights either.
Gaming
Gaming the system (i.e. creating an special infobox just for one page, filling in only one field of the infobox, uploading a low-effort bootscreen or desktop to game the image requirement, etc.) does not work, and your WNR will be deleted.
Stubs
Stubs are pages without a concept paragraph (or something similar) and are tagged with the {{Stub}} template. A list of stubs can be found at Category:Article stubs. Please help to expand them.
Joke WNRs
Joke WNRs are WNRs created with humorous intent. They must still follow the quality requirements unless the low quality of the mockup is the punchline. Note that such humorous low-quality mockups must be funny, and if the joke mockup is not funny, it will still be deleted.