DareNET Wiki:Policies and Guidelines

Revision as of 09:50, 21 February 2009

The DareNET Wiki is a collaborative editing environment for all DareNET registered users. We use the same software as Wikipedia and, in general, the same sorts of behavior that is encouraged there is encouraged here. What is frowned upon there is also frowned upon here. Unlike Wikipedia, however, we do not have an overall goal to produce an encyclopedia or anything else. This wiki exists purely for the community of DareNET users to get informed, express themselves and collaborate.

Key policies

1. DareNET Wiki is about DareNET. Articules should not be created unless they have at least a tenuous relevance to DareNET and its projects. There is more leniency for user pages, but articles should not be created in the main namespace unless they are about DareNET / IRC.
2. Don't infringe copyrights. All contributions to the site are licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, including material on user pages. Submitting work which infringes copyright could lead to legal problems.
3. Respect other contributors. This is not a soapbox for airing your personal grievances regarding other people. The purpose of this site is collaboration, not flamewars, and articles should seek to encompass all viewpoints. Disagreement with a point of view is fine but name-calling is not.

Conventions

Following these conventions will result in a site that looks consistent and is easier to use.

• Editing policy (How to edit articles)
• Naming conventions (How to title articles)
• Deletion policy (When and how to delete articles)
• Protection policy (When, why and how to protect an article)

How are policies decided?

Policy relating to this wiki is formulated, for the most part, by consensus of the Support team members. This consensus may be reached through open debate over difficult questions, or it may simply develop as a result of established practice. In many cases, policies are not always formally written down right away. Hence, the statements on this and other pages about DareNET Wiki policy are intended to describe existing community norms that have developed over time.

Policy issues may be formulated and debated on talk pages, IRC, and the forums. If a policy may be controversial, it should always be discussed before being adopted.

Policies that result from established practice are sometimes harder to identify. If there is no objection to the practice, it may be difficult to sustain community attention long enough for a formal process of adopting it as policy. In this situation, the best solution may be to document existing practice on an appropriate page. This then provides a location to discuss the practice and possible changes to the policy, and it also allows people to cite a source for the policy if necessary.

How are policies enforced?

You, as a user of this wiki, have the ability to enforce policies as agreed upon by the community. Users are encouraged to be bold in their edits and fix any problems they encounter. Most policies and guidelines are thus enforced by individual users editing pages, and discussing matters with each other. Some policies are also enforced by temporary blocks by admins, either by protecting an article from edits or by temporarily suspending editing rights for a given user. In extreme cases admins may permanently revoke a user's editing rights.

At the moment, DareNET Wiki is too new to have any sort of Arbitration committee to resolve highly disruptive situations. If needed, this is something that can come into effect later. For now, simply ccntact a sysop.

Specific guidelines to consider

In addition to the generally accepted guidelines listed above, many useful guidelines from Wikipedia and elsewhere apply here too. Yes, many of the Wikipedia policies are skewed towards their goal of producing an online encyclopedia, but use common sense to see how that applies to DareNET-related articles too.

General guidelines

• Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages
• Wikipedia:Build the web

Behaviour guidelines

• Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages
• Wikipedia:No personal attacks
• Use your user page appropriately

Style guidelines

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style
• Wikipedia:Pay attention to spelling
• Wikipedia:Always fill summary field

External Links

• Wikipedia:Polices and guidelines
• The Meta-Wikipedia site contains many articles about Wikipedia and related topics in a more editorial style. Many of these are also relevant to contributing to this wiki.