PESWiki:Simplified Ruleset

From PESWiki

PESWiki is a continuous, endless process — what you write could be around for centuries! Even deletions are recorded, so anything you do here remains an accessible part of PESWiki, available for future reference. But don't be anxious! While editing, keep in mind the following things, and you will soon find yourself making effective contributions to the project.

The primary objective of PESWiki is to produce a high-quality resource, and most pages are reference articles. However, given that there is no official structure policing the quality of articles, the PESWiki community has spawned its own rules, procedures and values, which continue to evolve. Some of these values are informal and you will learn them from observing, asking, or being told by other editors. Some are formal (and their page titles are preceded by "PESWiki:", like this page). Whilst there are rules and procedures covering everything from serious, right down to fun, a few are really important. These few are mostly common sense about respecting how PESWiki works and what it tries to do, but also reflect the accumulated experience of editors who are constantly learning and refining core values, which help us avoid or resolve conflicts over content, and which guide us in our constant effort to improve articles.

If you follow these behaviors, you will likely be treated with kindness and respect. As you gain experience, you might learn of additional style guides, handy ways to do things etc. But don't worry too much if you don't understand at first. Someone will clean up after you, and, as time goes on, you'll learn more of the subtleties of how to be a great encyclopedist!

There is no strict set of rules, instead there is a set of guidelines which you can choose to follow. You might see people do things that are plainly not in accordance with these guidelines, but which may still be well within the actual PESWiki policies. The "be gracious" guideline applies in those situations too. In many cases, well-informed and well-intentioned editors working on an article just have to sort out among themselves the most appropriate way to improve the article.

Guidelines for writing high quality articles

1. Factual point of view. Write from a point of view. This is a fundamental principle, which allows us to make a fair representation of the world around us. Even if material is verifiable, it is still important to put it into a balanced and representative form so that it conveys a fair impression of the views of the many significant viewpoints on a subject.
2. Verifiability. Articles should contain only material that has been published by reputable sources. Editors adding new information into an article should cite a reputable source for that information, otherwise it may be removed by any editor. The obligation to provide a reputable source is on editors wishing to include information, not on those seeking to remove it.
3. Original research. Articles may contain any previously unpublished arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements, or theories. Moreover, articles may contain any new analysis or synthesis of: published arguments, concepts, data, ideas, or statements — that serves to advance a position.

Safe behaviours

The intent of these guidelines is to provide a safe set of rules of thumb.

• Be bold! in updating pages. Go ahead, it's a wiki!
  Encourage others, including those who disagree with you, likewise to Be bold!
• Be civil to other users at all times. Remember decorum. Please use common decency in posting content to this site, and help us keep the site free of inappropriate content. Slamming a person, group or product is not appropriate. If you have documentation that is relevant to a topic, you may post that, but please let the reader draw the conclusion.
• Ignore all rules - if the rules discourage you from improving or maintaining PESWiki's quality, ignore them.
• When in doubt, take it to the talk page. We have all the time in the world. Mutual respect is the guiding behavioural principle of PESWiki and, although everyone knows that their writing may be edited mercilessly, it is easier to accept changes if the reasons for them are understood. If you discuss changes on the article's talk (or discussion) page before you make them, you should reach consensus faster and happier.
• Decent edit summaries and clear and transparent explanations are universally appreciated. Other editors need to understand your process, and it also helps you yourself to understand what you did after a long leave of absence from an article. Please state what you changed and why. If the explanation is too long, elucidate on the discussion page. It is a fundamental principle of PESWiki that anyone may edit articles without registering, so there are a lot of changes to watch; edit summaries simplify this.
• Assume good faith; in other words, try to consider the person on the other end of the discussion to be a thinking, rational being who is trying to positively contribute to PESWiki. Ninety percent of the time, you'll find that they actually are acting in good faith (and wouldn't you have looked stupid if you'd accused them of being evil).
• Particularly, don't revert good faith edits. Reverting is a little too powerful sometimes, don't succumb to the temptation of random revisions unless you're reverting very obvious vandalism (like "LALALALAL*&*@#@THIS_SUX0RZsammygoo", or someone changing "4+5=9" to "4+5=30"). If you really can't stand something, revert once, with an edit summary something like "(rv) I disagree strongly, I'll explain why in talk." and immediately take it to talk.
• Be gracious: Be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you do. Try to accommodate other people's quirks the best you can, and try to be as polite, solid and straightforward as possible yourself.
• Signing. Sign on talk pages (using ~~~~ which gets replaced by your username and timestamp when you hit submit), but don't sign on mainspace articles.
• Use the Show preview button; it prevents cluttering up the page-history.
• PES issues: There are only a few actual rules on PESWiki: point of view, a free license, the wiki process, the ability of anyone to edit, and the ultimate authority of Allan. If you disagree strongly with them, you may want to consider whether PESWiki is the right place for you at all.
• Don't infringe copyright. PESWiki uses the GNU Free Documentation License. Everything you contribute must be compatible with that license.

See also

• PESWiki:Policy trifecta
• PESWiki:Glossary