This is not the strict set of house rules. This is advice to editors. Guidelines can cover everything -- from the serious to the silly -- and most are simply common sense.
1. Learn by Doing. You don't need to know all the guidelines before you can edit. You will learn them from observing, asking, or being told by other editors.
2. Participate by collaborative editing. We are learning and refining together to improve pages. Don't worry too much if you don't understand at first. Someone will clean up after you. As time goes on, you'll learn more of the subtleties of how to be a wiki jedi!
1. Unless the page says otherwise write toward a neutral point of view. This is a fundamental principle, which allows others to participate. Don't write in the first person, or express things "in my opinion". Refactor content written by others in first person to be more universal.
2. Verifiability. We encourage editors to include information that has been published by reputable sources.
3. Contribute Original thought and research. Unlike Wikipedia, we also encourage editors to contribute original thought and research (including previously unpublished arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements, or theories). Pages may also contain new analysis or synthesis of published arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements or theories that have appeared in reputable sources. As above, editors adding original thought and research into an article should clearly document their sources and methodology, otherwise it may be removed by any editor.
4. Cite your sources by linking In the case of both published and unpublished thought and/or research, the obligation to document your sources and research methodology is on editors wishing to include information, not on those seeking to remove it.
The intent of these guidelines is to provide a safe set of rules of thumb. Follow these behaviours, and you'll likely not get into trouble, and will also do fairly well at requests for adminship, over time.
1. Be bold! in updating pages. Go ahead, it's a wiki!
2. Encourage others, including those who disagree with you, likewise to be bold.!
3. Be civil to other users at all times.
4. Ignore all guidelines - if the guidelines discourage you from editing ignore them, your participation is what is most important.
5. Create talk pages. If you want to discuss changes that are happening on a page
To create a talk page: just link to [Talk:Page Name] where "page name" is the page you want to talk about.
6. Use the talk page to provide edit comments. Edit comments are short explanations of what you changed and why.
7. 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 the wiki chapter. Even if you're convinced that they're Evil reptilian kitten eaters from another planet, still pretend they're acting in good faith. 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).
8. Particularly, don't revert good faith edits. A Revert is a little too powerful sometimes, and it may chase other editors away permanently.
9. 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.
Page Last Updated: May 7 7:30am by Wikinomics Staff