From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This page includes a summary of one or more official policies on the English Wikipedia which are set out in detail elsewhere. Policies have wide acceptance among editors and are considered standards that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision is consistent with the underlying policies. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
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See Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines for a general overview of what policies are about, how they are made, and why we have them. You can also access all policies, without descriptions, at Category:Wikipedia official policy.
Every current policy falls into one of the following five categories:
- Behavioral: standards for behavior on Wikipedia to make it a pleasant experience for everyone.
- Content and Style: which topics are welcome on Wikipedia and give quality and naming standards.
- Deletion: the fraught area of deleting articles that are considered undesirable.
- Enforcement: what action authorised users can take to enforce other policies.
- Legal and copyright: law-based rules about what material may be used here, and remedies for misuse.
[edit] Policies
[edit] Behavioral
- Bots
- Programs that update pages automatically in a useful and harmless way may be welcome, if their owners seek approval first and go to great lengths to stop them from running amok or being a drain on resources.
- Civility
- Being rude, insensitive or petty makes people upset and stops Wikipedia from working well. Try to discourage others from being uncivil, and be careful to avoid offending people unintentionally. Mediation is available if needed.
- Editing policy
- Improve pages wherever you can, and don't worry about leaving them imperfect. Avoid deleting information wherever possible.
- Ignore all rules
- Every policy, guideline or any other rule may be ignored if it hinders improving Wikipedia.
- No legal threats
- Use dispute resolution rather than legal threats, for everyone's sake. We respond quickly to complaints of defamation or copyright infringement. If you do take legal action, please refrain from editing until it is resolved.
- No personal attacks
- Do not make personal attacks anywhere in Wikipedia. Comment on content, not on the contributor. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Nobody likes abuse.
- Ownership of articles
- You agreed to allow others to modify your work. So let them.
- Sock puppetry
- Do not use multiple accounts to create the illusion of greater support for an issue, to mislead others, or to circumvent a block; nor ask your friends to create accounts to support you or anyone.
- Three-revert rule
- Do not revert any single page in whole or in part more than three times in 24 hours. (Otherwise an administrator may block your account).
- Username
- Choose a neutral username that you'll be happy with. You can usually change your name if you need to by asking, but you can't delete it.
- Vandalism
- Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia. It is, and needs to be, removed from the encyclopedia.
- What Wikipedia is not
- Wikipedia would not exist without the online community that has come together to build it. However, Wikipedia is first and foremost an online encyclopedia. Please avoid the temptation to use Wikipedia for other purposes.
- Wheel War
- Do not repeat an administrative action when you know that another administrator opposes it. (Applies to sysops only)
[edit] Content and Style
- Attribution
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a publisher of original thought. The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is whether material is attributable to a reliable published source, not whether it is true.
- Biographies of living persons
- Articles about living persons, which require a degree of sensitivity, must adhere strictly to Wikipedia's content policies. Be very firm about high-quality references, particularly about details of personal lives. Unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should be removed immediately from both the article and the talk page.
- Naming conventions
- Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers worldwide would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.
- Neutral point of view
- Articles, including reader-facing templates, categories and portals, should be written from a Neutral Point of View.
- Neutral point of view FAQ
- This gives an objection-rebuttal style explanation of NPOV, and was split off from the main page (listed above this).
- No original research
- Articles may not contain any unpublished theories, data, statements, concepts, arguments, or ideas; or any new interpretation, analysis, or synthesis of published data, statements, concepts, arguments, or ideas that, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales, would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation."
- Verifiability
- We cannot check the accuracy of claims, but we can check whether the claims have been published by a reputable publication. Articles should therefore cite sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
- What Wikipedia is not
- Every day thousands of Wikipedia articles are edited, and every day millions of people search and read Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is first and foremost an online encyclopedia. Please avoid the temptation to use Wikipedia for other purposes.
- Wikipedia is not a dictionary
- An article should begin with a good definition or a clear description of the topic. Articles that are just dictionary entries belong at Wiktionary.
[edit] Deletion
- Category deletion policy
- Deleting categories follows roughly the same process as articles, except that it's on a different page. Categories that don't conform to naming conventions can be "speedily renamed".
- Criteria for speedy deletion
- Articles, images, categories etc. may be "speedily deleted" if they clearly fall within certain categories, which generally boil down to pages lacking content, or disruptive pages. Anything potentially controversial should go through the deletion process instead.
- Deletion policy
- Deleting articles requires an administrator and generally follows a consensus-forming process. Most potentially controversial articles require a three-step process and a waiting period of a week.
- Office actions
- The Wikimedia Foundation office reserves the right to speedily delete an article temporarily in cases of exceptional controversy.
- Oversight
- Page revisions can be deleted for legal reasons.
- Proposed deletion
- As a shortcut around AfD for uncontroversial deletions, an article can be proposed for deletion, though once only. If no one contests the proposal within five days, the article may be deleted by an administrator.
- Undeletion policy
- Deleted articles can be undeleted by any administrator. If this is controversial (or if a non-admin wishes something undeleted) this is discussed at Deletion review. Images deleted after June 2006 can also be undeleted.
[edit] Enforcing policies
- Appealing a block
- Rules for having a block lifted.
- Arbitration Committee
- The Arbitration Committee exists to impose binding solutions to Wikipedia disputes. It is a last resort to be turned to when all else has failed.
- Arbitration policy
- Rules for how Arbitrators decide cases.
- Banning policy
- Extremely disruptive users may be banned from Wikipedia. Please respect these bans, don't bait banned users and don't help them out. Bans can be appealed to Jimbo Wales or the Arbitration Committee, depending on the nature of the ban.
- Blocking policy
- Disruptive users can be blocked from editing for short or long amounts of time.
- Consensus
- Most editing decisions are made by a continually evolving rough consensus among editors.
- No open proxies
- All public proxy servers which could be used by anyone to hide their true IP address are not allowed to edit Wikipedia, and will be permanently blocked from editing upon discovery. (There are no restrictions on reading Wikipedia from public proxy servers).
- Protection policy
- Pages can be protected against vandals or during fierce content disputes. Protected pages can, but in general shouldn't, be edited by administrators. Also, pages undergoing frequent vandalism can be semi-protected to block edits by very new or unregistered users.
- Resolving disputes
- The first step to resolving any dispute is to talk to those who disagree with you. If that fails, there are more structured forms of discussion available.
- Usurpation
- Under some circumstances, unused usernames might be renamed to a new name in order to permit another user to register the unused username.
[edit] Legal and copyright
- Copyrights
- Material which infringes other copyrights must not be added. The legalities of copyright and "fair use" are quite complex.
- Copyright violations
- Wikipedia has no tolerance for copyright violations in our encyclopedia, and we actively strive to find and remove any that we find.
- Fair use criteria
- The cases in which you can declare an image "fair use" are quite narrow. You must specify the exact use of the image, and only use the image in that one context.
- Image use policy
- Generally avoid uploading nonfree images; fully describe images' sources and copyright details on their description pages, and try and make images as useful and reusable as possible.
- Libel
- It is Wikipedia policy to delete libellous revisions from the page history. If you believe you have been defamed, please contact us.
- Reusing Wikipedia content
- Wikipedia material may be freely used under the GFDL, which means you must credit authors, relicense the material under GFDL and allow free access to it.
- Text of the GNU Free Documentation License
- This is the license under which all contributions to Wikipedia are released. Any re-use of the work must also be released under GFDL.
[edit] See also
