Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines
Contents |
This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia's policies and guidelines are pages that serve to document the good practices that are accepted in the Wikipedia community. This policy describes how WP policies and guidelines should normally be developed and maintained.
Wikipedia policy
Principles
Five pillars
What Wikipedia is not
Ignore all rules
Content standards
Neutral point of view
Verifiability
No original research
Biographies of living persons
Article titles
Working with others
Civility
No personal attacks
Harassment
No legal threats
Consensus
Dispute resolution
More
List of policies
List of guidelines
Wikipedia policies and guidelines are developed by the community to describe best practice, clarify principles, resolve conflicts, and otherwise further our goal of creating a free, reliable encyclopedia. There is no need to read any policy or guideline pages before starting editing, although it is worth reading the Five pillars page, which contains a summary of the most pertinent principles.
Although Wikipedia does not employ hard-and-fast rules, its policy and guideline pages describe its principles and best-known practices. Policies describe standards that (within the limits of common sense) all users should normally follow, and guidelines are meant to contain best practices for doing so.
This policy page specifies the community standards related to the organization, life cycle, maintenance of, and adherence to policies and guidelines, and related pages.
Derivation
Wikipedia is operated by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which reserves certain legal rights (see here for a list of its policies). See also Role of Jimmy Wales. Nevertheless, in normal working order, Wikipedia is a self-governing project run by its community. Its policies and guidelines are intended to reflect the consensus of the community.
The page Wikipedia:Five pillars summarizes the most important principles on which many policies and guidelines are based. (Other similar pages include Jimbo Wales' statement of principles and the Founding principles for Wikimedia projects.)
Role
WP:POLICIES
Policies have wide acceptance among editors and describe standards that all users should normally follow. They are often closely related to the five pillars of Wikipedia. All policy pages are in Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines and Category:Wikipedia policy. For summaries of key policies, see also List of policies.
WP:GUIDES
Guidelines are sets of best practices that are supported by consensus. Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Guideline pages can be found in Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines and Category:Wikipedia guidelines. For summaries of key guidelines, see also List of guidelines.
WP:ESSAYS
Essays are the opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors, for which widespread consensus has not been established. They do not speak for the entire community and may be created and written without approval. Untagged pages in the Wikipedia namespace are assumed to be essays. Essays that the author does not want others to edit, or that are found to contradict widespread consensus, belong in the user namespace. See Category:Wikipedia essays.
Other pages that can be found in the Wikipedia: namespace include community process pages (which facilitate application of the policies and guidelines), historical pages, WikiProject pages, how-to or help pages (also found in the Help namespace), community discussion pages and noticeboards. These pages are not policies or guidelines, although they may contain valuable advice or information.
Adherence
Use common sense when interpreting and applying policies and guidelines; there will be occasional exceptions to these rules. Conversely, those who violate the spirit of a rule may be reprimanded even if no rule has technically been broken.
Whether a policy or guideline is an accurate description of best practice is determined by the community through consensus.
On discussion pages and in edit summaries, shortcuts are often used to refer to policies and guidelines. For example, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, and WP:LIVE. Similar shortcuts are sometimes also used for other types of project page. A shortcut does not necessarily imply that the page linked to has policy or guideline status. Additionally, remember that the shortcut is not the policy; the plain-English definition of the page's title or shortcut may be importantly different from the linked page.
Enforcement
Enforcement on Wikipedia is similar to other social interactions. If an editor violates the community standards described in policies and guidelines, other editors can persuade the person to adhere to acceptable norms of conduct, over time resorting to more forceful means, such as administrator and steward actions. In the case of gross violations of community norms, they are likely to resort to more forceful means fairly rapidly. Going against the principles set out on these pages, particularly policy pages, is unlikely to prove acceptable, although it may be possible to convince fellow editors that an exception ought to be made. This means that individual editors (including you) enforce and apply policies and guidelines.
In cases where it is clear that a user is acting against policy (or against a guideline in a way that conflicts with policy), especially if they are doing so intentionally and persistently, that user may be temporarily or indefinitely blocked from editing by an administrator. In cases where the general dispute resolution procedure has been ineffective, the Arbitration Committee has the power to deal with highly disruptive or sensitive situations.
Content
Policy and guideline pages should:
- be clear and concise. Avoid esoteric legal terms and verbose dumbed-down language. Be both plain and concise. Clarity and terseness are not in opposition: direct and brief writing is more clear. Footnotes may be used for further clarification.
- emphasize the spirit of the rule. Verbosity is not a defense against misinterpretation. Be unambiguous and specific: avoid platitudes and generalities. Don't theorize, and omit needless words, especially adjectives. If the spirit of the rule is clear, say no more.
- maintain scope, avoid redundancy. Both purpose and scope must be clearly provided in the lead, and not merely as an aside. Content should be within the scope of its policy. When the scope of one policy overlaps with the scope of another, keep redundancy to a minimum. When one policy refers to another policy, it should do so briefly, clearly and explicitly.
- avoid overlinking. Links should be used only when clarification or context is needed. Links to other policies, guidelines, or essays may inadvertently or intentionally defer authority to them. Make it clear when links defer, and when they do not.
- not contradict each other. The community's view cannot simultaneously be "A" and "not A". When apparent discrepancies arise between pages, editors at all the affected pages should discuss how they can most accurately represent the community's current position, and correct all of the pages to reflect the community's view.
Not part of the encyclopedia
Wikipedia has many policies and guidelines about encyclopedic content. These standards require verifiability, neutrality, respect for living people, and more.
The policies, guidelines, and process pages themselves are not part of the encyclopedia proper. Consequently, they do not generally need to conform with the content standards. It is therefore not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify for Wikipedia's administrative pages, or to phrase Wikipedia procedures or principles in a neutral manner, or to cite an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's editorial practices. Instead, the content of these pages is controlled by community-wide consensus, and the style should emphasize clarity, directness, and usefulness to other editors.
These pages do, however, need to comply with Wikipedia's legal and behavioral policies. For example, editors may not violate copyrights anywhere on Wikipedia, and edit warring is prohibited everywhere, not merely in encyclopedia articles.
Life cycle
WP:PGLIFE
Many of the most well-established policies and guidelines have developed from principles which have been accepted as fundamental since Wikipedia's inception. Others developed as solutions to common problems and disruptive editing. Policy and guideline pages are seldom established without precedent, and always require strong community support. Policies and guidelines may be established through new proposals, promotion of existing essays or guidelines, and reorganization of existing policies and guidelines through splitting and merging.
Essays and information pages may be established by writing them and adding {{essay}}, {{infopage}}, or similar templates to the page.
Current policy and guideline proposals can be found in Category:Wikipedia proposals, and rejected proposals can be found in Category:Wikipedia rejected proposals. All editors are welcome to comment on these proposals.
Proposals
WP:PROPOSAL
New proposals require discussion and a high level of consensus from the entire community for promotion to guideline or policy. Adding the {{policy}} template to a page without the required consensus does not mean that the page is policy, even if the page summarizes or copies policy. Most commonly, editors use a Request for comments (RfC) to determine consensus for a newly proposed policy or guideline, via the {{rfctag|policy}} tag.
Good practice for proposals
The first step is to write the best initial proposal that you can. Authors can request early-stage feedback at Wikipedia's village pump for idea incubation and from any relevant WikiProjects. Amendments to a proposal should be discussed on its talk page (not on a new page), but it is often appropriate and even necessary to improve a proposal in response to feedback received from outside editors.
Once you think that the initial proposal is well-written, start an RfC for your policy or guideline proposal in a new section on the talk page, and including the {{rfctag|policy}} tag along with a brief, time-stamped explanation of the proposal. After that, you can provide, if you want, a detailed explanation of what the page does and why you think it should be a policy or guideline. The {{proposed}} (for newly-written proposals) or {{promote}} (for promotion of essays or guidelines) templates should be placed at the top of the proposed page; these tags will get the proposal properly categorized.
The RfC should typically be announced at the policy and/or proposals village pumps, and you should notify other potentially interested groups. If your proposal affects a specific content area, then related WikiProjects can be found at the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. For example, proposed style guidelines should be announced to Wikipedia:WikiProject Manual of Style. If your proposal relates to an existing policy or guideline, leave a note on the talk page of the related policy or guideline. For example, proposed style guidelines should be announced at Wikipedia:Manual of Style. Try to identify the subcategory of guideline or policy (see {{subcat guideline}}). Proposals involving contentious subjects or wide-ranging effects should normally be listed on Wikipedia:Centralized discussions for the duration of the RfC. RfCs for policy and guideline proposals are normally left open for at least one week, and sometimes as long as a couple of months.
To avoid later complaints about insufficient notice, it may be helpful to provide a complete list of the groups or pages that you used to advertise the proposal on the talk page.
Editors should respond to proposals in a way that helps identify and build consensus. Explain your thoughts, ask questions, and raise concerns; all views are welcome. Many editors begin their response with bold-font 'vote' of support or opposition to make evaluation easier. Editors should sign their responses.
Ending a discussion requires careful evaluation of the responses to determine the consensus. This does not require the intervention of an administrator, but may be done by any sufficiently experienced independent editor (an impartial editor not involved in the discussion) who is familiar with all of the policies and guidelines that relate to the proposal. The following points are important in evaluating consensus: