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This page includes a summary of official policies on the English Misplaced Pages 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.
Administrators, like all users, are not perfect beings. However, in general, they are expected to act as role models within the community, and a good general standard of civility, fairness, and general conduct both to users and in content matters, is expected. When acting as administrators, they are also expected to be fair, exercise good judgment, and give explanations and be communicative as necessary.
Programs that update pages automatically in a useful and harmless way may be welcome, as long as their owners seek approval first and are careful to keep them from running amok or being a drain on resources.
Being rude, insensitive or petty makes people upset and stops Misplaced Pages from working well. Try to discourage others from being uncivil, and be careful to avoid offending people unintentionally. Mediation is available if needed.
If someone challenges your edits, discuss it with them and seek a compromise, or seek dispute resolution. Don't just fight over competing views and versions.
Users in good standing whose editing is disrupted by unrelated blocks or firewalls may request IP block exemption, which allows editing on an otherwise-blocked IP address.
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.
Do not make personal attacks anywhere in Misplaced Pages. Comment on content, not on the contributor. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Nobody likes abuse.
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.
Do not revert any single page in whole or in part more than three times in 24 hours. (Otherwise an administrator mayblock your account). For exceptions, see WP:3RR#Exceptions.
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.
A Misplaced Pages article, page, category, redirect or image created for the sole purpose of disparaging its subject is an attack page. These pages are subject to being deleted by any administrator at any time.
Articles about living persons, which require a degree of sensitivity, must adhere strictly to Misplaced Pages's content policies. Be very firm about high-quality references, particularly about details of personal lives. "Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material — whether negative, positive, or just questionable — about living persons should be removed immediately and without discussion from Misplaced Pages articles, talk pages, user pages, and project space."
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.
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 Misplaced Pages's co-founder Jimbo Wales, would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation."
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.
Deleting categories follows roughly the same process as articles, except that it is described on a different page. Categories that don't conform to naming conventions can be "speedily renamed".
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.
Deleting articles requires an administrator and generally follows a consensus-forming process. Most potentially controversial deletions require a three-step process and a waiting period of a week.
As a shortcut around the Articles for Deletion ("AfD") process, for uncontroversial deletions an article can be proposed for deletion, though once only. If no one contests the proposed deletion within five days, the article may be deleted by an administrator.
Extremely disruptive users may be banned from Misplaced Pages. 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.
A steward may block an IP address or IP address range from editing all WMF projects to prevent cross-wiki disruption or to enforce the prohibition against editing from open proxies. Globally blocked users may be unblocked locally, at the discretion of an Administrator.
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.
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.
CheckUser is a tool allowed to be used by a small number of users who are permitted to examine user IP information and other server log data under certain circumstances, for the purposes of protecting Misplaced Pages against actual and potential disruption and abuse.
Generally avoid uploading nonfree images; fully describe images' sources and copyright details on their description pages, and try to make images as useful and reusable as possible.
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.
Misplaced Pages 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.
