Founding principles
The Wikimedia projects as a community have certain founding principles. These principles may evolve or be refined over time, but they are considered ideals essential to the founding of the Wikimedia projects – not to be confused with the Wikimedia Foundation (which also arose from the Wikimedia projects). People who strongly disagree with them are nonetheless expected to respect them while collaborating on the site, or (if unable or unwilling) have sometimes ended up leaving the project.
These principles include:
- Neutral point of view (NPOV) as a guiding editorial principle.
- The ability of anyone to edit (most) articles without registration.
- The "wiki process" and discussion with other editors as the final decision-making mechanism by consensus for all content.
- The creation of a welcoming and collegial editorial environment.
- Free licensing of content; in practice defined by each project as public domain, GFDL, CC-BY-SA or CC-BY.
- Maintaining room for fiat to help resolve particularly difficult problems. On the English Wikipedia, an Arbitration Committee has the authority to make certain binding, final decisions such as banning an editor. Other wikis have set up similar frameworks.
Over time a very few additional principles have acquired a similar standing:
- With the exception of content actually illegal under the laws of the United States, Wikimedia's educational content is managed by the community; it is not otherwise censored due to objectionability or pressure from external groups or individuals, whether related to a category of content as a whole or to specific matters.[1]
- Privacy of individual editors' non-public information is to be preserved where possible, with very limited exceptions.[2]
A few founding principles exist on some projects but not universally:
- On Wikipedias, Wikisources, Wikiquotes, and Wiktionaries, verifiability is a founding principle. On some projects such as Wikinews original reporting may be communally endorsed.
- On most current wikis, selectivity of content is a founding principle.[3] However it would not be inconsistent in future for certain non-selective content such as large public archives to also be hosted.
- Content related to living people has more stringent standards than most to better protect the subjects from risk of harm due to inappropriate quality or coverage.
A number of other principles are widely held but derive from these, such as the expectation that contentious material will be cited to a source (to ensure verifiability), or that personal attacks and legal threats are unacceptable (they disrupt the collegial environment).
See also
Notes
- ↑ Although in some areas a high degree of salience may be required and material of low educational value may be removed. Also non-educational pages such as user and community pages usually have different and tighter criteria for acceptable content case-by-case as their purpose is to facilitate an editing community.
- ↑ The most common exceptions are self-disclosure, prevention or mitigation of abuse, and where the material is too old or too well established to be removed without causing the reverse of the intended effect.
- ↑ On English Wikipedia the principle is sometimes described as "not an indiscriminate collection of information". other projects have their own standards for the kinds of material that should and should not be included.