Guidelines for Community Participation

Keeping any Wiki community focused and productively engaged requires all of us to follow some simple rules of etiquette, rules that apply to how we participate in discussions and edit each others' pages.

Those rules include:

• Not posting off-topic content or links.
• Not deleting the work of others without community discussion.
• Not getting too "personal" towards other contributors in your comments, or using profanity.
• Not misrepresenting your own identity or other information in your profile.
• Not engaging in "Wiki wars" where two parties reverse each others' edits without striving for a neutral point of view or creating separate pages.

The Community Facilitator reserves the right to take steps (such as removing the ability for someone to edit pages, and not re-approving them if they ask for those permissions again) to ensure a productive process. The Facilitator is expected to be transparent in their actions to the community, and work with the community to evolve these guidelines.

While there is much that could be written as to how a community might moderate itself, the most important guideline for any participant is still the Golden Rule: treat others the same way you yourself would like to be treated. Suggestions for more guidelines? Perhaps more cribbed from the Wikipedia "Etiquette" page?

The Wikipedia has its "Five Pillars" of its community. It may be worthwhile to adopt something similar here.