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Monstropedia's Editorial Policy

Monstropedia:Editorial Policy

Monstropedia is a collaborative Wiki project with a central purpose:

To create the best and most comprehensive source of knowledge relating to monsters.

Monstropedia is an open source project. Contributors retain copyright ownership of their work, but by adding it to Monstropedia the work becomes "open source."

This leads to the Prime Directives:

Prime Directive 1: Only post material that you own, that is in the public domain, or that is used within the framework of fair use and properly cited.

Prime Directive 2: On Monstropedia, everyone has the right to edit your entries.

Because of the volatile nature of some people, we have instituted:

Prime Directive 3: Content wars are completely forbidden.

Entering into a content war is a fast way to getting banned from contributing to Monstropedia. This is an encyclopedia, not a platform for individual agendas. If a serious disagreement about content occurs, you may make a Mediation request.

Monstropedia is edited by the community. This means that issues such as factual accuracy, content, grammar, spelling, formatting, and completeness are left to the members to monitor and correct.


Primary Editorial Principles

Whenever editorial decisions have to be made on Monstropedia, they will be based on the following primary principles:

  1. Articles should promote clarity, accuracy, and the will to inform without distortion or fabrication.
  2. Articles should reflect knowledge that is drawn from expert sources or common knowledge.


Official Editorial Policies

The following items are official Monstropedia policy.

Content

  1. Monstropedia is an encyclopedia. That is the extent of its scope. It is not a soapbox, journal, dictionary, discussion forum, site mirror, or link repository. See What Monstropedia is not for more information.
  2. Articles should be reflections of existing knowledge. That is the nature of an encyclopedia. As such, entries should be based either on material written by acknowledged experts (preferrably in print, but on the Web can be acceptable) or a part of accepted common knowledge. While excellent articles will contain some analysis of data, generally speaking, articles should NOT advocate personal beliefs or report on subjective experience.
  3. Articles must be written in the third person. No article should contain phrases like, "I believe..." or "I have found that...". Think of them as short high school research papers.
  4. Avoid profanity. This is not so much about offending others as it is about content. Profanity tends to be an expression of personal opinion, rather than fact or general consensus.
  5. Make omissions explicit. While articles should be written as completely as possible, if something is left out, it should be stated. Two suggestions: leave an HTML "comment" (<!--your comment-->) in the page or make a note on the discussion page for that entry.


Behavior

  1. Respect others. This is not a platform for attacking people, tarnishing reputations, or insulting groups, religions, or ideas that do not conform to your own. This principle is vigorously enforced. Persistent attacks will result in a ban.
  2. Learn good etiquette. For a complete discussion, we strongly recommend reading the wiki etiquettepage. Those who are persistantly aggressive, abusive, insulting, uncooperative with fellow editors, or create a negative or hostile environment will eventually be banned.
  3. Avoid reverting and deleting. Amend, edit, and discuss. Repeated instances of reverting can lead to disciplinary action.

Do not sign your articles. But DO sign your posts on discussion pages by typing three or four tildes ~~~~.

  1. Create Stubs responsibly. A stub is a new entry that has very little by way of content. Please make stubs only when there is a good reason, such as a topic that you feel strongly should exist, but you are not prepared to write yourself. When you do, be sure to write {{stub}} at the top of the edit box.
  2. Try not to delete useful content. Just because something is written poorly doesn't mean it lacks a purpose. Consider what a sentence or paragraph tries to say. Clarify it instead of throwing it away. If the topic seems not to belong where it stands, consider moving the wayward material to another page, or creating a new page; otherwise, it's usually best to move it to the article's "Talk" page, which can be accessed using the "Discuss this page" button. Whoever wrote the text must have thought it valuable, so it's polite to preserve it somewhere.


Guardians

Although Monstropedia is largely maintained by its editor membership, there are those who are responsible for the general integrity of the site as a whole. Such members are called Guardians. Editorially, they have no more authority than any other site member, and are equally bound to Monstropedia editorial policies. At the same time, they do have special security privileges which they use to enforce policy when necessary. For example, they have the ability to protect and delete pages, block and ban users, and delete obvious vandalism. More than that, they are available for dispute mediation and as a source of assistance, essentially providing guidance and leadership within the Monstropedia community.

See the Guardians page for information on duties and privileges. Any editor may apply to become a Guardian.

Guardians reserve the right to:

  1. Accept new memberships, deny new memberships, ban users, and delete accounts without explanation. Banning and eliminating accounts are done only as a last resort.
  2. Protect articles from changes.
  3. Control all aspects of the functionality of Monstropedia, including (but not limited to) navigation, the categorization system, and namespaces.
  4. Rule on editorial content requirements that are global.
  5. Change, eliminate, or add to existing Monstropedia policies.