The Lord of the Rings Gollum Wiki:Policies and guidelines

Policies and guidelines document good practice on the as established by consensus. The degree of enforcement should be handled on a case-by-case basis, as not all conventions described here work in every situation. Rather, these pages exist to help keep contributors up to speed on all previously made community decisions, ensuring consistency and cohesiveness across the site. Policies also exist to help guide dispute resolution and administrative action to maintain a constructive, collaborative environment on the site.

Generally, policies govern the inclusion or exclusion of content on the site, whereas guidelines govern the presentation of such content. Policies are usually intentionally broad, presenting an ideal to aim for and the steps to get there. Guidelines are generally less strict than policies in enforcement, but more specific in purview.

Consensus
Consensus occurs when editors reach an agreement through discussion, upon which decisive action is taken. It is not achieved via popular vote, nor does it require unanimous agreement. Rather, it is established by the cogency of the prevailing arguments, and is formally established by edits ensuant on concession and good faith.

The ability to decide when consensus has been reached without depending upon a democratic system resides within the relevant parties' ability to compromise, remain civil, and remember that editing a wiki is not about winning. When this fails, the result is no consensus and the status quo is maintained. Otherwise, all parties are expected to make adequate efforts to put forth and respond to all good faith attempts at objective arguments.

Contributors who deliberately disregard this standard, make no good faith attempts at engaging in conversation and participating in decision-making, or engage in status quo stonewalling may be excluded from the consensus-building process by being assumed to concede to the prevailing argument.

After consensus is reached, it should be documented and enforced as necessary. Thorough but concise accounts of important decisions should be documented in a policy, guideline, or on the bulletin board. The conversation that led to the consensus should remain in-tact on the community forums if possible.

In general, the site and its content is governed by common sense. The is not a bureaucracy with legislative processes or judicial functions. For this reason, many "rules" remain intentionally unwritten—but that is not approval for clearly wrong but unspecified behavior. It is up to all editors to ensure that first and foremost they work harmoniously with others in the community.

Content policies
Content policies concern the content within the mainspace (articles) of the wiki.


 * Project:Verifiability — Content should be verifiable against reliable sources, preferably using citations to support contentious or extraordinary claims.
 * Project:Notability — Topics must be important, unique, or independently viable to have dedicated articles. Information within articles should be relevant to the average user.
 * Project:About &sect; Scope — The does not devote coverage to everything conceivably related to the . Included topics must help meet the wiki's goals.
 * Project:About &sect; What the is not...

Procedural policies
Procedural policies concern how users behave on and interact with the wiki.


 * Project:Administrators — Policies concerning the role and standards expected of administrators, as well as the procedures concerning their promotion and demotion.
 * Project:Moderation — Policies concerning administrative use of sysop and content moderator access levels (namely deletion, reverting, blocking, and page protection).
 * Project:User policy — Among other etiquette, don't be a dick, and there are some restrictions on user pages.

Guidelines

 * Project:Manual of Style — Governs the style standards within articles. Its primary goal is to maintain stylistic consistency across articles.
 * Project:File use — Concerns the uploading, organization, and use of files on the wiki. Sections "Before uploading files" and "Uploading files" are considered content policies rather than guidelines.
 * Category:Template documentation — All templates have individualized guidelines concerning their use, and should be treated as reflections of (and written according to) consensus.

Ignore all rules
If a "rule" prevents you from improving the —ignore it.