Project:Content policy

In accordance with the project's scope, the following policy lays out what types of content should be included and how such content should be presented.

Language

For the purposes of upholding project policies all content written or displayed on this project, anywhere on this project, must be in English.

Neutrality

All content must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing information included on the wiki fairly and without bias.

This project aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them. The aim is to inform, not influence. Editors, while naturally having their own points of view, should strive in good faith to provide complete information and not to promote one particular point of view over another. As such, the neutral point of view does not mean the exclusion of certain points of view. It means including all points of view. Observe the following principles to achieve the level of neutrality that is appropriate.

• Avoid stating opinions as facts. Rather, they should be attributed in the text to particular sources, or where justified, described as widespread views, etc. For example, an article should not state that "genocide is an evil action" but may state that "genocide has been described by John So-and-so as the epitome of human evil."
• Avoid stating seriously contested assertions as facts. If different sources make conflicting assertions about a matter, treat these assertions as opinions rather than facts, and do not present them as direct statements.
• Avoid stating facts as opinions. Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by sources should normally be directly stated in the project's voice.
• Prefer nonjudgmental language. A neutral point of view neither sympathizes with nor disparages its subject (or what reliable sources say about the subject), although this must sometimes be balanced against clarity. Present opinions and conflicting findings in a disinterested tone. Do not editorialize.
• Indicate the relative prominence of opposing views. When writing material, ensure that when discussing events or behaviors that the relevant support for each position is properly attributed. For example, a statement such as "Multiple members commented that the behavior from Admin JDoe57 were inappropriate, with BillyB43 commenting that their behavior was a good change of pace" would be inappropriate. It insinuates that BillyB43's view on the matter was within an equivalent scope to that of a large portion of members, which is not accurate.

Preserving community informational security

Access to information varies based on both the community's genre and on the position a person has in it. For example, a competitive community may restrict access to tactics and training to only those in specific teams, or a roleplay community may restrict access to a group's goals to only those within said group for an event.

Online Communipedia finds the dissemination of information that is private unethical. To this end, no information from a community may added to an article unless it is accessible to an individual with general membership in the relevant community. If such information is discovered or reported, administrators shall perform revision deletion.

Conversely, community leaders may not petition Online Communipedia to remove information simply because they do not wish the information to be displayed. Community leaders are similarly not able to circumvent this policy by retroactively concealing information that was once available to the general member base. If it was ever available to the member base, it may remain, even if the release of the information was unauthorized or unintended.

General membership

"General membership" is defined based on how one participates in the community.

1. If participation lacks a barrier (e.g a public Minecraft server), then general membership would be whatever a member of a forum (or any other communications platform) that is newly registered could see.
2. If participation requires a manual review of some kind (e.g an application process), then general membership would be what a member newly accepted into the community could see.

Any information that requires being appointed to a named position (e.g "moderator", "manager", "police officer") can safely be assumed to be protected by this policy.

This will not always be a simple determination. Administrators are encouraged to be liberal in the enforcement of this policy if it is borderline.

Private communities

Communities that have an explicit statement that indicates they are private or exclusive, and of which all or a vast majority of their material/communications are not available for public view, are classified as private communities to Online Communipedia. Note that this does not apply to communities wherein access to material is granted automatically upon some kind of registration or upon acceptance of an invitation (e.g Discord).

Communities classified as private may not have articles created about them. Optionally, editors may reserve the name of the community by physically creating the page and invoking Template:Private community declaration. At the discretion of uninvolved administrators, particular details discussed in other venues (such as talk pages or articles of peripherally related communities) regarding such a community may be subject to revision deletion, if deemed especially sensitive or harmful.

Verifiability

Facts must have a source that sufficiently prove it's accuracy. The singular exception would be content which to any reasonable person would be equivalently as obvious as the sky being blue. For example, it is unnecessary to provide sourcing to support a community's name - that tends to be predominantly displayed on the relevant community's communications platforms, websites, and the works. Any statement of fact made within an article (aside from necessary synthesis, see below) that is unsourced may be removed and may not be reintroduced until a source is provided for it.

Sourcing

A source is material which information comes from, and with few exceptions anything can be a source. Sources should be used that are reliable for the information they are supporting. For example, a fact such as "John Doe, the previous owner of Community X, was forcefully removed due to being arrested in real life" would necessitate a statement from a real world news article speaking of the arrest. A random person making mention of it off hand is insufficient, though if that is the only source, this project should present it in the voice of said person.

All sources should be capable of being independently checked by another editor. If a source is exclusively available to only a select group of people within a community (and was not in the past more widely available), the source may not be used, and any information derived from it may be in violation of our policy on maintaining community informational security. An exception would be sourcing uploaded to Online Communipedia, such as a screenshot of a communications platform, that is later deleted or deprecated. That would be handled by our policy on challenging the authenticity of a file's review.

Presumption of staff integrity

Statements from a staff member on the community's own activities or structure is presumed to be accurate for the purposes of sourcing. Statements made from former staff members are not covered by this presumption, as it is likely their access to information has been closed and is outdated, though they are still reliable for past events.

This presumption is severed on a statement-by-statement basis if...

• Written material (e.g rules, internal documents) contradicts them.
  • In this case, the written material is to be utilized.
• Any other staff member contradicts them.
  • In this case, whichever staff member of the highest relevant "rank" or "tier" is to be utilized.
  • If a current staff member contradicts a statement made in the past by a former staff member, the current staff member is to be utilized.
  • If there is no clear hierarchy among the active contradictory staff members, and there is no written material discussing the subject, Online Communipedia should document the contradiction rather than make a statement 1 way or the other.

Synthesis

It is often necessary to synthesize information, or take information from multiple sources and draw a conclusion from it in the project's voice, in order to describe a community. This is most common when writing about a community's rank structure, since it is rarely spelled out. Sourcing will probably not exist that outright proves synthesis, which is acceptable; but sourcing must still be provided for the facts being used within the synthesis.

Synthesis must never be performed when writing about a community's history or when writing about particular events that happened within it. Such content must remain strictly neutral, only present what sourcing states, and only present the facts in the voice of whatever the source is.

External communication

Cases may occur where a community's leadership contacts editors of Online Communipedia, or the inverse, in order to correct inaccuracies, confirm basic facts, or confirm synthesis. In such a scenario an administrator must become involved and verify the identity of such a contact. If the administrator is satsified with their identity, they may invoke Template:External communication on an article's talk page so as to document the information received. Once invoked, the content described within the template may not be changed without the invoking administrator's input, unless there is a consensus among editors to do so or another source contradicts the information.

External communication may not be used to violate or circumvent other content policies.

Media and verifiability

It is acceptable and often necessary for media (e.g screenshots, video, PDFs) to be used as sourcing. The age of online community's having forums that are easily archived with the wayback machine has generally passed, and has been replaced with Discord servers and their equivalent. However, media is ripe for abuse with the prevelance of 3rd party editing tools.

Any media uploaded to Online Communipedia with the intent of being used as a source must be unmodified and be tagged with {{Media auth}}.

The only type of modification permitted is cropping, such as to only get a single message in a conversation, so as to avoid editors having to capture an entire window or screen for all of their media. Any other modification (e.g censoring text, names, images; changing text from what was there originally; cutting off a portion of a message) is prohibited.

Any media used as a source needs to be tagged with {{Media auth|auth=n}} so that readers can be warned to have healthy skepticism. All files with auth= set to n are placed in the maintenance category Category:Media needing authentication, which can be patrolled by administrators or established editors. Instructions for such editors on how to authenticate media is available on the template's documentation, but if a piece of media passes, the parameter can flip to y to indicate to readers that a human has reviewed the file and found it to be appropriate.

Challenging authenticity

An autoconfirmed editor may, at any time, challenge the review of a source. Once challenged, an administrator that was not the previous reviewer will perform a re-review to ensure there is no modification. If an administrator is the challenger, they may immediately perform the re-review themselves.

If a re-review is successful, it will be reported on the relevant talk page for the file, and it may not be challenged again for 6 months. If the administrator determines beyond a reasonable doubt that the source was altered in any way, it must be deleted immediately. If a re-review is wholly impossible (e.g website that is the source of a screenshot has deprecated without archival), the administrator shall be empowered to make a ruling on the matter within their best judgement. This is not the case for the file's first review, in which case if the source cannot be found the file must be deleted.

Administrators are encouraged to lean toward deletion if there are suspicious circumstances involving a particular file during a re-review.

Copyright and trademark considerations

Media uploaded as a source is still bound by our policy on the usage of copyrighted material.

Content disputes and consensus

A time may come when 2 or more editors engage in discourse over the content of an article on this project. Editors are to be aware that outside of project policies there exists no governing body (with a single exception, described below) that arbitrates content. This includes administrators. All disagreements over content, whether it be how content is displayed or what content gets to remain, must be resolved by consensus.

A dispute is considered to begin de facto once an editor A introduces a change to an article and an editor B undoes it, either via the undo button or by editing the page manually. After that, the content should not be reintroduced without discussion (unless a project policy dictates otherwise). A dispute may also begin by an editor bringing up something on the article talk page and another editor expresses disagreement. Any editor, or administrator, may assist editors engaged in a dispute by providing their own opinion or - so long as they did not participate themselves - present their evaluation as to what the result of a discussion should be.

Due to the small nature of the project, the site operator may at their sole and complete discretion exercise executive powers to arbitrate content (i.e they may make a binding ruling on what should happen in a dispute, regardless of consensus). The enacted result and rationale for using this power will be communicated clearly. If and when the project grows to a reasonable size, the hope is for this power to be phased out.

Attribution

The following is unrelated to the policies described on this page. It serves as the attribution of content to be in line with this site's polices and legal requirements.

At least one revision of this page incorporates text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view which is released under CC BY-SA-4.0. (view authors)