Knowino:Guidelines

Knowino's mission is to create, disseminate, and promote free^[1] educational content worldwide. We aim to build a reliable encyclopedic compendium by engaging a global community of volunteer contributors, called "editors", on a collaborative wiki^[2] project.

These community guidelines outline our content policies and your basic responsibilities as a contributor. The Community Council is empowered to make binding resolutions in cases where clarification is needed. Administrators also have reasonable scope to exercise their discretion.

[edit] Content

All material that you post on Knowino should contribute, directly or indirectly, towards our mission.

You agree to release your contributions under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-SA) license. If you don't want your work to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, please don't submit it here. We can't accept contributions that aren't your own work, unless they're in the public domain, or available under a license that permits CC-BY-SA redistribution, and properly attributed.

We have three principles—accuracy, objectivity, and readability—that are mandatory for all articles^[3] and supplementary material^[4] associated with articles. We allow multiple articles, written from different approaches, on individual topics. Reviewers are encouraged to review articles within their respective areas of expertise.

Accuracy

All material presented in articles must be correct and verifiable by subject-matter experts. The distinction between fact and opinion should be made clear to readers. In general, articles should be based primarily on published, peer-reviewed writing and research, which should be properly cited. However, limited original research is permitted, provided it is both encyclopedic and verifiable.

Objectivity

Articles should accommodate, in a clear and unbiased way, all significant views on subjects of contention, as well as the nature of support for those views. It is not our responsibility to make judgements about disputes; our aim is to help inform readers so that they can make up their own minds. Controversies, where they exist, should be described accurately and dispassionately. Each relevant view should be given appropriate emphasis, corresponding directly to the prominence and acceptance of the view in human society—particularly, but not exclusively, in the expert community.

Readability

Our aim is to write articles that are concise, lucid, and engaging. Two main categories of readers should be accommodated: those who are looking for specific details on a subject, and those who simply want to "browse" and learn more about a topic. That means articles should be coherent, readable narratives, and key information should be easy to find.

If you think an article fails to adhere to these principles, please try to address the issues or report them on the article's discussion page. Please note that we won't delete an article merely on the grounds that it isn't perfect; deletion will usually occur only when an article is in such a poor state that it would be more practical to start from scratch than to fix the problems in the article as it stands.

Articles are community-edited, and it is courteous to request feedback from other contributors before you make major changes to large articles. You can use your own "sandbox" to develop articles on your own before including them in the compendium for others to read and change. If a genuine dispute about the content of an article cannot be resolved quickly through communication between involved parties, we will temporarily "fork" the disputed sections of the article and let each "branch" develop independently. Once a resolution is achieved, we can simply "un-fork" the branches, merging them back into the original article.

[edit] Community

Knowino's community functions on a basis of mutual trust and respect. Please be aware that we don't tolerate offensive or derogatory comments, excessively distracting account names, or deliberate disruption of the wiki process.

You can contribute without registering, but we highly encourage you to create an account and sign in. Your work will be associated with your account name (if you are signed in) or your IP address (if you are not signed in). You should be aware that IP addresses are traceable; the "traceability" of your IP address depends on your Internet service provider. See our privacy policy for more details.

We encourage real names, but inoffensive pseudonyms are completely acceptable. However, to be eligible for user-rights that are not automatically granted, you must use your real name as your account name. You can ask for your account to be renamed at a later date.

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ "Free" in both senses—gratis (free of charge) and libre (free of cumbersome restrictions).
2. ↑ A wiki is an Internet site that allows content to be added, modified, and updated quickly by multiple users. It's easy to link pages together to "build the Web".
3. ↑ An "article" is a page in the main namespace.
4. ↑ Examples of supplementary material: uploaded files, bibliographies, and lists of external links.