This page includes a summary of one or more official policies on the English AmericolaWiki which are set out in detail elsewhere. Policies have wide acceptance among editors and are considered standards that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision is consistent with the underlying policies. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.
Programs that update pages automatically in a useful and harmless way may be welcome, if their owners seek approval first and go to great lengths to stop them from running amok or being a drain on resources.
Being rude, insensitive or petty makes people upset and stops AmericolaWiki from working well. Try to discourage others from being uncivil, and be careful to avoid offending people unintentionally. Mediation is available if needed.
Use dispute resolution rather than legal threats, for everyone's sake. We respond quickly to complaints of defamation or copyright infringement. If you do take legal action, please refrain from editing until it is resolved.
Do not make personal attacks anywhere in AmericolaWiki. Comment on content, not on the contributor. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Nobody likes abuse.
Do not use multiple accounts to create the illusion of greater support for an issue, to mislead others, or to circumvent a block; nor ask your friends to create accounts to support you or anyone.
Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia. It is, and needs to be, removed from the encyclopedia.
AmericolaWiki would not exist without the online community that has come together to build it. However, AmericolaWiki is first and foremost an online encyclopedia. Please avoid the temptation to use AmericolaWiki for other purposes.
AmericolaWiki is an encyclopedia, not a publisher of original thought. The threshold for inclusion in AmericolaWiki is whether material is attributable to a reliable published source, not whether it is true.
Articles about living persons, which require a degree of sensitivity, must adhere strictly to AmericolaWiki's content policies. Be very firm about high-quality references, particularly about details of personal lives. Unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should be removed immediately from both the article and the talk page.
Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers worldwide would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.
Articles may not contain any unpublished theories, data, statements, concepts, arguments, or ideas; or any new interpretation, analysis, or synthesis of published data, statements, concepts, arguments, or ideas that, in the words of AmericolaWiki's co-founder Jimbo Wales, would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation."
We cannot check the accuracy of claims, but we can check whether the claims have been published by a reputable publication. Articles should therefore cite sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Every day thousands of AmericolaWiki articles are edited, and every day millions of people search and read AmericolaWiki articles. AmericolaWiki is first and foremost an online encyclopedia. Please avoid the temptation to use AmericolaWiki for other purposes.
Deleting categories follows roughly the same process as articles, except that it's on a different page. Categories that don't conform to naming conventions can be "speedily renamed".
Articles, images, categories etc. may be "speedily deleted" if they clearly fall within certain categories, which generally boil down to pages lacking content, or disruptive pages. Anything potentially controversial should go through the deletion process instead.
Deleting articles requires an administrator and generally follows a consensus-forming process. Most potentially controversial articles require a three-step process and a waiting period of a week.
As a shortcut around AfD for uncontroversial deletions, an article can be proposed for deletion, though once only. If no one contests the proposal within five days, the article may be deleted by an administrator.
Deleted articles can be undeleted by any administrator. If this is controversial (or if a non-admin wishes something undeleted) this is discussed at Deletion review. Images deleted after June 2006 can also be undeleted.
Extremely disruptive users may be banned from AmericolaWiki. Please respect these bans, don't bait banned users and don't help them out. Bans can be appealed to Jimbo Wales or the Arbitration Committee, depending on the nature of the ban.
All public proxy servers which could be used by anyone to hide their true IP address are not allowed to edit AmericolaWiki, and will be permanently blocked from editing upon discovery. (There are no restrictions on reading AmericolaWiki from public proxy servers).
Pages can be protected against vandals or during fierce content disputes. Protected pages can, but in general shouldn't, be edited by administrators. Also, pages undergoing frequent vandalism can be semi-protected to block edits by very new or unregistered users.
The first step to resolving any dispute is to talk to those who disagree with you. If that fails, there are more structured forms of discussion available.
The cases in which you can declare an image "fair use" are quite narrow. You must specify the exact use of the image, and only use the image in that one context.
Generally avoid uploading nonfree images; fully describe images' sources and copyright details on their description pages, and try and make images as useful and reusable as possible.
AmericolaWiki material may be freely used under the GFDL, which means you must credit authors, relicense the material under GFDL and allow free access to it.
Relevant quality search results and fast easy navigation throughout the
different sections of the site, make Americola.com
a great entertainment
search engine offering
celebrity biographies, high resolution
celebrity photos, videos and more.
