Guidelines for a friendlier Wiki[]

• Assume good faith - your default assumption should be that other users are just as interested in improving the Wiki as you are, even if they may be misguided in their attempts to do so. (Of course, perhaps you are the misguided soul!) In any case, unless they have shown strong indications that you should believe otherwise, do your utmost to work constructively with your fellow users.

A guide to sysop tools[]

Sysop stands for system operator, aka admin. Sysop tools have been granted to trusted users of the community, after having gone through a request for adminship that was closed successfully by a bureaucrat.

Think of the extra tools as the janitorial mop-and-bucket. It makes cleaning up the Wiki easier on many fronts, but the mop isn't something you start whacking other users over the head with. At all times, the work that is being created on the Wiki should be more important than the tools you carry - so know that admins are not the final say on legitimate disputes (more on this later) and that the tools should be used to ensure collaborative discussion, and disagreement even!

Blocking[]

When it comes to vandalism, always look for malicious intent. Remember that not everyone knows how to edit Wikis, they may experiment and add nonsense text or blank a page completely by accident. For an act to be considered vandalism, there are two criteria that need to be fulfilled: (1) the act itself defaces the page, (2) the act itself was fully intended to deface the page - these are two very different things.

Blocking should only be done when malicious intent has been relatively ascertained, e.g. one page blanked is not enough, but three in a row you can safely assume something is up. For first-time acts of vandalism, after fixing the vandalism, the user should be given either a warning or a 1-3 day block.

For IP addresses:

• First-time - Give the user a warning or a 1-3 day block
• Second-time vandalism after having been blocked - 3-day - 1-week block.
• Serial offenders - 1-week to 1-month blocks.

Infinite blocks should never be given out to IP addresses because: (1) IP addresses can change, so you might prevent a future person who's visiting the Wiki for the first time from editing (2) No one is quite that irredeemable

For users:

• Follow the above. Though in the case of established users who have a history of good edits, it should raise an alarm that perhaps the user has been hacked. For new (and possibly junk) accounts, those accounts can be given an infinite block if it is obvious that the account was created simply to wreak damage on the Wiki articles (i.e. blatant vandalism).

• Usually, blocking of established users happens for reasons detailed in the next section.

How to resolve disputes[]

• Individuals - People are wired differently, and are raised in a whole host of backgrounds to you have no access to. So try, first of all, to be patient and understanding. If you see bullying behaviour, call them out on it firmly and calmly, while providing evidence for your claims. In serious cases, an admin will look into whether the user deserves a block. Milder cases can be addressed by leaving a gentle note on the user's talk page.

• Content - For disputes about content in articles, there is a 3RR (three-revert rule) hard limit to prevent edit-warring. Any users that have reverted an article three times or more over legitimate content disputes (i.e. vandalism excluded) will be blocked. The idea is that in a legitimate dispute (even if you are certain that you are right), you should take the discussion to the article's talk page and hash it out there, rather than communicate over a series of edit summaries - which is not a talkspace users can properly follow. This also allows other users to weigh in.