Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search
"WP:POL" redirects here. For the politics WikiProject, see Wikipedia:WikiProject
Politics.
Shortcuts

This page documents a procedural policy of  WP:PG

Wikipedia.  WP:RULES
 WP:POLICY
 WP:GUIDELINE

This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia's policies and guidelines are pages that

serve to document the good practices accepted in the Wikipedia community.
This policy describes how our policies and guidelines should normally be
developed and maintained.

Policies and guidelines (list)

Principles

 Five pillars

 Ignore all rules

 Core content policies

Content policies

 Article titles

 Biographies of living persons

 Image use

 Neutral point of view

 No original research

 Verifiability

 What Wikipedia is not (Not a dictionary)

Conduct policies

 Civility

 Clean start

 Consensus

 Dispute resolution

 Edit warring

 Editing policy

 Harassment

 No legal threats
  No personal attacks

 Ownership of content

 Username policy

 Vandalism

Other policy categories

 Deletion

 Enforcement

 Legal

 Procedural

Directories

 List of policies

 List of guidelines

 Manual of Style contents

 v

 t

 e

Wikipedia's policies and guidelines are developed by the community to describe

best practices, clarify principles, resolve conflicts, and otherwise further our goal of
creating a free, reliable encyclopedia. There is no need to read any policy or
guideline pages to start editing. The five pillars are a popular summary of the most
pertinent principles.
Although Wikipedia generally does not employ hard-and-fast rules, Wikipedia's policy
and guideline pages describe its principles and agreed-upon best practices. Policies
are standards all users should normally follow, and guidelines are generally meant to
be best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and
guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.
This policy page specifies the community standards related to the organization, life
cycle, maintenance of, and adherence to policies, guidelines, and related pages of
the English Wikipedia. It does not cover other editions of
Wikipedia. (See Wikipedia:List of policies and Wikipedia:List of guidelines for a
comprehensive listing of individual English Wikipedia policies and guidelines.)

Contents

 1Derivation
 2Role
 3Adherence
 4Enforcement
 5Content
  6Not part of the encyclopedia
 7Life cycle
o 7.1Proposals
 7.1.1Good practice for proposals
o 7.2Demotion
o 7.3Content changes
 7.3.1Substantive changes
o 7.4Conflicts between advice pages
 8Naming
 9See also
 10Notes
 11Further reading

Derivation
Further information: Wikipedia:Administration § Human and legal administration
Wikipedia is operated by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which reserves
certain legal rights—see the Wikimedia Foundation's Policies page for a list of its
policies. See also Role of Jimmy Wales. Nevertheless, normally Wikipedia is a self-
governing project run by its community. Its policies and guidelines are intended to
reflect the consensus of the community.

Role
Further information: Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and
essays
Shortcuts

 WP:POLICIES
 WP:GUIDES

Policies have wide acceptance among editors and describe standards all users
should normally follow. All policy pages are in Wikipedia:List of policies and
guidelines and Category:Wikipedia policies. For summar