Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines
This serves as a guide to the policies and guidelines that are generally accepted and considered important — even essential — by the project's founders and community. These help us to work towards our goal: Developing free, open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts. It is important to note that at least some of these policies are still evolving as Wikibooks grows and develops.
The use of "must", "should", "must not", "should not", and "may" on this page are used consistently with RFC 2119.
Definition of terms
- Policy
- A policy is a set of rules that must be followed at all times.
- Guideline
- A guideline is a set of rules that should be followed and only ignored in particular circumstances.
- Draft
- Referring to a policy or guideline, this means that it has been suggested by a user and is still undergoing discussion as to whether it should be made official or rejected. Proposed policies and guidelines may either become official or rejected, depending on the eventual outcome of the discussion.
- Must
- This word, or the terms required or shall, means that the definition is an absolute requirement of the policy or guideline.
- Should
- This word, or the adjective recommended, means that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular guideline, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
- Official
- Referring to a policy or guideline, this means that it is currently in effect, and enforced by other contributors. A policy is a set of rules that must be followed. A guideline is a set of rules that should be followed.
- Obsolete
- Referring to a policy or guideline, this means that it has been superseded by a new guideline or policy. The new version should be used, and the old version is only kept for historical reasons.
- Rejected
- Referring to a policy or guideline proposal, this means that it has been rejected by the community for a variety of different reasons. It, along with the proposal discussion, is kept to remind people of the reasons for the rejection and to prevent it from being reproposed for reasons rejected in previous discussion.
Procedures
Formulating policies and guidelines
All Wikimedia projects share a set of core founding principles.
Wikibooks policies and guidelines are formulated for the most part by habit and consensus. This takes place in discussions on talk pages, the Reading Room and the Textbook-l email list. Once a ground for consensus exists on a topic that Wikibooks would benefit to have as an official guideline or policy, a document is created and discussed in specifics.
To propose a new policy or guideline document, add a new entry to the Proposals section below. The page should be in the Wikibooks namespace. Create the new page, add the {{draft}} template and write up the proposal.
So long as the policy is proposed, other users and members may change the text of the proposal to reflect the state of the discussion and compromises about the proposal. After proposed policy has been reviewed and discussed by other users and work on it is considered finished, it may be accepted by community consensus. For specifics about what consensus means, and how it is achieved, see the decision making guidelines
Even a page which is already an official policy or guideline can be modified to keep it in line with consensus or to make it more coherent. Policies and guidelines are generally open to being edited by any established user, but controversial changes are likely to be reverted. Anyone who thinks there is a problem with an existing policy or guideline is welcome to discuss it. Still, except for non-normative edits, changes must be proposed on the guideline discussion page and accepted by the community per Wikibooks:Decision making.
Enforcing policies
You are a Wikibooks editor. Wikibooks lacks an editor-in-chief or a central, top-down mechanism whereby the day-to-day progress on this instructional resource is monitored and approved. Instead, active participants monitor recent changes and make copyedits and corrections to the content and format problems they see. The participants are both writers and editors.
Policies
Official Wikibooks policies are identified with the {{policy}} template at the top of the page, which includes the page in Category:Wikibooks policies. The current list of official policies follows:
Guidelines
Official Wikibooks guidelines are identified with the {{guideline}} template at the top of the page, which includes the page in Category:Wikibooks guidelines. The current list of official guidelines follows:
Drafts
The following are draft policies and guidelines that still need an official community decision: