User:Techpriest/Sandbox/Community Standards

The following is an archived Sandbox. It's contents were never included in any sort of policy or official capacity due to the need for them passing in the wind. The contents of this Sandbox are preserved for the sake of recordkeeping, but will not be edited.

Reason for sandboxing: Writing a few sections so that we can deal with the fact that our CS have recently been inadequate to resolve a specific type of edit disputes.

Common guidelines
Canvassing (or meatpuppeting) is the act of solliciting votes from outside or inactive editors to influence the outcome of a vote in a certain way. Canvassing is not the same thing as merely notifying editors that a vote exists, but rather is intentionally encouraging editors to influence a vote in a certain way. Canvassing as a general rule is discouraged, since it results in stuffing votes in a certain direction. Accusations of canvassing require evidence to be posted along with them, in the form of transcripts of the conversation in question.

Page ownership
While we welcome additions of all kinds, please keep in mind that RationalWiki pages can be edited by anyone. Editors do not own any pages outside of their own userspace or their Essays, and as a result cannot dictate the content of our pages. That being said, often editors do take the effort of maintaining their articles, generally those that they contributed a lot to or those that they are experts on (something which Wikipedia calls stewardship). While we don't discourage people stewarding a page, it becomes an issue if editors refuse to engage in constructive dialogue, and instead start gatekeeping contributions to our articles based on personal biases.

As a result, all editors are expected to engage in constructive dialogue, regardless of their own efforts or expertise on the subject. If you revert a possibly controversial edit, make sure to leave a comment on the talkpage, explaining your reasoning as to why you reverted it, and be open to differing viewpoints. If your edit got reverted, try to first check the edit summary. Sometimes editors leave a description as to why they reverted the edit in there. Otherwise, check the talkpage.

Edit disputes
An edit dispute happens after an editor gets their content reverted out of a page. Rather than wantonly reinserting the content (causing an edit war), editors are instead encouraged to go to the article's talkpage. Conduct guidelines during edit disputes are stricter than during regular conversations on the wiki. Unlike in regular conversations, civility is considered to be a requirement and making personal or off-topic attacks is not tolerated. This does not mean that you cannot debunk falsehoods, just that throwing insults at other users will not be tolerated.

Repeatedly reverting the same content into/out of a page can be considered edit warring if it happens thrice in a row (this is sometimes called the 3 Revert Rule, or 3RR, since it gets applied after 3 reverts to the same page). The measure for this rule is based on the content of the edits, not on individual editors. This means that editors cannot ask other editors to revert content for them to avoid breaking 3RR (although accidents can happen sometimes). In this event, it is recommended to protect the page against further edit warring until the dispute is settled on the talkpage. If the dispute is between a sysop and a regular editor, this should be enough. If the dispute is between sysops, or a sysop tries to edit through the page protection, notify a moderator. They can protect the page against further edits by non-moderators. In a dispute, the state of the page before the reverted content was instated is considered to be the "pristine" version of the page, and is the state the disputed content should remain in for as long as the dispute is active.

Editors should try to seek a resolution on the talkpage as much as possible. In this light, it is recommended to always assume good faith where possible. Assuming bad faith or making personal attacks is considered to be uncivil and may result in escalation of conflict, which will not be tolerated. Always remember the human behind the username.