The Warrior Wiki:Contributing Guidelines

The Warrior Wiki is a wiki dedicated to making UW's history accessible to everyone.

Anyone can help contribute to the wiki, by adding/editing pages, proofreading changes, adding photos, and more.

However, there are still some guidelines that every contributor needs to keep in mind.

"Be excellent to each other"
This mantra, lifted from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, can serve as the foundations for all actions related to The Warrior Wiki. Over the years, this guideline has been similarly worded as "The Golden Rule", and "Don't be a dick". Essentially, it means that everything carried out on this wiki, by contributors or administrators, should be done in such a way that does not harm others. If everyone observed this guideline, there wouldn't be a need for most of these guidelines.

Assume Good Faith
Users will generally carry out actions in good faith. If a user performs an action that you find unsatisfactory, assume they had good intentions. Work with them to correct the mistake, and discuss the action with the user on their talk page. Similarly, as Hanlon's Razor goes: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. (or ignorance)

Neutral Point of View
The Warrior Wiki is not a place for opinion pieces. All statements and claims must be backed by facts and references, and pages must not be written in such a way that portrays a bias. See Neutral point of view for more information.

Be Bold!
This phrase has become a slogan of Wikipedia and has also been adopted by The Warrior Wiki. Another way of phrasing it is "Just do it!". If there is something you wish to change, simply change it. There are caveats of course; you still want to observe the other guidelines. But in general, just do it!

General Etiquette
In most cases, it's a good idea to have a read of Wikipedia's etiquette guidelines. Since they address the topic well (and we don't want to write/have boat-loads of policy :) ) we'll be following a lot of the practices outlined there, and expect our users to follow suit.

Blocking Policy
The Warrior Wiki will block users that abuse or vandalize the site, using a graduated punishment scale. Please see The Warrior Wiki:Blocking policy for more information.

What belongs on the wiki
This wiki is for the collection of all things related to the University of Waterloo's history. This topic is nearly limitless, and it is up to the contributor to determine the granularity with which to cover a subject. When it comes to choosing a granularity for the pages, aim to be more specific than more general (assuming you have citations to support it). Below are some example topics that the wiki aims to cover. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and if you find yourself wondering whether to create a page for something, first ask "Is this directly related to UW?", and then "Be Bold".

Locations
The wiki should contain a page for every building that the University has ever owned/administered. See List of Buildings. There should be a page for each room, every statue, and every permanent art piece. There should also be pages for physical attributes of campus, including things like Laurel Creek and Columbia Lake.

Organizations
The wiki should contain pages for any organization that is directly a part of the university. This includes all Feds clubs, all departments of the university, and every committee (no matter how dull they may seem).

People
The wiki should contain pages for anyone who played a historically significant role in shaping the university as it exists today. Generally, this will include people like university presidents, founders, and most faculty. It is somewhat rare that students will be considered significant enough, so don't add a page for yourself or your buddy unless you've shaped the university in some meaningful way(in which case, someone else will probably end up doing it for you).

Events
While there is a long term goal for this wiki to record every event that occurs on campus, we are not there yet. Only historically significant events should receive their own page. Some examples of historically significant events are the university receiving its charter, and The Great Water Tower Caper. Other less significant events and controversies can often be added as a subsection of their related page. (for example, the 2011 Fed Hall controversy can be added to the Federation Hall page, and broken off into it's own page if necessary). The end result of this is that events that are not important to the history of UW (Like a MathSoc bake sale, for example.) should be left out for now. Reoccurring events that have survived the test of time, like Pi Day, or Bus Push, should have their own pages.

English Language
The Warrior Wiki currently is an English language only wiki. This means that all articles, discussion pages, and profiles should only contain English text. There are some exceptions. (For example, it might be useful to have the Mandarin/Cantonese name included in the Sino-Canadian College page.)

Regional Variation
Due to variations in the English spellings of words, some words may be spelled differently from what you might expect. As a general rule, The Warrior Wiki use Canadian English, but minor spelling differences (such as organization vs. organisation) are not important enough to merit an edit/revision.

Copyright
All content on The Warrior Wiki is submitted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. This means that anything you contribute to The Warrior Wiki will also be under that license. This is the same license that Wikipedia uses.

This also means that you must ensure that you have permission to release any images or files uploaded to The Warrior Wiki under this license. If you do not, you should not upload the file until you have received written permission from the content's owner to do so.

Copyrighted materials may be removed unless appropriate permissions have been granted by the content's owner.