User:Esquivalience/Introduction to Wikipedia policies and guidelines
The goal of Wikipedia is to provide an accurate, comprehensive, and high-quality encyclopedia for free. In order to reach that goal faster, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone.
However, there needs to be a set of policies and guidelines in order to maintain the quality of Wikipedia content. To start off, Wikipedia operates on five principles, and you should have a firm knowledge of those principles before editing.
However, Wikipedia has no firm rules. If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining the encyclopedia, and you are sure your edit improves or helps maintain the encyclopedia, ignore it!
If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.
Content
Wikipedia's goal is to provide an accurate, comprehensive, and high-quality encyclopedia for free, however, how do we reach that goal? Well, first, we have to develop some policies whose purpose is to keep the encyclopedia accurate, comprehensive, and high-quality.
All content must be written from a neutral point of view. That basically means that you should not take a side in editing; instead you should explain the sides without bias. Articles should fairly, proportionately, and without bias, explain all of the significant views as published by reliable sources.
This policy is to help prevent articles from favouring a specific viewpoint, which may cause contributors to put undue weight on one viewpoint, or to lower the quality of articles. This also prevents promotional content and propaganda from appearing in articles.
Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. However, couldn't bad-faith contributors add false information and get away with it?
Because Wikipedia is vulnerable to the addition of false information, all content whose accuracy or verifiability is challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable source. This is so readers can verify the accuracy of the content and see if the content comes from a reliable source.
What makes a source reliable?
There are three related meanings of a "source" on Wikipedia:
- The actual work itself.
- The author/creator of the work.
- The publisher of a work.
Any of the three can affect a source's reliability. For example, if the work is published by a reputable publisher, with a history of reliability, then it demonstrates the reliability of the actual work itself.
Articles should be based on reliable and published independent of the subject. Works that are self-published are not considered reliable, and self-published sources supporting article content should be replaced with a published and reliable source.
Peer-reviewed and academic publications are usually the most reliable sources (and should be used if available), however reliable, non-academic sources can also be used.