AARoads:Conduct policy

Conduct policy
A subpage for the AARoads project

Standard:

This user conduct policy shall govern user behavior throughout the wiki. All terms used in this policy shall be interpreted according to the definitions established in the policy overview.

Fundamentals of user conduct

Standard:

All users shall behave in a manner consistent with the Golden Rule: "Treat others like you would like to be treated." Users shall uphold the comity of the community and treat other editors with respect.

Support:

Unlike a forum or social media site, a wiki is a collaborative project working toward a common purpose. All editors here are volunteers who can choose to walk away from the project at any time. A friendly, respectful working environment is necessary to retain editors and create the conditions needed to keep the project moving forward.

Standard:

Users shall not post discriminatory comments, images or links, i.e. any disparaging or offensive content (directed at fellow editors or others) pertaining to race, religion, creed, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, disability, or other protected classes, as deemed necessary by the community.

Support:

The AARoads Wiki community is made up a diverse group of individuals of different backgrounds. In order to maintain the comity of the wiki and ensure all users feel welcome, discriminatory content cannot be tolerated.

Standard:

All edits to the wiki shall be made for the common purpose of documenting the road transportation systems of the world, facilitating the process of creating this documentation, and/or contributing to the AARoads Wiki or Forum communities. Editors shall display a level of competence in editing that ensures their edits work toward this common purpose.

Guidance:

Editors should assume that edits made by others are done in a good faith attempt to contribute to the wiki and/or its community (including the AARoads Forum community), unless given a specific reason to believe otherwise. While not every edit will, by necessity, be a direct improvement to the wiki's contents (community building and development of the wiki's backend procedures is important too), conduct that is clearly not helpful to doing so (e.g. inserting fictitious information into articles, vandalizing pages, or spamming) should not be tolerated.

Editors should not unduly admonish other editors, especially new users, for merely making mistakes. Editors should be empowered to edit with confidence. Because the full history of every page is stored by the wiki software, nearly all mistakes can be easily corrected, including by reverting to a previous version, if necessary.

Option:

The community may enact a ban of any member it judges does not contribute to its common purpose. Administrators are empowered to enact blocks on such users to enforce such a ban, under the terms of the administration policy.

Support:

It is common for disagreements to arise in the course of editing a wiki. However, it is important to remember that users involved in a dispute most likely are working toward the goal of improving the wiki, and simply have different ideas about how to go about this. It is important to act in a manner that recognizes this, unless evidence exists to the contrary.

Some level of tolerance for human error is necessary in a project like this one; everyone makes mistakes. New users especially need a good deal of leeway as they learn the more complex tasks involved in editing a wiki. However, a level of basic competence is required. Users whose edits consistently require more of the community's time to correct than is justified by their benefit to the wiki should be asked to improve their editing skills, or else the community must take steps to protect the wiki's content from them.

Resolving disputes

Standard:

Users who come into conflict while editing the same page shall, when such a conflict is recognized, cease editing the article and engage in discussion on the article's Talk page, until such time that the dispute is resolved.

Guidance:

Users should conduct a discussion regarding disputed content with an eye toward resolving the conflict as amicably as possible. If a dispute seems like it may be intractable, the users involved should solicit outside opinions at The Interchange, in the hopes that a workable solution may be found by users not party to the dispute.

Standard:

A user shall not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period, except to remove clear cases of vandalism. An edit or a series of consecutive edits that undoes or manually reverses other editors' actions—whether in whole or in part—shall be counted as a revert.

Guidance:

An administrator aware of an ongoing edit/revert war on a page should temporarily protect it (with no regard to which version is current at the time of their intervention) to force users to cease editing the disputed article and resolve the dispute on the article's Talk page.

Support:

The only workable way to resolve a dispute on a wiki is to discuss the situation with the other editor and try to find common ground. The Talk page is the proper venue for doing this. Repeatedly removing another user's contributions is unlikely to result in a successful resolution of the conflict, and is more likely to result in inflaming the situation further.

Account usage

Standard:

No person shall operate more than one account on this wiki, with the following exceptions:

• Accounts intended for use when connected to public wifi networks, so as to reduce the risk that the user's main account will be compromised. Such accounts shall clearly be indicated by having the same username as the main account, with "(public)" appended.
• Accounts intended to be operated automatically or semi-automatically by software other than the regular wiki user interface.
• Any other exceptions approved by the community before registering the account.

A person operating more than one account under the exceptions listed above shall list all alternate accounts operated, and a clearly stated purpose for each, on the user page of the main account. The user page of each alternate account shall clearly state the name of the main account of the user operating it, or redirect to the main account's userpage.

Support:

Wiki editors use an account's list of past contributions to inform themselves of the user's history on the site. This allows them to hold the user accountable and decide what action is appropriate, should their edits or conduct prove to be undesirable for any reason. In order for an editor to get an accurate and complete picture of another editor's history on the site, that history must be complete and not fragmented between multiple accounts. If practical concerns dictate that a user must use multiple accounts, clear identification of who is operating them is necessary to provide editors with a complete view of the history of the person behind the accounts.

Standard:

No account shall be operated by more than one person. Organizations wishing to edit the wiki on an official basis shall register a separate account for each of its members who intend to edit the wiki, and clearly identify the sponsoring organization in either the user name or the account's userpage.

Support:

"Role accounts" operated by multiple individuals obscures the edit history of the individuals operating the account, which makes it difficult to hold them accountable if necessary.

Edit automation

Standard:

For the purposes of this policy, terms shall be defined as follows:

Fully-automatic editing

Editing with the use of software with the capability to perform edits in bulk, without requiring human approval for each edit.

Semi-automatic editing

Editing with the use of software with the capability to performs edits in bulk, but requiring human approval for each edit.

Bot (robot)

Software used to perform fully-automatic editing.

No user shall engage in either fully-automatic or semi-automatic editing without the approval of the community before beginning such editing.

Support:

Because both fully-automatic and semi-automatic editing allows a user to edit a large number of pages at once, it presents the risk of disruptive or malformed edits to a large number of pages at once. Therefore, the community must approve the use of such software in advance.

Standard:

A user seeking to operate a bot shall request community approval for each proposed task the bot is to accomplish. Such a request shall demonstrate that the bot provides a useful service and does not use excessive server resources. The bot operator shall provide the bot's source code at the community's request.

Guidance:

A bot request should provide sufficient information for the community to ascertain that it is in the likely best interest of the wiki for the bot to be allowed to operate. The community should inspect the bot's source code to ensure that it will not edit in error, nor overwhelm the server resources.

Option:

A bot operator may operate a bot for a limited run of edits before community approval is granted, either for testing purposes, or to demonstrate the bot's effectiveness as part of a bot approval request. Such a test or demonstration run should be limited to copies of articles stored in user space for this purpose, if practical.

Standard:

All bots shall be operated on an account separate from the operator's main account. Such accounts shall clearly be indicated by having the word "bot" in their username. Additionally, bureaucrats shall mark all such accounts as bot accounts in the software. The user page of the bot account shall clearly state the name of the main account of the user operating it, or redirect to the main account's userpage.

Support:

Transparency on which accounts are bot accounts, and who is operating them, provides a point of contact in cases where the bot is malfunctioning or otherwise editing in a manner that another user disagrees with.

Standard:

All fully-automated edits shall be marked as bot edits by use of the bot flag.

Support:

The bot flag allows users to clearly understand that the edit was being performed by a bot, and allows users to filter such edits out of their watchlist or recent changes feeds as desired.

Option:

Administrators may grant a user the ability to use a piece of semi-automated editing software at their discretion. Administrators may also revoke this ability at their discretion if the user is operating it in an abusive or incompetent manner. Semi-automated editing ability is granted indefinitely, and need not be re-requested for each individual task performed with that piece of software.

Support:

Because semi-automated editing by definition requires a greater degree of editor oversight than fully-automated editing, the community oversight of its use is correspondingly reduced. Nevertheless, the ability to use it can be revoked if it is misused.

Standard:

Users shall be responsible for all automated and semi-automated edits made on their accounts.

Support:

Users will still be held accountable for their edits, regardless of how said edits were made. If a piece of software malfunctions or produces edits against the community's wishes, it is the operator's responsibility to rectify the situation.