Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines
- See also: Wikipedia:Wikipedia essays
Essays are pages reflecting the views of an editor or a group of editors. The term is used for many opinion pages that do not fall into other categories. Essays may become guidelines if they have sufficient support, although in practice this happens rarely.
Essays need not be proposed or advertised; you can simply write them, as long as you understand that you do not necessarily speak for the entire community. If you do not want other people to edit your essay, put it in your userspace.
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How are policies enforced?
You are a Wikipedia editor. Since Wikipedia has no editor-in-chief or top-down article approval mechanism, active participants make copyedits and corrections to the format and content problems they see. So the participants are both writers and editors.
Individual users thus enforce most of the policies and guidelines by editing pages, and discussing matters with each other. Some policies, such as vandalism, are enforced by administrators by blocking users. In extreme cases the Arbitration Committee has the power to deal with highly disruptive situations, as part of the general dispute resolution procedure.
Some features of the software which could potentially be misused, such as deleting pages and locking pages from editing, are restricted to administrators, who are experienced and trusted members of the community. See the administrators' reading list for further information.
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Other essays and discussions about Wikipedia
- The Meta-Wiki site contains many articles about Wikipedia and related topics in a more editorial style.
- Creating how-to articles in Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia:Centralized discussion is a centralized list of ongoing policy discussions, as is Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Policies.
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See also
- Wikipedia:List of policies
- Wikipedia:List of guidelines
- Wikimedia Foundation policies
- Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), discussion of existing and proposed policies
- Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), discussion of new ideas and proposals not policy related
- Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Policies, listing of proposed policies and proposed changes to policies through Wikipedia:Requests for comment
- Wikipedia:Perennial proposals, that come up very often on the proposals
- Wikipedia:Ignore all rules
- Category:Wikipedia policies and guidelines lists approved, rejected, and proposed policies.
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