 | This is aWiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. This is adraft proposal. It is unofficial, and it is unknown whether it is widely accepted by Wiktionary editors. |
| Policies – Entries:CFI -EL -NORM -NPOV -QUOTE -REDIR -DELETE. Languages:LT -AXX. Others:BLOCK -BOTS -VOTES. |
Wiktionary is a collaborative project and its founders and contributors have common goals.
Wiktionarypolicies and guidelines help us to work toward those common goals. These policies are continually evolving, and need some effort to maintain their evolution. You can contribute to the effort.
You don't need to read every Wiktionary policy before you contribute! However, the following principles are key to a productive,collaborative Wiktionary experience, and should always be borne in mind.
A former alphabetical list of policies was atWiktionary:Index to Policies, but is no longer maintained.
Wiktionary policy will be formulated for the most part byconsensus. Consensus can be reached through open debate over difficult questions, or it may simply develop as a result of established practice. The statements on this and other pages about Wiktionary policy are intended to describe community norms that are developing over time.
Policies that result from established practice are sometimes harder to identify. If there is no objection to the practice, it may be difficult to sustain community attention long enough for a formal process of adopting it as policy. In this situation, the best solution may be to document existing practice on a language's "About" page (seehere the "About" page for Latin, as an example) if necessary.
You are a Wiktionary editor! Wiktionary has no editor-in-chief or any central, top-down mechanism whereby the day-to-day progress on the dictionary is monitored and approved. Instead, active participants add new articles, improve others, and make corrections to the content and format problems they see. So the participants are both writersand editors.
Most policies and guidelines are thus implemented by individual users editing pages, and discussing matters with each other.
There are someadministrators appointed that will tackle the problems of vandalism and housekeeping, for which they need extra privileges. Anyone with a fairtrack record of contributions can apply for administrator status.