AHWiki:Policies

AHWiki has developed a body of policies and guidelines to further our goal of creating a source of quality aviation related content.

What is a Policy?

Policies have wide acceptance among editors and are considered a standard that all users should follow. The remarks below concerning amendment of guidelines are also applicable to policies, except that particular care needs to be taken to ensure that community consensus exists before making any substantial change to policy.{

What are Guidelines?

Guidelines are more advisory in nature than policies. Amendments to a guideline should be discussed on its talk page, although it is generally acceptable to edit a guideline to improve it. Disputes over the wording of a guideline are resolved by considering and discussing objections and counter-proposals and coming to agreement, often using compromise language; such a dispute does not "suspend" the guideline or "turn it into" something other than a guideline. People are sometimes tempted to call a vote on a guideline, but this is a bad idea because it polarizes the issue.

A "naming" or "Manual of Style" entry is a specific kind of guideline, related to proper naming, or the way articles should be written. Note that guidelines are subcategorized merely for convenience, and that there is no practical difference between several "kinds" of guidelines.

Other pages in AHWiki namespace

Process pages

A process is a central and organized way of doing things, generally following certain policies or guidelines (e.g. the "deletion policy" tells us how the "deletion process" works).

"How to" or help pages

A 'how-to|how-to or help page is any instructive page that tells people how to do things. These will of course be edited by people who have suggestions on how to do things differently. A how-to differs from a guideline in that the former explains how to perform a certain action, and the latter explains when or why certain actions are recommended.

How are policies enforced?

You are an editor. Since AHWiki 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 policies and guidelines by editing pages, and discussing matters with each other. Some policies, such as vandalism, are enforced by administrators by blocking users.

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.