Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines

Wikipedia's policies and guidelines are developed by the community to describe best practices, clarify principles, resolve conflicts, and to create a free, reliable encyclopedia.

In the five pillars it's a summary of all these rules.

Wikipedia usually don`t employ hard rules, they can be followed with common sense.

Role

Policies are accepted by the community, you must follow them by common sense.

Guidelines are setted by consensus. You also must follow them with common sense.

Essays are the opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors.

Adherence

To interpret the rules and guidelines, you should follow common sense, although there are some exceptions, for example if you violate the spirit, you`ll be punished even if you haven´t break the rule.

Enforcement

It's similar to other social interactions, if you violate the rule once, an administrator can delete your article, but if you do it more times, they can apply sanctions and they will tell you the conduct rules.

If you are clearly acting against policy, they will block you temporarily or indefinitely.

Content

In your article you must follow this standards

Be clear
Be as concise as possible—but no more concise.
Emphasize the spirit of the rule.
Maintain scope and avoid redundancy.
Avoid overlinking.
Not contradict each other.

Conduct

Civility: The civility policy describes the standards expected of users and provides appropriate ways of dealing with problems when they arise.
Clean start: is when a user stops using an old account to start with a new account.
Consensus: It´s the principal method to make a decision.
Dispute resolution: It´s easy to disagree with other editors. Many disputes can be resolved without external input, through gradual editing, discussion, and attempts to understand the legitimate objections of others.
Edit warring: Occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's contributions. These conflicts are usually solved with consensus.
Editing policy: Wikipedia allows users to edit in other one´s articles for adding information or to change things, but this has to be respecting other´s work.
Harassment: Is a pattern of repeated offensive behavior that appears to a reasonable observer to intentionally target a specific user. It's usually used to intimidate.
No legal threats: Is a threat to engage in an external (real life) legal or other governmental process that would target Wikipedia or other editors.
No personal attacks Personal attacks harm the Wikipedia community and the collaborative atmosphere needed to create a good encyclopedia. So you shouldn't do it.
Ownership of content: All Wikipedia pages and articles are edited collaboratively by a community of volunteer contributors. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians.
Username policy: This policy describes what kinds of usernames are acceptable on the English Wikipedia and how unacceptable or doubtful usernames can be dealt with
Vandalism: In wikipedia, vandalism is pursued because it prevents the webpage from being free.

Life cycle

Policies and guidelines must be applied in new proposals, but also in existing ones.

Proposals

New proposals must be setted by a high consensus of all the community.

New proposals must be setted by a high consensus of all the community. There are some steps:

The first step is to write the best initial proposal you can. This proposals will be talked in the Wikipedia's village pump for idea incubation.
Once you think the initial proposal is well written and the issues involved have been sufficiently discussed, you can start a request for comment (RfC) about your policy or guideline proposal in a new section at WP:Village Pump/Policy .
The RfC will probably be posted at the policy and/or proposals village pumps but if your proposal talks about an specific content area, then related WikiProjects can be found at the WikiProject directory. If your proposal is about an existing policy or guideline, then leave a note on the talk page of the related policy or guideline.

Demotion

An accepted policy or guideline could become obsolete because of changes in the community standards. In these situations, the police or guideline could stay in the informational page, essay or historical page. But in certain cases, it could also be suppressed.

The essais that have been supported by a tiny amount of people will usually be moved to the userspace of the primary author.

Content changes

Policies and guidelines can be edited like any other Wikipedia page. It's not strictly necessary to discuss the changes, but because the policies and guidelines are important, sensitive and complex, the users should be respectful and carefull with the editions. They also need to be sure that they are not accidentally introducing new sources of error or confusion.

Implement

Before making substantive changes to policy and guideline pages, it is sometimes useful to try to establish a reasonable exception to the existing practice. If after some time, there are no objections or changes, Your change will be saved.

Talk first

The talk page discussions usually receive lots of changes in policies and guidelines. Edits also could be saved if there are no objections or discussion.

Conflicts between advice pages

If a page is directly a conflict, more pages have to be revised to be successful for the community, but meanwhile this process, if a guideline appears to conflict with a policy, editors may assume the policy is more important.