Help:Simplified Ruleset

From Forexpedia

There is no strict set of rules, instead there is a set of guidelines which you can choose to follow. You might see people do things that are plainly not in accordance with these guidelines, but which may still be well within the actual BabyPips.com policies. The "be graceful" guideline applies in those situations too. In many cases, well-informed and well-intentioned editors working on an article just have to sort out among themselves the most appropriate way to improve the article.

Guidelines for writing high quality articles

1. Neutral point of view. Write from a neutral point of view. This is a fundamental principle, which allows us to make a fair representation of the world around us. Even if material is verifiable, it is still important to put it into a balanced and representative form so that it conveys a fair impression of the views of the many significant viewpoints on a subject.
2. Verifiability. Articles should contain only material that has been published by reputable sources. Editors adding new information into an article should cite a reputable source for that information, otherwise it may be removed by any editor. The obligation to provide a reputable source is on editors wishing to include information, not on those seeking to remove it.
3. No original research. Articles may not contain any previously unpublished arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements, or theories. Moreover, articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of: published arguments, concepts, data, ideas, or statements — that serves to advance a position.

Safe behaviours

The intent of these guidelines is to provide a safe set of rules of thumb. Follow these behaviours, and you'll likely not get into trouble, and will also do fairly well at requests for adminship, over time.

1. [Be bold! in updating pages - Bold in a good way, of course. Go ahead, it's a wiki!
   Encourage others, including those who disagree with you, likewise to Be bold!
2. Be civil to other users at all times.
3. When in doubt, take it to the talk page. We have all the time in the world. Mutual respect is the guiding behavioural principle of Forexpedia and, although everyone knows that their writing may be edited mercilessly, it is easier to accept changes if the reasons for them are understood. If you discuss changes on the article's talk (or discussion) page before you make them, you should reach consensus faster and happier.
4. Decent edit summaries and clear and transparent explanations are universally appreciated. Other editors need to understand your process, and it also helps you yourself to understand what you did after a long leave of absence from an article. Please state what you changed and why. If the explanation is too long, elucidate on the discussion page. It is a fundamental principle of this wiki that anyone may edit articles, so there are a lot of changes to watch; edit summaries simplify this.
5. Assume good faith; in other words, try to consider the person on the other end of the discussion to be a thinking, rational being who is trying to positively contribute. Even if you're convinced that they're Evil reptilian kitten eaters from another planet, still pretend they're acting in good faith. Ninety percent of the time, you'll find that they actually are acting in good faith (and wouldn't you have looked stupid if you'd accused them of being evil).
6. Particularly, don't revert good faith edits. Reverting is a little too powerful sometimes. Don't succumb to the temptation, unless you're reverting very obvious vandalism (like "LALALALAL*&*@#@THIS_SUX0RZsammygoo", or someone changing "4+5=9" to "4+5=30"). If you really can't stand something, revert once, with an edit summary something like "(rv) I disagree strongly, I'll explain why in talk." and immediately take it to talk.
7. Be gracious: Be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you do. Try to accommodate other people's quirks the best you can, and try to be as polite, solid and straightforward as possible yourself.
8. Signing. Sign on talk pages (using ~~~~ which gets replaced by your username and timestamp when you hit submit), but don't sign on mainspace articles.
9. Use the Show preview button; it prevents cluttering up the page-history.
10. Ultimate authority over the Wiki lies in the hands of the BabyPips.com team. If you disagree strongly with them, you may want to consider whether Babypips.com and Forexpedia is the right place for you at all. While anything can theoretically be changed on a wiki, the community up to this point has been built on these principles and is highly unlikely to move away from them in the future. A lot of thought has been put into them and they've worked for us so far; do give them a fair shake before attempting to radically change them or leaving the project.
11. Respect copyright.

• Minor postscript: The above mainly focuses on practice, rather than actual content; for content discussions, see List of bad article ideas for a discussion of article ideas that show up (and get deleted) frequently on articles for deletion, Wikipedia's method of removing articles that don't constitute vandalism in and of themselves.