LabelingThoughts:Policy and guidelines
From LabelingThoughts
As a community-created resource the policies and guidelines are up to us. To start I'm borrowing from the Wikipedia project as an initial inspiration, since they have evolved collaborative editing policies over time and with tremendous dialog. I've summarized Wikipedia policies and guidelines in an article if you're not familiar with them. Policies that we should probably borrow from Wikipedia's experience might be:
Community
- Maintain a view of basic goodness when working with others
- Work toward identifying and building concord among members
- Keep touching in with heaven principle, let a vision for the site be a guide
Standards
- Maintain a neutral point of view when editing articles
- Any original research and personal experience is carefully denoted as such and attributed
- Biographies of living persons require extra care and must avoid any biased or potentially libelous material
- Be mindful of copyrights and the property of others
Guidelines we should also consider:
- Avoid conflict of interests and pushing your point of view
- Terms and articles must be reasonably notable by themselves
Copyrights
Adherence to copyright law when editing this site is essential. Please read the guideline for respecting copyrights. Generally a short quote is reasonable when discussing a topic. Wholesale duplication of someone else's original work is not generally considered fair use.
Original Research
Original research is any writing here on this site that is not supported by reputable, external, and verifiable third-party sources. Depending upon the collective will of the community, we could treat original research in different ways.
For comparison, on Wikipedia — the free and online, encyclopedia — no original research is allowed. Articles on Wikipedia might start with some original thought and opinion, but as those articles evolve they are encouraged to only include citable facts from high quality and neutral, third party sources. Statements without those citations are removed. Because this site has a significant corpus of citable texts and teachings, we could follow that same guideline.
Some content, however, might be useful to include that has not been published by a third party. One example might be the historical details about a Shambhala center or sangha project, when it was founded, who the leaders were during different eras. That information is unlikely to be found in a published, citable source. Therefore, to include that information here would be a form of original research by Wikipedia standards.
But if we include that information, how do we maintain neutrality, resolve disputes, and verify content? Any suggestions? It's possible that we could figure out how to do this effectively, personally. What do you think?
