Wikipedia:Editing policy

Wikipedia respects others' copyright. Although content must be backed by reliable sources, avoid copying or closely paraphrasing a copyrighted source. You should read the source, understand it, and then express what it says in your own words. An exception exists for the often necessary use of short quotations; they must be enclosed in quotations marks, accompanied by an inline reference to the source, and usually attributed to the author. (See the fair use doctrine which allows limited quoting without permission.)

Another way you can improve an article is by finding a source for existing unsourced content. This is especially true if you come across statements that are potentially controversial. You do not need to be the person who added the content to add a source and citation for it.

The guideline Wikipedia:Notability describes what is needed to support the creation of a new article.

Any large-scale automated or

Mass creation by automated means may additionally require approval as specified by Wikipedia:Bot policy. Approval of a bot for mass creation does not override the need for community consensus for the creation itself, nor does community consensus for a creation override the need for approval of the bot itself.

Note that while creation of non-content pages (such as redirects from systematic names, or maintenance categories) is not covered by this mass creation policy, other policies, such as Wikipedia:Bot policy, still apply.

Perfection is not required, as Wikipedia is a work in progress. Collaborative editing means that incomplete or poorly written first drafts can evolve over time into excellent articles. Even poor articles, if they can be improved, are welcome. For instance, one person may start an article with an overview of a subject or a few random facts. Another may help standardize the article's formatting or have additional facts and figures or a graphic to add. Yet another may bring better balance to the views represented in the article and perform fact-checking and sourcing to existing content. At any point during this process, the article may become disorganized or contain substandard writing.

While perfection is not required, extra care should be taken on articles that mention living persons. Contentious material about living or recently deceased persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should either be verified immediately, with one or more reliable sources and presented in a

Fix problems if you can,

• Rephrasing or copy-editing to improve grammar or more accurately represent the sources
• Correcting inaccuracies, while keeping the rest of the content intact
• an entirely new article
• Adding another point of view
  to the existing points of view to make the article more balanced
• Requesting a citation by adding the {{citation needed}} tag, or adding any other Template:Inline cleanup tags as appropriate
• Doing a quick search for sources and adding a citation yourself
• Adding appropriate cleanup tags to content you cannot fix yourself
• Repairing a dead link if a new URL for the page or an archive
  of the old one can be located
• Merging the entire article into another article with the original article turned into a
  performing a merge
• Fixing errors in
  wikitext
  or formatting

Remove libel, nonsense, and vandalism, material that violates copyright and material for which no reliable source that supports it has ever been published.

Take special care with biographies of living people, especially when handling unsourced or poorly sourced claims about the subject. Editors working on such articles need to know and understand the extra restrictions that are laid out at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons.

Be bold in updating articles, especially for minor changes, fixing problems, and changes that you believe are unlikely to be controversial. Previous authors do not need to be consulted before making changes. Nobody owns articles, so if you see an improvement you can make, make it.

If you think the edit might be controversial, then a better course of action may be to first make a proposal on the talk page. Bold editing does not excuse edits against existing consensus, edits in violation of core policies, such as Neutral point of view and Verifiability, or edits designed to create a fait accompli, where actions are justified by the fact they have already been carried out.

If someone indicates disagreement with your bold edit by reverting it or contesting it in a talk page discussion,

Be helpful: explain your changes. When you edit an article, the more radical or controversial the change, the greater the need to explain it. Be sure to leave a comment about why you made the change. Try to use an appropriate edit summary. For larger or more significant changes, the edit summary may not give you enough space to fully explain the edit; in this case, you may leave a note on the article's talk page as well. Remember too that notes on the talk page are more visible, make misunderstandings less likely, and encourage discussion rather than edit warring.

Be cautious about making a major change to an article. Prevent edit warring by discussing such edits first on the article's talk page. An edit that one editor thinks is minor or clearly warranted might be seen as major or unwarranted by others. If you choose to be bold, provide the rationale for any change in the edit summary or on the article talk page. If your change is lengthy or complex, consider first creating a new draft on a subpage of your own user page and start a discussion that includes a link to it on the article's talk page.

Whether you decide to edit very boldly or discuss carefully on the talk page first, please bear in mind that Wikipedia is not a discussion forum. It is best to concentrate our energies on improving articles rather than debating our personal ideas and beliefs. This is discussed further at Wikipedia:Etiquette.

The Wikipedia:Dispute resolution processes are available if you need help reaching an agreement with other editors.

For guidance on how to edit talk pages see:

• Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines
• Wikipedia:Refactoring talk pages
• Help:Archiving a talk page

• Contributing to Wikipedia: how and where you can help Wikipedia
• Disruptive editing: how not to edit Wikipedia
• Edit conflicts: how to deal with an edit conflict
• There is no deadline: various points of view on what this lack of a deadline means
• Wikipedia:Template index/User talk namespace/Multi-level templates#Blanking/Removal of content (warning templates)