Westarctica:Policy

The Encyclopedia Westarctica is a wiki which anyone is welcome to edit and improve. In this sense, it is very similar to the better known wiki "Wikipedia", and it derives its editing software from the same source. However, there are some important policy differences between this wiki and others that exist. Mostly, these policies are meant to encourage a more liberal editing environment with fewer restrictions on content or editorial behavior. This also means, however, that our site admins are freer to take actions against behaviors they consider inappropriate, and to remove content that they deem unsuitable for whatever reason and without much explanation. The sword has two edges; mostly, however, it is not meant to be wielded.

• Vandalism Vandalism of the Encyclopedia Westarctica will be handled just as swiftly and with no less mercy than it is on other wikis. Edits that vandalize will be removed/ undone and the user accounts or IPs that perform them are likely to be blocked indefinitely. There is nothing fair about this.

• Content Having explained our policy with regard to vandalism, you should feel encouraged to add any content and to create new articles that relate in any way to Westarctica's history, biology, geology, etc. Moreover, and in a significantly different way than Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Westarctica makes no requirements that editors include supporting references to the material they add. If you know a fact about Westarctica, you may add that fact to our encyclopedia— your knowledge of its certainty is our only requirement. References are entirely optional.

• Scope The Encyclopedia Westarctica is an encyclopedia about, well, Westarctica. It is not an encyclopedia about Brazil or peptides or Maundy Thursday. We ask that our editors add only content that is within our project scope. If you submit an article about your garage band, unless that band has either performed in Westarctica or has a bass player who is a citizen, the article may not be retained. Unlike Wikipedia, we do not hold deletion discussions. If one of our admins identifies an article or content that is outside of our project scope, that content may be removed without explanation. If you performed an edit and that edit now appears to have been deleted, you are welcome to contact the deleting administrator and ask for an explanation (though we do not police our site with any express strictness, and we are much more concerned with having not enough content rather than too much of it, so this part of our policies is not likely to be well enforced).

• Copyright In most respects, our encyclopedia provides for a looser editing environment than many, but not with regard to copyright. Your own textual contributions are automatically freely licensed the minute you save them, but you are not welcome to add previously copyrighted material unless you are the owner of that copyright. This policy relates to text as well as any visual or audio files (all of which are considered "works"). You may not add works which are protected by copyright unless those works are freely licensed and only so long as you abide by its licensing terms. For example, if you upload a picture created by an artist or photographer whose license has restricted that work to the "share alike" conditions on reuse, then you must be sure that you indicate this fact by selecting the corresponding "share alike" license at the time you perform the upload. You are not permitted to upload any work that is fully protected by copyright by someone else unless you are able to provide a suitable "fair use rationale" for doing so (see Wikipedia's page for more information about fair use and what it means) or unless you yourself are the copyright holder.
  
  

Also in a significant deviation from Wikipedia's and Wikimedia Commons' restrictions on content, you are welcome to license your OWN visual works under more restrictive and non-free terms, if you so choose. If, for example, you upload your own work and would like to restrict that work to only non-commercial reuse, you are welcome to do so. You must understand that the Encyclopedia Westarctica does not enforce such licensing restrictions, however: if you find that an image you submitted and licensed this way has been reused by someone else in violation of your license terms, you must contact the reuser yourself and arrange for a solution. We are not an intermediary in such disputes, we merely allow YOU to indicate how YOU would like to license your own work, including the option to indicate that one of your creations is fully copyright protected. We will host the image and its license, but we have no duty nor ability to enforce your copyright claims against some other party.

If you are the owner of a copyrighted work which you discover has been uploaded to the Encyclopedia Westarctica in violation of your copyright terms for it, please contact any of our administrators and ask that the work be removed. We will be more than happy to assist you in protecting your rights to your work by removing that work from our site upon request.

A large portion of our own content was derived from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. That content was freely licensed when it was created/ uploaded, and we have indicated our source for that content in the edit history or text of our articles by stating, "Created with content derived from Wikipedia" or something similar. In order to identify the authors of those works, you may visit the corresponding articles on Wikipedia and review their edit histories there. This is in accordance with the "attribution" requirement placed on many/ most of these works.

• Creation of new policies If any of our admins decides to establish a new policy or expand/ modify/ reduce the scope of an existing one, they are welcome to do so ad libidum and as they deem necessary. In the spirit of creating a more open editing context than Wikipedia, we hope to keep this keep our policies few and brief so that editors will feel unrestricted with regard to their contributions. If our boundaries are pushed, new written policies may be required.