Wikiquote:Rules

This page is a guideline on Wikiquote. It tells about ways to do things, which many users agree should be the way things should be done. Major changes to this page should be talked about on the talk page before changing.

Wikiquote is a project made by many users and its users have a common goal:

Our goal with Wikiquote is to create a free collection of quotes, maybe even the biggest one in history, in both size and detail. We also want Wikiquote to become something that people can trust will be right.

Wikiquote has some rules that most users care about. We have these so that our pages look clean and people can understand them the way we want them to. These help us to work toward our goal. It is important to know that some of these policies are still changing as Wikiquote grows. Some others, however, have been around a long time. Most people don't question these rules because they have worked for a long time.

Basic rules

• Be bold.
• Don't break copyrights. Wikiquote is a free collection from the GNU Free Documentation License. Adding copyrighted work without permission is dangerous to our project. We want it to be free forever. See the Wikiquote copyrights page for more information.
• Wikiquote is a collection of quotations. The site needs to be used for making the collection better. You should use a page's Talk page to talk about making a page better. Make sure you know what Wikiquote is not.
• Be nice to other users. Wikiquote users come from many different places, and believe in a lot of different things. If we can be nice to each other, we can work together better and get more done. If you want to read more, see the being nice page.
• Follow rules. If we follow these rules we are able to make a better collection of quotes:
  • Editing rules (How to change a page)
  • Naming a page (How to give a good name to a page)
  • Pages with the same name (How to deal with pages with names that are like each other)
  • Picture rules (How to put a picture on Wikiquote)
  • Deleting a page (When and how to get rid of a page)

An administrator is a user on Wikiquote who has been here a long time and made a lot of good changes. Administrators get special powers if they pass a vote. If you want to read about things that administrators can do, see the administrators page.

A lot of rules we use here at Wikiquote came from rules on Wikipedia. If a rule about something Wikiquote isn't here yet, you can read about it on the Wikipedia rule page.

See the common mistake page for some useful information for new users about how not to make some mistakes.

How do we make sure people follow the rules?

You are a Wikiquote user. Wikiquote does not have a single person in charge of everything. Instead, users watch the recent changes page and fix things when they see problems there. So users are both writers and editors.

Sometimes there are big cases where a user acts very bad and we at Wikiquote don't know what to do. Then, we ask Jimbo Wales, who started Wikipedia, to help us make a choice. Jimbo has also said that some rules are ones that everybody has to follow; see this email and Jimbo's most important rules page.

How we make rules

We at Wikiquote make rules by seeing how most people make changes.

The things on this page and related pages are supposed to describe community rules that have already made by the majority. Problems should be worked out on talk pages.

Specific rules

These rules are ideas that some users have started:

General rules

• Don't be afraid to change pages
• Tell us when you take out something
• Build the web
• No vandalism: Don't change pages in a bad way.