Community Guidelines

We love communities! We love to provide tools to help build and nurture them. In order to provide the best possible home to our communities, we must place some restrictions on what types of wikis we allow here:

Whether it's culture, science, art, or esoterica, your wiki should serve to inform and teach both visitors and editors.

..because wouldn't it be great to have a comprehensive guide to everything to do and see in your town?

We are here to help communities of people collaborate and share knowledge. Creating a wiki for just personal usage, or creating any other wiki with no intended community, is an unwelcome drain on our resources and goals.

Together, everyone's knowledge becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Generally, unless you have permission to upload the content, it's a violation of United States copyright law. Since Wiki Spot is hosted in the US, we must adhere to US copyright law. Most Wiki Spot wikis have some copyrights that are intended to create a free resource for their community. Instead of stealing something else, create something free for everybody!

Search around to see if there is already a wiki that covers the topic of the one you are considering starting. Use "search all wikis" to find topical information across all wikis, and use our Wiki Directory to find specific wikis by topic. When we work together we can get a whole lot more done!

Don't create a wiki to promote your business or product. Wiki Spot isn't here to subsidize your business.

On the other hand, we are here to provide to all communities; for example, a user group would be more than welcome to create a wiki. There is a fine line here, but exercise your best judgment and don't hesitate to engage in a discussion with the community if you're not sure.

For-profit businesses are always free to contribute, respond, and help maintain pages about their business on a wiki. These pages are maintained by the community as a whole, and the pages should be written in the voice of the community, not in the voice of the business. Pages about businesses should serve to inform and teach the community as a whole, not promote a particular for-profit business.

What's this mean? This means that adding stuff like promotional material (without any other value, e.g. it's not historical, newsworthy or otherwise interesting) and advertising is generally not okay on pages about for-profit businesses. We tend to consider things like long product price lists to be promotional in nature, but there are exceptions.

If you have questions about this please see our page for questions about this. You can also see some legalese regarding this.

Mean people suck.

We cannot support communities that exist to support illegal activities such as child pornography, drug smuggling, terrorism, baby eating, etc.

If you are not sure if your idea meets these guidelines or not, feel free to ask the community. We'll let you know whether you can proceed or not, and we're aware that there's a lot of grey area in the world.

If your idea is in obvious conflict with these guidelines, such as establishing a website for a business, there are still ways we can help. You are welcome to use Sycamore, the open-source wiki software that Wiki Spot uses, on a commercial hosting provider. Members of the Wiki Spot and Project Sycamore communities are very likely to assist you in technical aspects of your wiki, as long as you're nice to them. :)

However, if your wiki is not established in accordance with these guidelines, we reserve the right to suspend your wiki or delete its contents. Still, we will try to work with you to avoid any misunderstandings, and, if possible, get you an export of your wiki.