Help:Editing
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Rules & Guidelines for Hellenistai Wiki Editors
If you must start with the Wikipedia article, you absolutely must attribute Wikipedia!
Wikipedia is technically under copyright -- in fact, just about everything written after 1927 is likely under some kind of copyright protection or restrictions. Wikipedia is under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribute-ShareAlike Licensing. What that means is that you can freely distribute and even edit Wikipedia pages, BUT you have to attribute where it came from; in theory, Wikipedia would be within their rights to pull a cease-and-desist on every Wiki site that uses Wikipedia pages, even thouroughly edited Wikipedia pages, without conforming to the guidelines of that licensing.
Now because I don't want this to be a carbon-copy of Wikipedia, I generally discourage blanketly copy-and-pasting Wikipedia pages to this site, even with a proper attribution statement. Please make extensive edits whenever and where-ever possible if you really must begin with a Wikipedia article.
That said, even with extensive editing, if the page still looks like it began on Wikipedia's corresponding page (and even if you don't think so, it very well still may), then you ABSOLUTELY MUST include the following statement in a "Notes" section of the article:
- The earliest versions of this page utilise text from Wikipedia, which is under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution Share-Alike licensing, and may be distributed and edited freely for endeavours such as this.
This rule will be strictly enforced as of 2010-05-12; anybody caught removing this note from pages will be banned, without question.
This is a living religion, make sure your articles reflect such thinking.
Refer to the deities, etc., in the present-tense. Articles that begin like "Hera was the goddess of marriage..." not only bear a tell-tale sign of coming from Wikipedia unedited, it also creates the impression that the goddess is question is dead, and thus the religion is dead, and if you are a part of the Hellenic polytheist community, you know that's not true.
Check your spelling and grammar before clicking "save page".
Do not rely on myself or the other Admins to be your editor. We don't expect you to catch everything, even professional editors miss something on occasion, but please try to make your edits look as nice as possible.
when including source books, include the ISBN
You can do this by adding "ISBN ----------" after the title and author; this creates a page to where readers can find links to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other sellers. It's totally nifty, non? You can locate the ISBN on the back of most books, usually just above the barcode; you can also locate the ISBN on Amazon.com, BN.com, Library Thing, and other book sites. If an ISBN is not available, then this is likely because the book is out-of-print or is an edition printed in the early 1960s or earlier. If the book is out-of-print, check Google Books, Project Gutenberg, or the Digital Archive Project, as it may have lapsed into the Public Domain and may be freely available; please link to those books after listing the author, title, and publishing information.
