Help:Guidelines

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Editing guidelines

Every wiki must have some kind of rules or guidelines, so also the IRC wiki doesn't go without any.

Relation to IRC

The topic of any article must be related to IRC as a technology or software that provides IRC functionality. For products that include IRC only as a smaller part of them (e.g. some Instant Messengers or computer games), the article should more or less strictly focus on that product's IRC functionality.

Objectivity

The articles should never sound like pure advertisement. This can be achieved by writing "The client aims to be user-friendly" instead of "The client is user-friendly" and by sourcing statements. Unsourced statements do not need to be immediately removed and may stay as long as there is consensus that they are true, but if a statement can be sourced it also should be.

You can use Template:Source to mark questionable statements when you can't tell whether they're true or false and when you really think they should be referenced but you can't find any reliable reference yourself that gives you a clue whether they are true or not.

Only relevant links

Any external links of an article should be limited to those truly relevant to the subject. Random small network XYZ that also uses software XY described in the article does most likely not need to be listed.

Difference to Wikipedia

The main difference of the IRC wiki to wikipedia in terms of guidelines is that only very little notability is required. We won't just delete every article on an IRC client just because there is no print source available.

That doesn't mean we don't want proper sources - but it doesn't necessarily need print sources to justify an article (although we like to have them aswell), visible coverage on independent websites is enough indication for a software to be spread on the web, and when in doubt we will leave an article undeleted.

In short: we tend towards Inclusionism - strong deletionists are at the wrong place here.