WikiQueer:Guiding principles

The WikiQueer community has certain guiding principles. Many of them originated with WikiQueer's founding organization, The Aequalitas Project, and others have been added to reflect the unique needs of a wiki and WIkiQueer specifically. These principles may evolve or be refined over time, but they are considered ideals essential to the core of WikiQueer. People who strongly disagree with them are nonetheless expected to either respect them while collaborating on the site or turn to another site. You are welcome to discuss these on this talk page.

Founding Principles

• We owe it to those that follow us to leave the world a better place than we found it
• All people have a fundamental right to have their voices heard
• Education is key to advancing equality
• Efficiency and effectiveness can be measured in several ways
• Advances achieved through compromise and incremental change are steps towards victory - not defeat
• Diversity means more than tokenism
• Being supportive of green and union practices is an affordable responsibility
• Appropriate transparency is a responsibility of all nonprofits
• Sometimes good things really do take time
• Nonprofit programs that charge participants a fee must also provide a means for overcoming any financial barriers those fees may place on otherwise eligible participants
• Corporations have a social responsibility to their community
• Recognition of fundamental human rights including, but certainly not limited to:
  • Equal access to government for all residents
  • Queer equality
  • Sexual freedom
  • Equal access to life sustaining healthcare and education
• The ability of almost anyone to edit (most) articles without registration
• "Wiki process" as the final decision-making mechanism for all content
• Creation of a welcoming and collegial editorial environment
• Free licensing of content; in practice defined as public domain, GFDL, CC-BY-SA or CC-BY
• We must use our technology skills for the greater good, including to help the broader LGBT movement with:
  • Use of emerging technologies
  • Development of open-source software with potential to be a catalyst
  • Creative use of wikis to address challenges
  • Development and publication of MediaWiki extensions and tools to transclude data from WikiQueer's Content Partners
• Maintaining room for civilized debate to help resolve particularly difficult problems
• Privacy of individual editors' non-public information is to be preserved where possible, with very limited exceptions
• Content related to living people or active organizations has more stringent standards than most to better protect the subjects from risk of harm due to inappropriate quality or coverage