WeRelate:Policy

Community

WeRelate is a community website. Contributions are made with agreement to abide by the Creative Commons Attribution License. Once content is shared, it may be edited by other community contributors. No one person owns the content on any of the pages. Regarding material that you contribute, if you do not want other people to add to it what they know, to correct mistakes, improve formatting or edit grammar, etc., then please do not post your content on WeRelate.

Golden Rule

Please use the Golden Rule to guide your actions on WeRelate. Play nice. Be polite. Don't post information that is offensive. We encourage everyone to remove any offensive material or spam. We want to make this an inclusive community where people feel accepted and they are encouraged to participate.

Profanity and lewd language

WeRelate is a family-oriented genealogy site. The use of profanity and lewd language is not allowed. The first offense will result in a 1 week block with the offending language being removed from the page. The second offence will result in a permanent block from using WeRelate. If a complaint is lodged with the Overview Committee, they will use their discretion to address the situation.

Conflicting Opinions and Editing Wars

WeRelate encourages "communication, collaboration and research" among researchers to resolve any differences of opinion in lineage or relationships. It is important to note that there is much "family history or tradition" that has been passed down on families that has been proven to be factually incorrect or at best not backed by the available records, and disagreements between researchers may exist in any family. Dealing with those differences through communication, collaboration, research and civility is always preferable on WeRelate.

Please do not remove information that conflicts with your opinions. If you disagree, politely add a new paragraph citing your reasoning and references. (You are encouraged to remove and edit obvious factual, grammatical, and spelling errors, such as a 4 year old having three children.) See Wiki etiquette.

PARTICIPANTS IN AN EDITING WAR--repeatedly deleting and rewriting each other's work--WILL BE BLOCKED FROM WeRelate FOR ONE MONTH. If you feel you have been blocked in error, please contact Dallan@WeRelate.org.

Copyright

You retain the copyright to all material you create that is contributed to WeRelate. You do not gain any rights to existing WeRelate page content when you edit or add material any existing WeRelate page. You do not gain any rights to edits or materials added to a WeRelate page after you create, edit, or add material to that page. The content you add to WeRelate is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license and for compatibility reasons, the GFDL. See terms of use and licensing for additional details.

Spam and Vandalism

Users or IP addresses that vandalize or place spam on WeRelate pages WILL BE BLOCKED from WeRelate FOR ONE MONTH. If you have been blocked in error, please contact Dallan@WeRelate.org.

Living People

Information on living people will be removed unless the person is a notable individual documented on Wikipedia whose shared ancestry is likely to be of interest to the community. (This exception is used primarily for heads of state.) WeRelate assumes that people with birth dates in the last 110 years without anything in the death or burial date fields are living.

Ancient Genealogy

WeRelate focuses on genealogy that can be traced to the present day. Early and ancient genealogy, including whether any lines connect to the present day, is a specialist endeavor for professionals. WeRelate has therefore adopted a policy of declining to host work for genealogy before 0700 AD.

Some pages, for very well substantiated early individuals (pre 0700 AD) may exist as unadorned extracts of information from Wikipedia. Such pages will be marked with a template that refers to this policy. They are meant to serve in the role of sentinels that will help catch early pages that users might inadvertantly create - allowing for recognition and removal of such material.

Place page text

Place page texts should consist of information that is relevant to genealogists. Ideally each place page would contain helpful research tips and historical information, in order to aid researchers; however, it is also appropriate for them to contain more general descriptions of the place. Part of understanding our ancestors is understanding where (and how) they lived. Objective descriptions of places on place pages helps make this understanding possible.