Community guidelines

The first rule is about other people, not about content

Everyone here is writing about somebody’s inheritance. A page on this site is often the only description in English of a practice a family has kept for two hundred years. Write as though the person who carries it is reading over your shoulder, because one day they will be.

Disagree with the claim, never with the person. “This source says otherwise” is an argument. “You clearly know nothing about this” is not, and it will be removed.

What folkroom will not publish

• Knowledge a community holds closed. Some practices are not meant to be written down for outsiders — initiation rites, restricted songs, sacred designs. Where a community has said so, that is the end of it. This outranks every other consideration on this page, including completeness, and we will remove material on a community’s word without requiring them to prove a legal right.
• Anything uncited. However true, however obvious, however well known where you live.
• Anything copied. From a book, a website, another encyclopedia. Read it, then write what it says in your own words and cite it.
• Promotion. A page about a tradition is not a listing for a troupe, a school, a shop or a festival.
• Sexual, violent or degrading material, and anything that presents a living practice as a curiosity to be gawped at. An automatic screen catches the obvious cases and pulls the page down rather than queueing it; a person handles the rest.
• Personal information about living people beyond what a published source already carries about their public work.

Writing about a tradition that is not yours

Most people writing here will be outsiders to most of what they write about. That is fine — it is how an archive of the whole world gets built — and it comes with obligations.

• Use the name the practitioners use. Where an exonym is better known, record both and say which is which.
• Describe what a practice is before what it resembles. A form is not “the X of Y”; it is itself.
• If a community source and an academic source disagree, record both and say they disagree. Do not silently prefer the one that is easier to cite.
• If you are told by a practitioner that a page is wrong, that is evidence. Take it to the talk page and find a citable source together, rather than reverting them.

Editing well

Assume the last editor was trying. Most bad edits are misunderstandings, not vandalism. Fix rather than revert where you can, and say in the edit summary what you changed and why.

If a page is being fought over, stop editing it and take it to the talk page. Repeatedly undoing another person’s work is the fastest way to lose the ability to edit directly, and it never settles anything.

What happens when someone crosses a line

Proportionate, recorded, and reversible in that order. Almost everything is a conversation. In escalating order: the edit is corrected; the page is protected so edits queue for review; the account is limited to suggestions; the account is suspended.

Every action is written to an audit log that reviewers can read, with who did it and why. Governance explains who holds those powers and how they are granted.

Two things skip the ladder and are removed immediately: closed community knowledge, and material that degrades a living practice or the people who carry it.

Reporting something

Every entry has a report link. Use it for anything wrong, offensive, promotional, or that should not be here at all. Who filed a report is never shown to the person reported.

If a report needs to go outside the normal route — because it concerns a moderator, or a community’s restricted knowledge — contact us directly and say so.

If you think we got it wrong

Say so. A different person reviews it. We would rather reverse a decision than defend it, and reversals are counted in the transparency report alongside the actions themselves.