Wikibooks:Assume good faith

Seeing the best in other Wikibookians whenever you can enables the community to function with minimal fuss.

Assume good faith means to treat others as if they have sincere and honest intentions. It is an honor system where you are expected to give the benefit of the doubt whenever possible and assume that other people are doing likewise. You should regard discussion of your actions or contributions as constructive criticism. If you feel that you have been misjudged in some way or that people got the wrong idea, you can come to an understanding by using the discussion page to clarify your actions and intentions, and by considering what others say. When you find people hard to work with, consider they may find you hard to work with as well.

Even an edit which adds apparent nonsense or removes significant content without explanation may be an accident, an experiment, or a case where a person thought his or her reasoning would be self-explanatory. Unexplained mishaps can and should be fixed, but the responsible party should not automatically be treated as a vandal, since vandalism by definition is intentionally destructive. Similarly, when you encounter a claim which you believe to be untrue, either in a book or in discussion, treat it as an honest mistake and not as a deliberate attempt to deceive.

The expected assumption of good faith is not a shield against the consequences of bad behavior—Wikibooks Administrators can block disruptive users from editing, if there appears to be no other viable recourse. However, problems can often be solved without administrative action; remember that intentions may be good even when behavior is problematic. Any Wikibookian can contact another to express concerns, politely, about his or her edits. Only if reasonable attempts at communication clearly fail should you report the user's behavior to Administrators. Note that such reporting is in itself a statement that the assumption of good faith has failed, and thus should not be done prematurely.

Examples

Here are some examples of how to address common concerns:

• Out-of-scope material added. Move material to the discussion page or to where it is within scope, and explain where the material went in the edit summary.
• Wanted links added. You can fix links to point to existing pages within the book, temperately point links to external websites with more information, replace links with missing information, or encourage someone else to fix it by adding {{dewikify}} to the page. People may need help understanding that books are expected to be self-contained and to include explanations directly.
• Incorrectly titled. Move the page to the correct title with a link to the naming policy in the move summary.
• Inconsistent style. Make a minor edit, replace HTML with wiki markup, add wiki markup to plain text, and make corrections that follow the book's manual of style. Explain what was changed and point to Help:Editing or the book's manual of style in the edit summary.
• Fixed word variants. People may fix unfamiliar spelling variants of words. However books should attempt to use a consistent variant of English. Use a minor edit to restore the correct variants of words and point people to a major English dictionary like Wiktionary for variations in spelling.
• Inaccuracies. You can clarify the facts, or add {{disputed}} to the page to encourage discussion.