Founding principles
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(Redirected from Foundation Issues)
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The Wikimedia projects as a community have certain founding principles. These principles may evolve or be refined over time, but they are considered ideals essential to the founding of the Wikimedia projects – not to be confused with the Wikimedia Foundation (which also arose from the Wikimedia projects). People who strongly disagree with them sometimes end up leaving the project.
These principles include:
- Neutral point of view as a guiding editorial principle,
- The ability of anyone to edit (most) articles without registration,
- The "wiki process" and discussion with other editors as the final decision-making mechanism for all content.
- Free licensing of content; in practice defined by each project as public domain, GFDL, CC-BY-SA or CC-BY.
- Maintaining room for fiat to help resolve particularly difficult problems. By convention, Jimbo Wales and later Arbitration Committees retain certain authority on en:wp (and other wikis set up similar frameworks) -- to make binding, final decisions such as banning an editor.
