Founding principles
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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" of consensus building 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 the English Wikipedia (and other wikis set up similar frameworks) — to make binding, final decisions such as banning an editor.
