AntWiki:Governance

The following are our management structures, guiding principles and operating rules. These are subject to revision at any time.

Management

Antwiki is currently managed by David Lubertazzi, Gary Alpert and Steve Shattuck. Future needs and circumstances may lead to additional people being added to the management team.

Guiding principles

Antwiki is a place for ant experts to share their knowledge, data and images.

We believe all ant biologists should be allowed to have editorial rights and make contributions. Anyone that can provide bona fide evidence of their professional expertise in ant biology will be considered for an editing account.

If you are not a professional scientist you can still contribute to Antwiki by adding notes to the Discussion pages. This information will then be available to editors who can integrate this information into the main Antwiki pages, as appropriate.

Please go to the User Accounts page to find out how to request an Antwiki account.

Antwiki management should provide the lightest possible guidance concerning content creation.

There are some rules and guidelines but will be as limited as possible. Our aim is to support and promote:

Core Antwiki content, such as species pages, being presented in a consistent, predictable fashion. This makes finding information as easy as possible.
The flexibility that allows contributors to create interesting, relevant and unique content. Editors can explore different ways of presenting information about ants and ant biology.

A few rules

User accounts names will reflect the name of the actual account holder.

Nicknames and pseudonyms will not be allowed. Antwiki is a community website, with editors being fully accountable for their actions. Providing a real name, which is attached to all contributions and edits, is one way to establish a high level of community trust and civility.

Any editor that is disruptive, malicious or attempts to use Antwiki for uses that are deemed harmful to Antwiki or the Antwiki community will have their account revoked.

Rather than beginning by explicitly defining what is not allowed on the web site we prefer to suggest civility and fairness should be the rule in posting new information and editing existing content on Antwiki. Our approach is to trust all to behave well, while also monitoring what is being done on the web site.

Additional details

For general information concerning Antwiki see Antwiki:About, Antwiki:General disclaimer and Antwiki:Privacy policy.