White Wolf:Strive for community solutions

&laquo;- White Wolf: Policies and Guidelines

A crucial aspect of the wiki format is that you should always strive for community solutions.

Pages, not people
When confronting a problem on WWWiki, it's always better to focus on the edits to the pages themselves, and not on the people who are making those edits. If you concentrate on the problem edits, there's a chance that a compromise can still be reached. If you concentrate on the problem editor, those chances go down precipitously.

It may be a hassle to have to deal with unwanted edits. Dealing with vandalism and other kinds of unwanted edits takes time and effort. But arguably, in the end it will only strengthen the community. Everyone can count on each other to take care of our common project. It's our focus on the project — and not the people who are making the contributions — that makes the wiki system work.

See also: Community Solution, Assume Good Faith

Soft security
First, soft security does not mean weak security! Rather, soft security is designed to protect the community in unobtrusive ways. Rather than enforce strict restrictions that limit the abilities of users, the community uses its own resources — people — to protect itself. And in this way, it ensures that the community remains as open as possible and offering the widest range of opportunities for expansion.

Wikis work better because they rely on the community, rather than technology, to police itself. If someone comes along and deletes text or posts spam, someone else can just as easily fix the problem. Since an open environment encourages participation and a strong sense of community, the ratio of fixers to breakers tends to be very high, so the wiki stays stable.

There are technological protections, too — they're just less obtrusive than having to "log in" or "rate" something. Most wikis store old versions of each page for at least a short period of time, allowing damage to be easily recovered. Many wikis provide a means to limit how quickly someone may edit a large number of pages. Most wikis also provide a means to lock out particularly abusive visitors without disturbing other visitors. 

See also: Soft Security, Limit Damage, Peer Review