Wikipedia community guidelines: Rules that keep the encyclopedia honest

When you read a Wikipedia article, you’re seeing the result of Wikipedia community guidelines, a set of unwritten and written rules enforced by volunteers to ensure accuracy, fairness, and reliability. Also known as Wikipedia policies, these guidelines aren’t laws passed by a government—they’re agreements made by editors who show up day after day to fix typos, chase down sources, and shut down bias. Without them, Wikipedia would be chaos: promotional spam, fake facts, and edit wars over every minor detail. But because of these rules, it’s one of the most trusted sources of information on the planet.

These guidelines don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re shaped by other key systems like conflict of interest policy, a rule that forces editors to disclose if they’re paid to write about a company, person, or organization, and Wikipedia consensus, the process where editors debate and agree on changes before they stick. You’ll find these same ideas echoed in how Wikipedia handles spam, bots, copyvio, and even AI-generated text. The goal is always the same: make sure what’s on the page is true, not just popular or convenient. These aren’t just technical rules—they’re ethical ones. A librarian adding a citation, a student fixing a broken link, or a volunteer chasing down a sockpuppet account—they’re all following the same code.

What you’ll find in this collection isn’t a dry manual. It’s real stories from the front lines: how a simple mobile edit can change an article, how A/B testing quietly reshapes the interface, how editors in Ukraine or Taiwan fight to keep history accurate under pressure. You’ll see how TemplateWizard helps new users avoid mistakes, how the Village Pump turns ideas into policy, and how safety tools protect editors who risk their privacy to write about dangerous topics. These aren’t abstract concepts. They’re tools, battles, and quiet victories that happen every minute on Wikipedia. This is how knowledge stays honest—and how you can help keep it that way.