From HowToGeek

This page contains the guidelines for editing and creating new pages on the How-To Geek Wiki. For help creating new pages, read Starting a New Page.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Link Policy 3 Protected Pages 4 Copyright 5 See Also

Overview

This is a list of general guidelines to follow, which will be expanded further in the future.

1. Search for articles before creating a new one - there's no need to duplicate content.
2. All content must be unique, original, and above all cannot be copied from some other site. We take copyright very seriously. More on this in the Copyright section below.
3. Links to any sites other than How-To Geek must be placed into a References section at the bottom of the article. Further link policy guidelines will be coming.
   
4. Pages about commercial products are permitted, but must be written solely in "informational" style, listing features or other facts about the software. These pages will be reviewed carefully by the How-To Geek staff.
5. No advertising or affiliate links are allowed anywhere within the wiki. If we find an affiliate link we will place that software on the spam list.
6. No links to TinyUrl or any other URL-shortening services, since they might cause confusion on what a link's destination is.
7. No personal pages. This isn't Myspace.

Link Policy

I've decided to spell out the linking conditions explicitly, since I fear that the Wiki will be a target for people attempting to build traffic to their websites/blogs.

1. Links to external sites must be placed into a "References" section at the bottom of the article. No inline links within the article to outside sites are allowed, even to pages within the How-To Geek network. Inline links are assumed to be Wiki-links.
2. Links to external sites may only be for reference purposes and must be limited to the home page of a product or company that the article is directly referencing. For instance, an article about the CrossLoop remote help application may have a link to the CrossLoop homepage in the References section of the article, but should not have that link within the article itself.
3. If an article is referencing a product or company that has a page on the How-To Geek Wiki, the links should be an inline wiki-link to the Wiki page. In this way all links will send the reader to a single place, which can then be updated once if the target website changes, rather than having to update dozens of broken links scattered across the wiki.
4. There should be no links to external how-to articles. The goal is to have all how-to information centralized within the How-To Geek Wiki. Note that links to articles within the How-To Geek network are permitted, but it would be preferable long-term for those articles to be rewritten within the Wiki as well.
5. Links to Wikipedia should be placed within the References section and should not be placed inline.
6. All links are marked with "nofollow" automatically.

Protected Pages

Most pages can be edited by anyone, but some pages on the site are locked to prevent vandalism and spam. You are welcome to suggest changes on the Discussion page.

Copyright

All pages under the wiki are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License This license might change in the future, but the general guideline is that you shouldn't start copying content from How-To Geek.

See Also

• Starting a New Page
• How-To Geek Wiki Copyright