This is a short guide designed to lay out what articles are under "staff purview," defined here as "the scope of control that staff exerts on the articles on the site." This is a fairly narrow list with very specific circumstances.
- Staff always have the ability to edit articles to correct formatting, add voting modules, or fix minor errors. Staff may also edit to articles to standardize them. For example, capitalizing SCP or moving measurements over to metric. Other site culture shifts (such as the change from amnesiac to amnestic) also fall under this category, though authors may revert these changes—and face the consequences for doing so with the voting public.
- All system pages, official guides, major site hub pages, and similar, integral site documents are under Staff Purview at all times. Major edits to such pages should be proposed and discussed publicly on 05 prior to enacting them.
- At any time, an author can willingly give control of their articles to staff by making a statement saying such.
- Staff currently consider "older articles" to be under the control of staff if they are considered abandoned. To determine if an article is abandoned, simply see if the author has been active on the site within the past year. If they have, then the article is not considered abandoned. If they have not, then it is abandoned, and falls under staff control. This also includes authors who have "given their articles to someone else for safe keeping." If both users have been inactive for this amount of time, then these articles fall under staff control.
Staff control is defined as being under the purview and protection of the Rewrite Team. The Rewrite Team will not and cannot make or authorize significant content edits to articles under staff control unless the article falls to a low voting score (the exact values vary and are listed in the Rewrite Guide). Should this occur, the Rewrite Team may exercise the authority to approve a rewrite of the article for the purposes of preservation in lieu of the original author. The Rewrite Team may also approve minor navigational edits (i.e. Wikiwalk Links) to staff controlled articles. Finally, the Rewrite Team may authorize the licensing team to edit staff controlled articles in order to replace images non-compliant to Creative Commons with suitable alternatives on a case by case basis. Authors who publicly expressed desire at any point to never have their articles rewritten will have their wishes respected. Furthermore, should an author return from absence, authority over their articles will immediately return to them.
If an article under Staff Purview has been found to be plagiarized or contains some similarly rule breaking material, then the offending material (up to and including the entire article) should be deleted. The Disciplinary Team should handle this process, and any issues arising from it, as this is a case of rules violation.
Please remember that we are working in good faith to keep the site up to date, constantly improve ourselves, and keep the site fresh for years to come. Using Staff Purview to cause a negative reaction, punish someone you dislike, or cause damage to the site is grounds for demotion.
Technical Purview
In addition to the above circumstances, the Tech Team claims purview of certain pages in the theme: and component: categories. Such pages are considered to be under technical purview if the author is currently banned or if the author has been absent for a period of six months or longer. This is because pages in these categories are used widely across the site, and may need fixes or changes to work properly as site usage and browser conditions evolve. As with normal staff control, should an author return from absence or be unbanned, authority over their pages will return to them.
Tech Team control can be used to make edits in the following ways:
- Updates in response to changes to pages in the nav: category or edits to the site theme. These changes should maintain the page's original aesthetic and appearance to the greatest degree possible.
- Fix issues with the page that are in violation of the CSS Policy or Technical Content Policy, or in response to edits to those policies.
- Fix issues with the page as a result of changes to its base theme, Wikidot's styling/function, or browser-related changes to CSS.
- Minor aesthetic edits for the improvement of the theme or component. This should preserve the original aesthetic of the theme, or function of the component. This line should only be used sparingly.
Additionally, the Tech Team shall be responsible for rewrites of any pages that fall under the jurisdiction described above, rather than the Rewrite Team.