Help:Editing
From Muscatelli Genealogy Wiki
We founded the Muscatelli Genealogy Wiki on a small set of fundamental principles.
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[edit] Share all Content
Also known as Open Content, Muscatelli Genealogy Wiki follows after sites such as Wikipedia that freely share their information in the hope that others will freely contribute to them. This means that we will never copyright the genealogical work you submit or willfully restrict its distribution.
[edit] Free Access
We intend to always allow free access to Muscatelli Genealogy Wiki content. We believe that the more people that access Muscatelli Genealogy Wiki the better the content will become. The better the content becomes, the more people that will visit and contribute. It's a circular pattern that benefits everyone.
[edit] Trust First
Most people have good intentions and want to contribute rather than be destructive. If we lock everything down then nothing will happen. We choose to trust people first and hope they will make the "right" decisions.
[edit] Track Everything
Even though we trust people at first, that doesn't mean that people don't make mistakes (willfully or accidentally). So we track all changes just in case someone turns out to be not so trustworthy. Part of tracking everything means that only logged in users can make changes. This way we can attibute every action back to a single user.
[edit] Allow for Easy Rollback
We want changes to be quickly reviewed and reverted if necessary. If it's faster to revert than to maliciously destroy then the 99% of good people will always be ahead of the 1% of bad people. This also applies to not allowing people to cause harm quickly. For example, we don't have any "Delete ALL" buttons anywhere. :)
[edit] One Tree Only
We don't believe in multiple copies of genealogy. Multiple versions causes confusion, mistakes, and discourages communication. If you think the father should be John and someone else thinks it's William, then you both can't be right. Muscatelli Genealogy Wiki can help facilitate the open dialogue, but ultimately the father can only be a single person.
[edit] The Older Record Wins by Default
When merging records we always keep the oldest copy (the individual record with the lowest ID #) by default. Over time the older records should become better and more accurate. It would be tragic if a time tested record with years of meticulous edits was accidentally overwritten during a careless merge. This means that if you import your "perfect" genealogy file, you'll have to manually review each change if you want your changes to win over the previous set of records.
