VassarWiki:About

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This page reflects established consensus. It should only be edited after reaching a new consensus on the talk page.

Our existing communication tools weren't built for college life. Emails are overwhelming and easy to miss, official sites only push information from the top down, and social media is manipulated by corporate algorithms. These tools fail because they don't reflect the fluidity and collaboration of communities. This is why we are building Vassar a wiki: a website that is collaboratively edited and governed by its users.

VassarWiki is a common space for the Vassar community to share and organize knowledge about Vassar life. Any community member can contribute, so keeping up to date is a shared effort instead of an individual burden. And as a persistent resource, VassarWiki is building an institutional memory that survives the four-year student turnover cycle.

If you want to help us, you should contribute! All you need is five minutes and something worth sharing.

Getting started

See also: VassarWiki:Help

Anyone connected to Vassar can contribute! All you have to do is sign up with your Vassar email. If you're connected to Vassar but lack a vassar.edu email, you have to apply to have your account approved.

You can edit a page by clicking the "Edit" button by a section or at the top of the page. You can either use the visual editor (recommended if you're new to editing, but more resource-intensive and slightly less capable) or switch to the source editor on the upper-right. Make whatever changes to the page you want, write a short edit summary, and save your changes. If your changes are non-controversial and superficial (e.g. fixing typos or minor formatting), click the minor edit button before saving your changes.

You can create a page by going to Special:EditPage and entering your desired title, or clicking a red link with the desired title (on desktop, you can find one by searching it).

What can I contribute?

See also: VassarWiki:What should I contribute?

VassarWiki is deliberately open-ended to adapt to community needs. There are two main types of pages:

• Articles can be about things like student orgs, events, classes, departments, and college lore. Content should be written from a neutral third-person point of view and be sourced when possible.
• Every contributor has user pages that only they can edit. You can put pretty much anything on your user pages (e.g. interests, projects, org memberships, essays or freeform content, contact information).

There are a few other types of pages as well:

• Every page has a corresponding talk page, where you can resolve disputes about page content or otherwise talk freely about that page's subject.
• Categories are assigned to pages to assist in navigation and organization. They are listed at the bottom of a page.
• Templates are pages designed for inclusion in other pages.
• Files like images, videos, and audio files, can be embedded in pages. Files should almost be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, where they will be released to the public domain.
• Project pages (those with the prefix "VassarWiki") deal with the governance and maintenance of VassarWiki.

Please read and understand VassarWiki policies before you edit. It's encouraged that you read any relevant guidelines before you edit, but there is no need to be an expert.

Contributions generally don't require prior approval, so if you think you can improve this project, be bold and make the edit! If there's an issue with your contribution, another user can revert it and you can discuss on a talk page if needed.

Policies and guidelines

Policies are the site's foundational principles that all contributors must follow. Put simply, contributors should:

• Build and respect consensus when disputes arise
• Leave a trail of citations, edit summaries, and talk page signatures
• Not publish copyrighted work here
• Not censor information they don't like
• Be civil and assume other contributors come in good faith

Guidelines are records of best practices in content and behavior. While there is no need to be an expert on guidelines when starting out, contributors should generally defer to and attempt to follow them.

Like everything on VassarWiki, policies and guidelines are established by community consensus and can evolve.

Governance

VassarWiki adopts a collective governance model, where decisions are made through deliberation and consensus-building. The weight of each contributor's voice should be evaluated by the strength of their argument.

Certain technical actions require their access be limited to a smaller group of contributors called administrators, who remain bound to community consensus and are not given any precedence in disputes.

See also

• VassarWiki:Disclaimer
• VassarWiki:Privacy policy