VGWiki Guidelines

VGWiki is the campus encyclopedia. Articles about Vista Grande, written and kept current by the students who go here.

These rules are on top of the community guidelines, which apply everywhere on the platform. Read those first.

What belongs on the wiki

Articles about Vista Grande and things connected to it. Clubs, teams, traditions, events, buildings and rooms, the bell schedule, courses, the history of the school, campus vocabulary that a new student would not know.

The test is whether a Spartan who transferred in last week would be better off for reading it. If the answer is yes, write the article.

What does not belong:

• Your own opinions presented as fact. If something is disputed, say who disputes it rather than picking a side.
• Homework, essays, and class assignments. Those go on VGWrites.
• Anything you would post to complain about a class or a teacher. That is what VGAgora is for.
• Made-up articles, joke articles, and inside jokes written as if they were real. A wiki only works if readers can trust it by default.
• Articles copied out of Wikipedia or anywhere else. Write it yourself.
• Article text produced by an AI tool. That has its own section below.

Text generated by AI

Do not use an AI tool to write or rewrite an article. Generating the text and then editing it is still generating the text, and saying so in the edit summary does not make it allowed.

You can use one to check your spelling and grammar, to ask what a word means, or to point out that your article is missing an obvious section. Then write the section yourself.

The reasons are mostly about damage to the wiki rather than about fairness to you.

A model produces the words most likely to come next, which is not the same as the words that are true. It will state Vista Grande’s bell schedule, the year a club was founded, or the name of a hallway with total confidence and get it wrong, and a confident wrong sentence is much harder for the next editor to catch than an obviously unfinished one.

It also invents sources. Generated text comes with citations that look right and point at nothing, and an article nobody can check is worse than no article, because readers trust it anyway. Generated passages can carry someone else’s copyrighted wording too, which is not yours to publish here.

The third reason is the point of the whole thing. This wiki is worth reading because the students who go here wrote it, and they know which door is actually locked and what everyone calls the courtyard. A model does not know any of that. It has never been on this campus.

The same goes for talk pages, where a generated comment is worse than useless. The point of a talk page is to find out what an actual editor thinks.

Generated article text gets reverted the same way any other bad edit does.

Writing about people

This is the part people get wrong, so it gets its own section.

Do not write an article about an individual student. Not a nice one, not a funny one, not one about your friend who said it was fine. Students show up in articles when they did something the school has already made public, such as winning a competition or holding an elected office, and then only in that context.

Teachers, coaches, and staff can be covered in their school role: what they teach, what they run, how long they have been here. Their personal lives are off the table. So is anything about how good you think they are at their job, which belongs in a conversation with your counselor, not an encyclopedia.

Never post anyone’s phone number, address, schedule, or class period. Never upload a photo of a student who has not agreed to it.

Editing other people’s articles

Every article on the wiki is editable by anyone with a school account. That includes the ones you wrote. Somebody rewriting your paragraph is the wiki working, not an insult.

How to do it well:

• Fix what is wrong, add what is missing, and leave the rest alone.
• Do not delete a whole section because you disagree with it. Talk about it on the article’s talk page.
• If you revert someone and they revert you back, stop and use the talk page. Two people going back and forth over the same paragraph helps nobody, and repeated edit warring gets both accounts a break from editing.
• Undoing obvious vandalism is not edit warring, so do not let this rule stop you from cleaning up a blanked page. A good-faith edit you happen to disagree with is not vandalism, even when you are certain it is wrong.
• Do not blank an article. If you think it should not exist, say so on the talk page.

Talk pages are for the article, not the person who wrote it. Argue about whether the sentence is accurate. Do not argue about whether the editor is stupid.

Your edits are permanent and public

Every revision is kept in full, forever, with your name on it. That has two consequences worth understanding before you type.

The first is that vandalism is pointless. Blanking a page or replacing it with something dumb takes one click to undo and leaves a permanent record of you doing it.

The second matters more. Deleting text in a later edit does not remove it from the wiki. The old revision is still there and anyone can read it. So if you post someone’s private information and then think better of it, editing it out does not fix the problem, and you need to report it so the revision itself can be dealt with.

Write as though the first draft is the one people will read, because it stays readable.

Images and files

Only upload an image if you have the right to. Your own photo of the gym is fine. A picture you found through a search engine is not, even with credit.

Photos with students in them need the agreement of the students in them. A wide shot of a packed rally is different from a close-up of three people who did not know you were taking it. Use judgment, and take it down if someone asks.

Categories and organization

Categories are how anyone finds anything. Put an article in the categories it actually belongs to, and not in five more because you want it seen. Renaming or recategorizing a group of articles at once affects everyone, so raise it on a talk page before you start.

When an article gets held

Edits are checked before they go live, so there can be a short wait between saving and seeing your change. If a revision is held, it does not publish until a person clears it, and the article stays on its previous revision in the meantime.

A held edit is usually a false positive on an ordinary word. Open a ticket at /support and it gets sorted out. The full appeal path is in the community guidelines.