Wikipedia:Summary of important policies and guidelines
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This essay is an attempt to list Wikipedia policies and guidelines roughly in order of their significance. Although all Wikipedia policies are "significant", this list is based on the idea that from the fundamental principles of Wikipedia flow the most fundamental policies, and from these fundamental policies flow other policies and eventually guidelines. The foundational principles are best summed up by the Five pillars or Wikipedia, but Jimbo Wales' statement of principles, the Founding principles for Wikimedia projects, and Wikipedia's core content policies should also be taken into account when attempting to arrange policies my their fundamentality.
The most fundamental policies are those summarized in the Five pillars. Perhaps the most fundamental of the pillars is that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, which is also one of Jimbo's foundational principles. From this principal, flows our first policy:
One important thing that "Wikipedia is not", is that Wikipedia is not just any encyclopaedia. A number of specifics make Wikipedia a very special encyclopaedia, one of the keys being that Wikipedia is free content, another of the five pillars. As one of the Founding principles for Wikimedia projects, this idea of "free content" also applies to Wikimedia projects more generally. Jombo stressed this principle in his foundational statement by saying "The open and viral nature of the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License is fundamental to the long-term success of the site". From this principle, flow a number of policies, perhaps one of the most significant being
This policy is particularly significant because it is not just a policy matter; it is a legal matter. So you could say that another Wikipedia principle, so obvious that it tends to remain unstated, is that Wikipedia is legal. Not only this, but that Wikipedia is uncontroversially legal. (In this sense, Wikipedia can be said to be the informational antithesis to the unrelated project Wikileaks. While Wikileaks have not as yet ever been convicted of breaking the law, their goal is to publish the material that is the most difficult to publish in the world) Wikipedia focuses on publishing the easiest material to publish in the world, which generally means using media under open licences—such as the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License, or material in the public domain. In the case of short segments of text, it means providing proper attribution in the form of inline citation and quotation marks when necessary.
As Wikipedia:Copyrights is a legal matter, it is perhaps the only case in which one cannot simply Ignore the rules. This brings us to our next policy: