RACKWiki:Author guide

RACKWiki is a harm-reduction educational resource with user-created content. Any registered user can create or edit most articles on the wiki.

Getting Started

Create an Account

An account is required to contribute to RACKWiki.

1. Create an account with username, password, and email. While you may use a pseudonym for your username, an active email is required.
2. Confirm your email address. The confirmation email will almost certainly be located in your spam folder. Resend confirmation email from the email portion of your preferences page if needed.

While new users may immediately begin editing and creating within the site, those changes will not be published until they have been approved by an editor. After multiple successful contributions, the user will be granted author level access which will allow the user to publish directly without review of an editor.

Contributing

Guidelines

In order to make RACKWiki as direct and useful as possible, we encourage authors to:

• Be thorough but concise
• Include reference citations
• Frame articles through lens of harm-reductive practices
• Use consistent style and language within an article
• Use bulleted lists and tables when possible

New Articles

Creating an article from search/red link

How to find templates in editor

In order to create an article, first, log in.

Begin by typing in the name of the article you want to create in the search bar at the top of the page.

Creating an article

*Info about seeding an article/editing existing heading

• Info about using Article Templates

User levels

• User: Level upon creation of profile. Can create and edit articles, but any changes require editor approval prior to content being publishing.
• Author: Authors can create and edit articles which will publish immediately without editor approval. Users are usually promoted to authors after one or more high quality content submission was reviewed and published.
• Editor: Editors moderate content submissions from Users, promote users to authors, and can edit most protected pages.
• Administrator: Administrators can edit all protected pages and manage some aspects of other user accounts.

Assessing risk

Risk level definitions

In order to encourage consistency and allow for relative risk assessment, RACKWiki uses the following standardized definitions of risk level when summarizing the risk of a given topic.

Health

Health risk relates to the likelihood of injury or death if the topic is practiced.

• Mild: Severe injury AND death unlikely
• Moderate: Temporary or permanent severe injury conceivable AND death unlikely
• High: Temporary or permanent injury plausible OR death conceivable
• Critical: Permanent injury or death risk essentially unmitigable

Legal

Legal risk relates to the likelihood of legal ramifications to the practitioners if law enforcement becomes involved or civil liability is pursued related to the practice of the topic.

• Mild: Unlikely to result in legal ramifications for practitioners
• Moderate: Legal ramifications for practitioners conceivable, legal contingency planning recommended
• High: Legal ramifications for practitioners likely, legal contingency planning highly recommended

Manual of Style

Title

The article title should be a recognizable name or description of the topic that is natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles. Capitalize the initial letter, but otherwise follow sentence case. Do not use articles in titles unless they are inseparable part of the name.

The following naming conventions are followed for individual topics:

• Articles about drugs or medicines should use the International Nonproprietary Name (INN). Common trade names should be included in the lead section.
• Articles about chemicals should use IUPAC nomenclature if that name is in common use. If not, use the most common name, and mention the IUPAC name in the lead.

Sections

The content of the article should begin with an introductory lead section, which does not have a section heading. The rest of the article is divided into sections. There are several available boilerplate section lists for common themes (kink activity, medicine, and so on).Linguistic choices of English

Linguistic choices

RACKWiki uses US English spelling in its articles.

Formatting

Dates and time

Use the format 1 January 1970 or January 1, 1970 when writing out dates. For lists and tables, YYYY-MM-DD can also be used.

Units of measurement

Use SI measurements. Customary conversions can be provided in parenthesis.

Grammar and usage

By default, write articles in the present tense. Use past tense only for past events or topics that no longer meaningfully exist.

Gender-neutral language

Use gender-neutral language. Do not use generic he or she. Use pronouns to refer to people only when appropriate pronouns are clear. If it's not clear what pronouns are appropriate, avoid pronouns completely with alternative sentence construction. Do not use singular 'they' if it's not a clearly stated preferred pronoun.

Instructional and presumptuous language

Do not use unencyclopedic or presumptuous language. Avoid phrases such as of course, naturally, obviously, clearly, and actually. Do not address the reader with phrases like remember that and note that. Purely instructional content, and policy/meta pages are allowed to address the reader, just like this page does.

Technical language

Technical language may be unavoidable when an article describes a nuanced, complicated topic. However, the lead section of an article should always provide a simple overview, and overly esoteric terms should either be replaced with simpler ones, or explained either inline or in a link to a separate article.

Plurals, vocabulary

• Contractions

Neutrality and factuality

Be careful when describing the safety of a particular activity. Avoid vague terms such as dangerous, irresponsible, and risky. Present risks in a neutral way, using well sourced data when available. For example:

• Bad: Catheters are risky because they often cause urinary tract infections.
• Better: According to research, catheter use in a controlled medical setting carries a symptomatic infection risk of about one percent, although a higher percentage may experience an asymptomatic infection.

Hypothesize and synthesize carefully. Many areas of BDSM and kink lack peer-reviewed research, and that's why RACKWiki does not have a policy of No Original Research like Wikipedia does. Be careful when creating factual content not directly attributable to a reference.

• Bad: Shock collars are safe to use on humans. [there is no research directly targeting this, so this is an opinion]
• Better: In medical literature, there are no documented cases of shock collars directly causing fatalities or permanent injury on humans [this could be easily disproven by finding a single reference, so it's a fair statement to make]. However, injuries may be caused by loss of muscular control, such as falling down when the collar is activated [probably no scientific reference, but a news story probably can be referenced if someone disputes this].

Media files

• Images, Other media files, Avoid using images to convey text, Captions Bulleted and numbered lists