Astrodienst Astrowiki:About

provisional editing guidelines

(written by Alois Treindl, founder and CEO of Astrodienst AG, Switzerland. Astrodienst is the maintainer of this AstroWiki.)

Astrodienst hopes to create, with the help of a community of volunteer editors, a relevant encyclopedia of astrology.

We admire Wikipedia and we are happy that it contains a lot and growing amount of information about astrology. However, Wikipedia has disadvantages for a field like astrology, which continues to be disputed by skeptics and other minority groups. In wikipedia, astrological content is often challenged or even distorted. An astrological wiki under the control of astrologers can cover more areas of astrology and keep vandalism and destructive skepticism at bay.

It is difficult to define the focus of this AstroWiki. Let me call it 'modern western mainstream consensus astrology'. This does not imply that special fields like traditional astrology, hellenistic astrology, hindu/vedic astrology should stay out of the wiki, but they should not dominate it. They should not grow faster than the main body, just because some enthusiast editor feeds new material rapidly.

In an article on The Sun the modern astrological mainstream opinion should be represented, minority views (like Sun in esoteric astrology etc.) dealt with in specialist articles, e.g. on esoteric astrology.

When the wiki is looked at as a growing tree, the tree should always remain balanced and trimmed in shape. It would not do to add 500 new articles on vedic astrology, when the core of the wiki is growing much slower.

If an editor has a special hobby like, for example, astro-meteorology, which does (in my humble opinion) not belong to the modern astrological mainstream body of teaching, this special field should enter the wiki only in some special articles. Such en editor should not go through all articles, like planets, signs, aspects, and add the 'astro-meteorology' information to each of these articles.

The AstroWiki is a consensus-oriented encyclopedia, not a place to show off, not a place to earn personal fame, not a place to pursue very special hobbies. At least, in its current state, not yet.

We do not know where we will end up with this wiki in five years. We are very curious.

These ideas are open to discussion and revision - please use the Discussion Link on top of this article to contribute and criticize.

License

The AstroWiki by Astrodienst is published under this Creative Commons License