Guild Wars Wiki:About

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Guild Wars Wiki

What is this website about?

 * Guild Wars Wiki is the official English language wiki for Guild Wars. It is hosted by ArenaNet for the Guild Wars community to be managed and shaped by the community.

Why would ArenaNet offer to host a wiki? What's in it for ArenaNet?

 * The wiki is a fantastic resource for Guild Wars players. It's often more complete and useful than the documentation that ArenaNet generates internally. Wiki documentation is featured prominently in Guild Wars through the help menu.
 * Because the wiki is featured in game there are a few factors ArenaNet needed to take into consideration. First, the game's wiki documentation needed to be hosted on a site that could scale to handle the potentially huge volume and huge bandwidth that comes with game integration. Second, it needed to be hosted on a site that they could guarantee would always be available. Third, the wiki needed to be hosted under a license that permits integration with the game. For these reasons, ArenaNet decided to start providing free hosting for a wiki site on their servers, and started working with the community to document Guild Wars.

ArenaNet hosts the site, does ArenaNet own the content?

 * ArenaNet is not attempting to own user-contributed articles or have any special rights over them. ArenaNet offered to host user-contributed content under the terms of the GNU Free Document License, which is the same license that Wikipedia uses. Contributors own the copyrights to original content they write, and by uploading them to the ArenaNet-hosted wiki site, they make their articles available for other people to use under the terms of the Free Document License. See Guild Wars Wiki:Copyrighted content for more information.

ArenaNet hosts the site, does ArenaNet police or control the content?

 * ArenaNet agrees with the community on some basic guidelines, like "report facts, not opinions" and "the purpose of this site is to document Guild Wars", and then asks the community to administer and moderate the site.
 * There are three main levels of users on this wiki. The most common are the normal users. The next level comprises of Sysops, who are chosen by a request for adminship; these users are here to enforce policy and carry out maintenance, such as page deletion. See Guild Wars Wiki:List of administrators to see who they are.
 * Above Sysops are the Bureaucrats. Their job is to appoint Sysops based on community consensus, and they are the final arbiters on the English language Guild Wars Wiki of user conduct (but not content decisions), including that of sysops. Bureaucrats are elected for a fixed term by the community in elections.

What's this "Guild_Wars_Wiki:" thing in the address bar about?

 * The Guild Wars Wiki strives to host information relevant to the game Guild Wars and the people who play it. To that end, the information here is separated into different areas or namespaces. An example of a namespace is the User namespace, which contains pages for individual users. For a list and description of the namespaces of Guild Wars Wiki, see Help:Namespaces.


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