Ground Rules and Resolutions

The rules that outrank every other guideline, the conventions all entries are written to, and the procedure when editors disagree.

Five pages describe how to write an entry, what counts as adequate, what happens to an entry afterward, and who has asked to be excluded. This page is the floor beneath all of them. Where another page appears to permit what is forbidden here, this page governs.

The Ground Rules

1. Consent precedes publication. Inform a person before writing about them. A refusal ends the matter; record it on the Rejected List. A request for removal after publication is honored without argument as to whether the remark was fair.

2. Nothing Written to Injure. From the Disclaimer to Volume I: this encyclopedia is meant for informational, satirical, or humorous purposes and is not intended to target anyone for hate or to hurt them emotionally. An entry that is amusing at the cost of the person described fails this rule regardless of how well it is written.

3. The Stated Standard. Write of a person only what you would say in their presence. Attribution is public, so the question is not whether you will be identified but whether you are content to be.

4. Satire Is Marked. Any statement about a real person that is not literally true is marked as satire. Marking does not license the remark: a cruel line remains cruel when highlighted.

5. Fact or Nothing. Quotations are verbatim or they are paraphrased as description. Second-hand accounts identify themselves as such. An invented statement attributed to a real person is removed rather than corrected.

6. Excluded Material. Grades, disciplinary records, medical or family circumstances, home addresses, telephone numbers, and sexual content concerning students are not published here. A kis.ac address is acceptable.

7. The Encyclopedia Is Public. Any visitor may read it; only a school account may edit it. What is written is visible to the person described, and to their family.

Writing Conventions

These govern the surface of every entry. They exist so that a reader moving between entries meets one encyclopedia rather than forty separate voices.

Spelling. American spelling throughout — color, organize, defense, traveled. British spelling is permitted only where the entry is imitating British usage for effect, and where that is the point of the sentence.

Capitalization. Headings take Title Case: principal words capitalized, articles and short prepositions in lower case unless they open the heading. Entry titles follow the name as it is ordinarily written — Adventure Day, Mr. John Striffler, Lunch Line. Prose is sentence case. A subject's title is capitalized when it precedes the name (Principal Kim) and not when it stands alone (the principal).

Person. Prefer a person, an editor, a student, anyone, no one. Avoid somebody, anybody, everybody, and nobody; they read as speech rather than as reference.

Spacing. One space after a period, never two. No space before a comma, period, colon, semicolon, question mark, or exclamation mark; one space after. An em dash takes a space on either side — as here. Parentheses and quotation marks sit tight against the text they enclose. A footnote marker follows the punctuation it belongs to.

Numbers and dates. Spell out numbers below ten in prose; use figures for ten and above, and for all measurements, room numbers, and years. Write dates as 22 August 2026 in prose. A slang term records only the year, or the year and month, that it fell out of use.

Korean and English. Korean is set without italics and without transliteration unless the transliteration is the subject. Where a Korean term first appears in an entry written in English, a short gloss follows it. Do not add a space inside Korean punctuation that does not take one.

Markup. Link an entry with double brackets on one line: [[Adventure Day]]. Bold marks a field label; italics mark a quoted phrase or a term under discussion. Reserve headings for sections a reader would seek out, and use the section names the guidelines already establish rather than inventing synonyms.

Resolutions

Most disagreement concerns wording, and wording is inexpensive to correct.

An Edit You Disagree With. Edit it again and state the reason in the description. That is the entire procedure. Reversion is reserved for vandalism and for edits that make an entry less true — not for wording you would have chosen differently, as Quality Control states.

A Passage That Keeps Changing. Stop after the second reversion. An edit war degrades the entry and is preserved in a history any reader may consult. Ask an administrator to lock the entry, and settle the question in person; the parties attend the same school.

An Objection From the Subject. The subject prevails. Not as a finding on the merits, but because clause 3 of the Disclaimer holds that material is published with consent and withdrawn on request. An administrator may erase a single remark and leave the remainder of the entry standing; request this by reporting the entry and identifying the line.

Material That Crosses a Line. Report it rather than correcting it yourself, and state what is wrong. Reports are attributed, as edits are.

An Administrator's Decision. Say so plainly. Every lock, deletion, erasure, and ban records who performed it and why, and remains visible to the other administrators. An administrator is an editor with additional controls, not an editor whose judgment carries greater weight.

Not Subject to Revision

Consent, removal on request, the Rejected List, and the prohibition on writing to injure. Every other provision in these guidelines is a convention, and conventions may be argued with, improved, and rewritten by whoever follows.

These four may not, because the encyclopedia continues only for as long as the people described in it are willing to be described.

See Also

How to Write an Entry · Quality Control · Housekeeping · Rejected List · Slang Dictionary