Community Editing

iFixit.com is a wiki-based site. By definition (thank you, Wikipedia) a wiki is:

...a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser.

Community Editing allows for our users (you) to easily contribute content to our ever-growing site in order to reach our goal of curating a collection of the directions to fix every thing. The system we have in place has a set of rules that allow for both authors and admin to monitor incoming information. As you contribute, you’ll begin to earn more reputation. The more reputation you have, the more power you’ll have to help monitor the content of the site.

While navigating our site, the other types of users you'll notice are administrators and moderators. If you feel that something has been done that is incorrect or out of line, reach out to our staff team at moderation@ifixit.com.

There are three major elements that make up the Community Editing feature: User Reputation, Page Permissions, and Content Patrol.

Reputation is earned based on how much a person has contributed to iFixit. It is an indication of how much the community (therefore, the system) trusts you. You can earn reputation by making contributions that other people find useful (creating new guides, wikis, or filling out device category pages) or completing tasks (such as answering questions on the answers forum or helping to improve a guide with flags) which will earn you varying degrees of reputation.

Conversely, performing other less-appreciated acts (or down right deplorable acts like spamming) will deduct reputation.

Attaining degrees of reputation gives you access to features, like helping review and accept edits in Patrol.

To see your reputation, start by going to your profile by clicking on your username in the top-right of the site-header. Then select View Profile. Last, click on the Reputation tab. This takes you to your reputation over time and the breakdown of how you earned it.

In Reputation over time, you'll see your reputation growth by, hopefully you've guessed this, time. You can place your mouse over any spot on the graph to view your reputation at that specific date.

The second section is the Reputation Breakdown. The Reputation Breakdown allows you to see exactly how you earned (or lost) reputation points. This section explains how many times you performed an action (Count) that gained or lost you reputation and how much reputation (Delta) was awarded.

You can view anyone's reputation graph and reputation breakdown by going to their profile and clicking on their Reputation tab.

For more specific information about the reputation you earned, click on the Activity tab next to the Reputation tab. This shows every action you have performed recently. If any of those actions earned or lost you reputation, the amount is displayed to the left of the action.

Earning reputation on your iFixit is easy! There are many different ways to increase your reputation.

Helping out other members of the community by answering questions increases your reputation. Answering unanswered questions is a great way to increase your reputation and help the planet at the same time.

The other main way to receive reputation is through creating or improving Guides. The more instances that people complete or like guides you've written or helped with, the more reputation you will receive.

The following is a complete list of how reputation can be earned through guides:

• A site admin makes your guide Public, thereby "Approving" it for the rest of the site to view.
• Someone completes your guide.
• Someone completes a guide that uses your guide as a prerequisite.

When multiple people contribute to a guide, all reputation received from that guide is divvied up amongst each author who contributed at least 10% to the guide.

Here's an example:

• Alice started the guide, but over time it's grown and her contribution is now 60%.
• Bob has made a lot of improvements and added new photos, contributing 36% of the total.
• Mallory contributed a few minor edits totaling 4%.

If Jane successfully completes the guide, which grants the author(s) +30points, Alice will get +18 points, and Bob will get +12. Mallory would not gain any points until she made more substantial changes to the guide. Then, if the guide had any prerequisites, 30 reputation points would be divvied up between its authors.

A key to running a user-based website is monitoring user activity. One way this is done is by removing reputation when someone does something that hurts the site or the community.

As easy as it is to gain reputation using Answers, it is also possible to lose it. By making sure to only publish information that is constructive, you will not have to worry about losing reputation. Reputation is typically lost when an answer or question that you post is voted down. On rare occasions, reputation may be lost if your post is removed for being offensive or spam. Again, this only occurs if you intentionally post something offensive or with the intention of spamming.

We do have a spam filtering robot, and let's be honest, while it's CPU is always in the right place, it's not that smart. So if you feel that content of yours was mistakenly marked as spam, reach out to moderation@ifixit.com for some human interaction.

Certain tasks, such as voting down a post, cost a little bit of reputation—not much, but enough to encourage you to be sparing with your criticism. Voting down posts is a very useful way to provide constructive criticism to others, but abusing the power can hurt the site.

Earning reputation unlocks some users privileges as they proven their worth on the site.

You can always ask a question or post an answer. However, as your reputation increases, the system trusts you more and allows you to perform more actions. These are the actions available in Answers, as well as their required reputations:

• Flag a comment: 20
• Flag a post: 30
• Vote on moderator actions: 100
• Edit device on a post: 200
• Archive a question: 5,000
• Reopen a question/answer: 10,000
• Delete a question/answer: 20,000

For more information on some of these topics, review the Moderation Guidelines Wiki.

The main way to moderate what people post is to patrol the edits that they make to pages. Having more reputation means that there is a higher chance that the edits you make will be instantly published, regardless of permission thresholds.

It is important that contributing to site content is a simple process; if it is not, valuable information may never be added.

The problem is that these two goals—protecting high-quality existing content and encouraging community contributions—can be diametrically opposed. With the Page Permissions system, original authors of content can set a minimum reputation limit on pages they create. This is primarily in place to reduce vandalism or unwanted changes to page content.

Most pages have a Permissions section. Administrators determine how much user reputation is required for the page to be edited without passing through Patrol. If someone with lower reputation than specified (other than the page creator or a member of the creator's team) edits the page, then the edit is not immediately published (instead, they go to Patrol to be reviewed). An administrator, author, or user with enough reputation will then accept (or deny) the edits in the queue before they go live.

Only administrators and original authors are able to set permissions. For everyone else, the permission section is automatically set by the system.

How to Set Page Permissions

Let's say the permissions value is set to 1000. A member with 1500 reputation could freely edit the page, and those edits would immediately go live on the site. If someone with 500 reputation made an edit, their edit would be sent to Patrol for review. Until the edit is accepted through Patrol, it will remain unpublished on that page.

If a page has submitted edits that are under review through Patrol, an unverified version of that page (including all recent pending edits) is available for viewing through a link at the top of the page:

If viewing the Unverified Version, users will always have the option to return to verified snapshot of the page, which is does not include any pending edits.

The Patrol queue allows site authors, admins, and users with adequate reputation to review edits submitted by the community.

To view all edits awaiting review, navigate to the Patrol tab from the Community page.

After clicking on the title of an edit awaiting review, the revision changes are visible and are typically highlighted as shown below. Unchanged text is not highlighted. Text that was removed or changed is highlighted in red, and the edits awaiting acceptance are highlighted in green.

From here you will have one of three patrol options:

• Accept - Edit is accepted.
• Deny - Edit is denied.
• Edit - You have the ability to make changes to the Edit before it is accepted.
  • If one user makes multiple changes to a page, these edits show up on the same review page. If you change the status of an edit, either accepting or denying it, all edits listed above this one will receive the same status. For example, if you choose to accept the fourth edit without first accepting or denying edits one through three, it will accept all four of them.

If you want to work on a guide with a group of people and do not want to bother with every edit waiting to be approved, there are two different options.

The first option only applies if you are the original guide author. If you are, you can simply set the permission threshold to 0 (or any number below all of your members' reputations) and all edits will automatically go live. This option works, but you must be aware that this means anyone with the right amount of reputation can edit your guide without waiting approval.

The second option is to create a team. All team members are able to freely edit any guide created by another member of their team. This is typically the best option when creating a collaborative guide.