APL Wiki:Content guidelines

APL Wiki's content policy is based on Wikipedia's. In general, Wikipedia's content policies and content guidelines are a good place to start if you're not sure what material belongs on the APL Wiki.

We do some things differently in order to support APL Wiki's focus on APL.

Notability
APL notability is not Wikipedia notability. While the APL Wiki adopts many of Wikipedia's notability guidelines, the concept of notability itself should not be shared between the two sites: then they would need to have the same content! While Wikipedia documents topics of general interest, the APL Wiki documents a specific interest: APL, and topics of interest to APLers.

Article notability
The APL Wiki is interested in documenting several things, which are considered inherently notable:
 * The APL language and array language family (e.g. Transpose)
 * Influences on APL's development (e.g. John Scholes)
 * The community of APL users (e.g. FinnAPL)
 * Applications of APL to interesting topics (not information about these applications but the applications themselves; e.g. Fast Fourier transform)

In general, being an APL user or knowing APL is not notable. To be interesting to an APLer, a user needs to have contributed to APL or the APL community in some way. So SimCorp, despite being notable enough for Wikipedia and a major user of APL, is probably not APL notable.

Because we consider some topics inherently notable, it is possible for a topic to be notable but not verifiable. If there is truly no verifiable information about a topic then it has no place on the APL Wiki, but our verifiability guidelines are more flexible than Wikipedia's and even material which is difficult to verify may be allowed. See.

Content notability
In general, only the APL-related aspects of a topic are notable. IBM has done a lot of things, but only its effects on APL or on APL developers belong in its APL Wiki article. Anything about IBM which is more generally notable by Wikipedia's standards should be on Wikipedia! This constraint is relaxed somewhat for articles on topics which are not found on Wikipedia. Keep the article focused on APL but it is fine to include expanded biographical or historical information for such topics. Relationships between two topics covered in the APL Wiki, even if they are not because of APL, should be included as well.

Verifiability
We make use of Wikipedia's definition verifiability, but expand the definition somewhat to allow some kinds of material that would otherwise remain undocumented.

The results of evaluating an expression in any array language, even one which is not readily available to the public, are automatically considered verifiable. Please actually perform this evaluation if you are relying on this rule! Results are also considered verifiable if they may be clearly derived from the language's published documentation.

Mathematical statements about APL with proof are considered to be verifiable. If you derive a new relation between APL primitives, and can prove it to a capable APLer, then feel free to put it on the wiki. Make sure you are clear about exactly which functions you are using, including distinguising between variations on APL primitives and noting any modifications or restrictions need to be made for the proven statement to hold.