Style Encyclopedia:About
From Style Encyclopedia
Style Encyclopedia is a freely-available, community-run repository of fashion and style information.
Most content on this site is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, so it's available for all the add, edit and re-publish.
This project is borne out of the fashion blogosphere (the person who thought of it and the person who championed it are both fashion bloggers), as a more permanent home for the best style-related info online. On a blog, great content disappears from the home page and is promptly forgotten; in an encyclopedia, it stays accessible forever -- and is kept up-to-date by a community of interested people.
A wiki-encyclopedia is the perfect format for that.
While we love Wikipedia and use it regularly to read up on various topics, some of the policies that make it so great in general also restrict how useful it can be as a source of information about fashion, beauty and style.
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How we differ from Wikipedia
We are similar to Wikipedia in many ways, but there are a few key differences in our policies:
We're all about style
The first and most obvious difference is that we are not a repository for all significant human knowledge. Wikipedia already has that covered off brilliantly!
Instead, we focus on one of the few topics that Wikipedia doesn't cover as well: clothing, style and human appearance. Our aim is to democratize fashion by making 'insider' knowledge about how to look your best each day available to all.
Notability vs comprehensiveness
Wikipedia's notability policy means a topic, event or person must have "received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject" in order to be notable. This means that only the topics that made it into 'reliable' sources such as books or newspapers are deserving of coverage. For most topics, it's a very sensible rule; for style, not so much.
In fashion, typically the companies that spend the most on advertising get the most coverage. That means there are a lot of commercially-successful labels out there that matter to a lot of people, but don't get the coverage they'd need to be 'notable'.
That's why we lean towards comprehensiveness over notability. While we do prefer a great reference list for each article, we are willing to include topics with a potential audience of 1,000 or more people that are not receiving mainstream media coverage. (Especially if they're topics that receive a lot of coverage in alternative media like blogs.)
Inclusion of instructive material
Another Wikipedia policy that is very sensible in general but not so great for coverage style-related topics, is their policy against inclusion of instructive materials such as tips or how-tos.
Clothing, beauty items are fundamentally practical products. They are created to be used; to alter the appearance of the wearer. Providing the reader with a comprehensive understanding of a fashion or beauty item is often greatly enhanced by a detailed step-by-step on how it is used.
Therefore, our policy is to encourage a mixture of encyclopedic and practical information on all topics.
Expert contributors
Wikipedia's policies on conflict of interest are also less useful in the style space than they are in general.
To be clear, we are not a repository for press releases and advertising materials; anything we find that sounds like spin will be pruned back to its bare factual bones (if it's not removed altogether).
That said, we do encourage people to write about the topics they know best, and we don't mind if they have a commercial interest there. For many style-related topics, the people who can best provide comprehensive and detailed information are the people who work on something every day.
Our single condition on this, is that you declare your interest. Contribute under you or your company's real name, and tell us about your work on your user page (linked from your name). You also help your credibility if you resist hyperbole -- no matter how much you love your work -- and cite other sources to back up your claims.
