File:John Diefenbaker holding Canadian Bill of Rights.jpg
Some editors invokes the Canadian Bill of Rights claiming they have the right to edit, but that's just plain wrong

Right to edit is an erroneous assumption that users on Wikipedia has an inalienable "right" to edit the contents of Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, we only have two rights, right to fork and right to leave.

Editing on Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right, for users who are in good standing and contribute to Wikipedia constructively. If you come to Wikipedia with the intention of submitting false, unverifiable materials or commit egregious vandalism, you will lose the privilege either temporarily by being blocked for a period of time, or permanently, by being indefinitely banned. The Wikipedia community, the Arbitration Committee, and Jimmy Wales have the power to revoke any disruptive editor's privilege to edit. The verifiability of the facts is exactly what the community's consensus demands in its WP:RS, WP:V, and WP:ATT policies. Editors should read and comply with policy. Editors who ignore policy will eventually find themselves on the wrong end of a block. The key is for editors to understand we have an open-arm acceptance but not blind faith.

If you disagree with this

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If you disagree with this, or with what Wikipedia stands for, but still wants to write an encyclopedia with Wiki format, you can start a new encyclopedia with MediaWiki software and use Wikipedia's files with GFDL documentation and attribution. In fact, many people have already done this. Fred Bauder has started Wikinfo and Larry Sanger has started Citizendium.

See also

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