AFSWiki Access Policy
From AFSWiki
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Anyone Can Read Most AFSWiki Pages
The volunteers and staff who have created AFSWiki believe that on balance, the benefit of open access to information about AFS outweighs the cost. In this spirit, most pages in the AFSWiki are readable and searchable by anonymous visitors.
Some Pages Require a Login to Read
A few, special but important categories of pages may only be read by users with accounts on AFSWiki. The permission to read these pages is restricted so that members of the AFS community may share personal, biographic, or otherwise sensitive information within the community without making the information available to the non-AFS public. The categories of restricted-access pages are:
- "User" pages. These pages contain personal, biographical and contact information about the people who have AFSWiki accounts – that is, the volunteers and staff of the AFS-USA community. To identify these pages, look for "User:" in the URL, or see the full list.
- "Private" pages. These pages contain sensitive, AFS-related information that should not be quoted outside the AFS community. The IT Advisory Group and that group's designees are responsible for deciding what pages to make “Private”. To make a new "Private" page, see AFSWiki Private Page Process. To identify these pages, look for "Private:" in the URL.
- Pages about specific schools. These pages may contain notes on people associated with each school who have been involved with AFS, so they will all be considered "Private." To identify these pages, see the full list.
All other categories of pages, including AFS News pages and all PDF and JPEG files uploaded to AFSWiki, are readable by anonymous visitors.
No Page May be Changed Without Logging In
Although we welcome anonymous visitors to read most AFSWiki pages, anonymous visitors may not add pages to or change the content of AFSWiki. That privilege is limited to “users”: the volunteers and staff of AFS-USA who have logged in to their AFSWiki accounts.
A Few Pages May Not Be Changed Even After Logging In
A few pages are restricted from editing by all except a few users (users with the word "sysop" after their name on the user list). These pages contain text that must be maintained verbatim, for reasons of regulatory compliance or liability. Examples of this type of content are procedures or regulations from CSIET or the United States Department of State. If you are reading one of these pages, it will lack an "edit" button, even if you are logged in.
Benefits of an Open AFSWiki
- Less burden on volunteers to remember their AFSWiki password if all they want to do is look up something
- Access to AFS information from AFS stakeholders who are not registered volunteers or staff, and thus are not eligible for an account: educators, past/present/future host families, participants, participants’ natural families, members of the press, etc.
- Less work for the volunteers to maintain account access for those who only wish to read, but not change, AFSWiki information
