Terms of Service
Conspiracy Wiki (“the site”) is an independent, community-maintained archive that documents conspiracy theories as cultural and historical subjects. By using the site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the site.
Documents that form part of these terms
These terms are deliberately short because three existing pages carry the rest, and each is incorporated here by reference: the Disclaimer, which sets out the absence of warranties, the limits of liability, and the jurisdictional position; the Content Policy, which governs what may be published; and the Editorial Standards, which govern how it must be written and sourced. Our Privacy Policy describes what the site records about you. Where these terms and one of those pages appear to conflict, the more specific page governs its own subject.
Accounts
You may read the site without an account. Contributing generally requires one. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for everything done through your account. Give accurate registration information, do not impersonate another person, and do not hold more than one account in order to evade a block or to manufacture the appearance of agreement between editors.
Acceptable use
You agree not to use the site to:
- post material that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, or that threatens or incites violence against any person or group;
- target a private individual, or publish personal information about anyone — addresses, phone numbers, workplaces, or similar — whether or not it is available elsewhere;
- post content you have no right to publish, including material that infringes copyright;
- present fabricated sources, forged documents, or invented quotations as genuine, or otherwise misrepresent what a source says;
- attack the site’s infrastructure: automated scraping at a rate that degrades service, circumventing rate limits or access controls, probing for vulnerabilities, or uploading malware;
- evade a block, or use the site to spam, advertise, or solicit.
Documenting a claim is not the same as endorsing it, and these terms are not a bar on writing about difficult subjects. They are a bar on using the archive as a weapon against a person.
Your contributions, and the licence you grant
You keep the copyright in what you write. For contributions made on or after the date at the top of this page, you grant everyone — including us — a licence to use, adapt, and redistribute that contribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). In plain terms: anyone may reuse your work, commercially or not, provided they credit it and release their version under the same licence. This licence cannot be revoked, which is what makes a shared archive possible — an article cannot be held hostage by one of its past editors.
By contributing you confirm that the work is yours to license, or that it is already under a compatible licence or in the public domain, and that you have said so on the page.
Reader notes, discussion posts, and other short commentary are published under the same licence.
Reusing material from the site
Article text is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 on the same terms described above: credit Conspiracy Wiki and link back to the article, and license your version alike. Not everything on the site is ours to license, however. Quoted passages, source documents, photographs, video, and logos remain the property of their owners and appear here for identification, commentary, criticism, and research. Check the rights on an individual item before reusing it.
Copyright complaints
If you believe material on the site infringes your copyright, contact us with enough detail to identify the material and the work it infringes, along with a statement of your good-faith belief that the use is unauthorised and confirmation that you are the rights holder or their agent. We remove infringing material promptly on a valid complaint.
Moderation and termination
Contributions may be edited, reverted, reorganised, or removed by other contributors and by us, and any article may be corrected or deleted. We may block an account or restrict access for breach of these terms. Because the site is a wiki, nothing you post is guaranteed to remain in the form you posted it — that is the nature of collaborative editing, not a judgement about your work.
Links to other sites
Articles cite and link to external sources as a matter of course. We do not control those sites, are not responsible for their content, and citing a source is not an endorsement of it or of the site hosting it.
Changes
These terms may change; the date at the top changes with them, and continued use of the site after a change means you accept the revised terms. A change to the contribution licence would apply only going forward, never to work already contributed.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Tennessee and the United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The site may be reached from jurisdictions whose laws differ; as set out in the Disclaimer, determining whether your use of the site complies with your local law is your responsibility.
Contact
Questions about these terms can be sent to us by email.