| š Image | This is an explanatory essay about the WP:ONUS policy. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
| š Image | This page in a nutshell: ONUS interacts with other policies in various ways. This essay is a summary of what the community has thought so far. |
- One of the things ONUS does is give a process for dealing with a fact or claim that's verifiable, but in the wrong place.
- Only use ONUS when you give a reason for your change. ONUS is not a reasonāit's a process.
- ONUS enables editors to move any fact or claim, including a fact or claim that's meticulously cited, to the article that's most appropriate for it.
- If there's no appropriate article, options are to start one, or to remove the disputed fact or claim.
- Because ONUS involves moving material that's properly cited, WP:V is a natural place where editors would tend to look for the rule.
- It interacts with WP:PRESERVE to mean that if the fact or claim belongs anywhere in the encyclopaedia, it can be moved rather than simply blanked.
- It interacts with WP:UNDUE to mean that if there's dispute about where to put the fact or claim, we tend to put it in the less prominent place. This can be good or bad.
- It's important for dealing with marketers and people with an agenda, who often won't want you to move their well-cited fact or claim to a place that gives it less prominence. ONUS is helpful in that situation.
- It's also useful for those who want to whitewash an article. This can lead to misuse.
- Where there's an apparent conflict between WP:ONUS and WP:NOCON, WP:NOCON prevails where there's reasonable evidence that the fact or claim had prior consensus. Otherwise WP:ONUS prevails.
- Longstanding versions of the article don't necessarily have consensusāparticularly for low-traffic articles. The best way to tell whether a fact or claim has consensus is if it's been specifically discussed on the talk page. It likely also has consensus if it's been substantially edited by a number of different editors over a reasonable period of time without challenge. (Examples of edits that aren't "substantial" include minor MOS-related edits, categorization, autowikibrowser, and typo fixes).