Community & Contributor Guide

How to share what you know, how it's reviewed, and how it relates to RKB's official, science-reviewed knowledge base.

A community contribution is a short, first-person note from a real keeper or breeder — an observation, a tip, a warning, or a regional care note tied to a specific species and care topic. It captures practical, husbandry-floor experience that complements (but never replaces) RKB's reviewed care sheets.

These are deliberately kept separate and are never merged automatically. Official care sheets and knowledge documents pass through source research, citation, and specialist scientific review before publication. Community contributions are unreviewed first-person input, shown clearly labeled beneath the official content on a species page — never inside it. A contribution does not become official knowledge because it was submitted, is popular, is highly voted, or comes from a verified contributor. It can, at most, be cited as supporting evidence if a researcher separately reviews it through the existing editorial process — see "From community to official" below.

Where possible, back a contribution with evidence: a source URL, a citation, or a link to an existing RKB reference. Evidence is reviewed independently and marked moderator-verified, disputed, or unverified — label your submission honestly rather than presenting an opinion as a confirmed fact.

Every contribution starts Pending Review. A moderator approves, rejects, or flags it; approved contributions appear publicly, attributed to their author. See My Contributions for exactly what each status means and what you can do next.

Only a verified, active account may submit or edit contribution content — a moderator grants verification after confirming a contributor is a real, genuine participant. A badge is not a claim of scientific authority, and it never bypasses moderation or scientific review:

A contributor's reputation reflects real, explainable signals: approved contributions, net helpful votes, submission consistency over time, and moderator-verified evidence. It is a rough signal of constructive participation, not a scientific-accuracy score, and it can never override evidence or bypass review.

Readers can mark a contribution helpful or not helpful, and reply in its discussion thread. This is separate from RKB's Consensus Engine, which independently detects agreement and conflict across approved community observations using its own evidence-weighted method — never a simple popularity vote. See a species page's Consensus tab for that view.

A community contribution can inform official research — for example, its attached evidence may cite an existing RKB reference that a researcher also relies on. RKB does not currently silently promote a contribution's own text into official knowledge; any incorporation goes through the same research → review → publish pipeline as any other source, with a visible, traceable link, never an implied or undocumented connection.