Editorial Policy

GTMC uses a flat organizational model with two roles: reviewers and writers. Outside contributors and writers receive identical treatment, and reviewers rotate from within the writer team. Reviewers are responsible for enforcing writing standards, performing fact checks, resolving conflicts on pull requests, and approving PRs.

To submit, draft an article on the website or locally, fill out the frontmatter at the top of your Markdown file, write using standard Markdown plus supported custom syntax, and open a Pull Request through the website or GitHub. The site opens and syncs the PR for you when you draft on the website.

Reviewers approve, request changes, or close the PR. Once a reviewer approves, the article is merged and goes live on the next site deploy. A strict recusal policy applies: reviewers cannot approve content they submitted or primarily authored — it must be cross-reviewed by other members of the reviewer pool.

GTMC is governed by a single Editorial Board. Members are collectively referred to as Editors (also called Article Editors).

The board runs on a hybrid seat model. Permanent seats (such as Petris and void) hold core personnel responsible for architectural decisions, arbitration of major disputes, and system revisions. Promotions to permanent seats are currently by invitation only. Rotating seats are filled by active editors selected periodically from the candidate pool; any contributor who has submitted at least one PR may be invited to the rotation candidate pool.

The current proposal uses an adjustable one-month rotation and tentatively selects three active editors through a weighted random process. Participation is optional, and a resting principle lowers the priority of editors who served in the previous cycle unless expertise is scarce. Content involving an active editor must be cross-reviewed. The source document still marks the formal dispute-resolution process as unfinished; it currently anticipates permanent-seat members making the final ruling.

All submissions must avoid factual errors. Fabricating unverified game mechanics or making severe logical errors in derivations is strictly prohibited. Minor formatting or tone issues are corrected with a reminder rather than a penalty. Academic fraud and copyright infringement — including plagiarism and unauthorized copying of others' work — are strictly forbidden.

Contributors must maintain an objective, professional tone, prioritizing neutral phrasing such as "results indicate" or "experiments show," and avoid subjective vocabulary such as "I," "we," "feels like," or "probably." All abbreviations must be spelled out and explained on first appearance, and terminology must remain consistent throughout the document. Original work must always be cited prominently.

Violations of the Code of Conduct are handled in three tiers. Level 1 (minor formatting or tone violations): a reminder is issued and the contributor is asked to revise the content to meet the guidelines, with no point deductions.

Level 2 (spamming or unauthorized copying): the violating content is deleted immediately, the contributor faces a short-term ban, and contribution points are deducted based on the circumstances. Level 3 (malicious fabrication of mechanics or personal attacks): the incident is publicly announced site-wide and the offending individual is permanently banned. The draft governance document anticipates an appeal to permanent-seat members, but the formal dispute-resolution process remains unfinished.

Articles exist as source files paired with optional translations. Source articles own the slug and primary metadata; translations link back to their source via a translates field and pin a specific source revision through the translated-from-revision field.

When the source has moved beyond the pinned revision, the website surfaces a "translation may be stale" hint so readers can judge freshness. Translations follow the same review and recusal policies as source articles.

Article content in Graduate Texts in Minecraft is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

You may share and adapt the articles for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate attribution and distribute your contributions under the same license. Website code is licensed separately under Apache-2.0.