If you can sign in and read a standard, you can improve it. There is no committee to join, no application to fill out, no gatekeeper. The Edit button is there for the same reason the standards are free: the people who use these documents every day are the ones who know how to make them better, and the library only works if their knowledge actually gets in.

You do not need to be the leading authority on a topic to contribute. You do need to work within your real expertise, be honest about what you know and what you are inferring, and engage other contributors in good faith.

A SynC Standard is meant to be recognized, relied on, and reused across many projects. That bar shapes what belongs in one:

• Manufacturer-agnostic. Describe functional requirements and performance, not brand-specific products. If a requirement is true only because one manufacturer's product happens to meet it, it is not a standard.
• Project-ready. Write what a working engineer can drop into a real project, not a hollow outline. If a requirement needs a value, give the value, or expose it as a datasheet field so the next user can select one — do not leave it as a placeholder.
• Configurable, not duplicated. When projects legitimately differ, capture the difference as a datasheet field on one standard, not as two competing standards. A shared baseline is the whole point; forking it defeats it.
• Grounded. When a requirement traces to a code, consensus standard, or established industry practice, say so. Specifications travel better between firms and across years when the reasoning travels with them.

The best contributions are often the smallest — sharpening a default, fixing a wrong unit, adding the option that everyone in the field uses but no specification ever states.

A standard is a living document, but the projects that cite it need something fixed. SynC handles both with revisions.

Every save creates a new revision. The system records what changed at element-level granularity, your optional edit summary, and who made it. Earlier revisions are never overwritten, so any change can be reviewed, compared against another, or reverted.

A revision is a proposed change until it is adopted. Reviewers periodically adopt a stable revision as the published version of the standard — that adopted revision is what projects cite and rely on. Until then, your edit is part of the standard's open history and visible to anyone reading it, but it is not the current adopted text.

This is what lets the standards stay alive without becoming unreliable: the working document moves forward continuously, while the adopted versions stay fixed and citable.

Contributions are credited to you, and you decide what to do with that credit. A public SynC profile is opt-in; if you publish one, you choose which contributions to feature, whether to display your current employer and job title, and how to describe yourself. "Contributor to the SynC Panelboard Standard, Adopted Revision 3" is a specific, verifiable claim — and it is true the moment you make the contribution.

Each contribution also records an attribution snapshot — your stated affiliation, specialty, and role at the moment you contributed. The snapshot is frozen at contribution time and does not change if your job later does. Construction standards carry weight, and readers benefit from knowing the perspective behind a requirement: who wrote it, what they did, and who they worked for at the time. Credit and context together — the work is yours, and the vantage point you brought to it is part of the record.

All wiki content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. When you save an edit, your contribution joins that commons — anyone may use, adapt, and redistribute it, including commercially, as long as they credit the source and keep their derivative work under the same license. ShareAlike is what guarantees the library can never be enclosed: no one, including SynC, can take this content private and sell it back to the industry that built it.

The actual terms that govern your contribution are in the Contributor License Agreement. It is short and written to be understood without a lawyer — read it once before your first contribution.

Your contributions stay in the wiki. Removing them would break the standards that depend on them and the revision history that documents how they evolved.

What changes is the attribution: your name and personal details are removed, and your contributions are no longer shown as yours to anyone reading the wiki. SynC keeps a limited private record of who made each contribution, used only for legal and licensing purposes — never displayed publicly. The full terms are in the Contributor License Agreement and the Privacy Policy.

Questions about contributing? Visit the Knowledge Base or contact us. For the binding terms, see the Contributor License Agreement, the Terms of Service, and the Privacy Policy.