User:Trialpears/Policies and guidelines

Policies and guidelines are important tools for keeping the project running smoothly without too many discussions being repeated over and over again. They can convey important information to newcomers and establish fundamental principals that can have a large impact on editor behavior and ensure that the wishes of the greater community can be considered in essentially all discussions. With such influence it's important that policies and guidelines have a strong support from the community.

Since our policies and guidelines are often referenced in discussions many Wikipedians will sooner or later search out our list of policies and guidelines where they find a list of (by my count) 291 different policies and guidelines. This is a very intimidating sight and may be a significant deterrent for new editors who want to get involved with discussions. You will definitely notice that you don't need to be familiar with all these guidelines, but which are good to be at least vaguely familiar with (like WP:N WP:V WP:NPOV WP:CON and more) and which you can completely ignore either because it doesn't contain anything you couldn't figure out on your own or is redundant to other policies like No 3D illustrations, Patent nonsense and Do not create hoaxes or because it's just so specific that you probably won't encounter it and if you do you can find it in other ways like Naming conventions (U.S. state and territory highways), Manual of Style/Cue sports or Wikipedia talk:Indic transliteration. Both these categories also run the risk of drifting away from established consensus since there are often very few people looking at them which can make it disingenious to portray them as having our highest level of consensus.

By recategorizing these and many other guidelines won't change the world, but it will probably make our community a little bit less impenetrable and on top of that align how we portray pages with their level of consensus. --Trialpears (talk) 05:29, 27 January 2023 (UTC)