Wikipedia talk:Coordinators

Proposal to make this a guideline

 * Note: my spelling and grammar suck, so I apologize in advance if anyone has trouble reading my typing.

I herby propse that this essay become an officially sanctioned guideline on WIkipedia. There are three main reasons behind this proposal:


 * Wikipedia and its associated projects are growing : Wikipedia's growth is in all reality only going to be limited to serve capacity, as such the content here will constantly grow. As it grows we will of nessessity see an increase in the number of projects and task forces that arise or expand to meet the demand of overseeing and maintaining these articles. At some point therefore projects will likely look for a better way to handle their internal mangement, and that will in all likelyhood lead to said projects and task forces to look into implementing a coordintor system, all the more so becuase some of the lasrgest and best run projects already use such a system.


 * We have no set criteria for implementing a coordinator system : These days it seems that virtually all articles on Wikipeda are covered by a project or a task force of some sort. As Wikipedia grows it has adopted seperate community reconginzed standards for adminship, beuracrats, oversighters, and checkusers, all of which have a policy page (or in the case of the bearacrats, a setup page), but we lack a similar page dedicated to coordinators. I believe that this oversight is now coming back to bite us as projects which seek to implement a coordinator system must copy a system already in place on another projects page, but that in itself may create problems as the members of the different projects consent to increasing the responisibilities of thier coordinator to meet the changing demands of the projects. Without an official page I fear that projects new to the coordinator idea may copy from projects that have increased the responsibilities of their coordinator departments, which could create a very messy situtation. We can negate that by turning this page into a guideline.


 * Projects would benifit from a centralized coordinator page : At present projects looking to implement a coordinator system must ask questions on the talk pages of current coordinators or on the talk page of project using a cooridinator system. But turning this page into a guideline we could streamline the Q&A process by allowing interested projects to post there questions and recieve there answers here rather than run all over wikipedia looking for help. As interested projects ask questions and get answers we can collect the data needed to create a standard FAQ page, which I think would further streamline the whole process.

Given these factor I am of the mind that this page should recieve official guideline status on wikipedia. I am open to comments, suggestions, and questions on this matter. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)


 * This page contains hardly any explicit standards for users to follow, and rather simply summarizes some relevant considerations, and thus I don't think it is a good fit as a guideline. This also belongs as part of WikiProject Council/Guide so far as I can tell. Christopher Parham (talk) 00:19, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Just do it
Seems fine. No reason not to go ahead with this. Stifle (talk) 13:34, 18 August 2008 (UTC) What he said.

This definitely does not need to be an official policy. Let each project try out whatever they think might work for them. Let each project copy whatever works for other projects if they think it looks cool. Let's see what evolves in practice.Filceolaire (talk) 07:18, 19 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Obviously you did not read the tag: we are not aiming for policy status, we are aiming for guideline status, and yes this is important because there is a huge difference. As to the other half of your arguments: Most militaries on the world insist on a uniformed plan of specification for there equipment so that they can pull from A to fix B. A and B may not even be remotely similar to one another, but the fact that A and B employ enterchangable parts makes it easy for those with little knowlage on the equipment to rob peter to pay paul. It is in this spirit that I am aiming to make this a guideline, not a policy, I expect that each project will aproach the topic differently, but if we don't do something to create uniformity now it may came back to haunt us in the long run. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.31.27.113 (talk) 07:41, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree with Stifle. Go for it. -- Rmrfstar (talk) 09:18, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I changed my mind. This is not a general editing "guideline". It should be placed on one of the pages of WikiProject Council, a WikiProject designed to do just what this page purports to do. -- Rmrfstar (talk) 09:26, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * This page doesn't need a tag. It looks like it discusses a process some WikiProjects have adopted.  WikiProjects should rightly be free to choose whether they have co-ordinators or not.  It should not be a guideline that they should.  I would oppose a move to guideline status for this page.  We should avoid instruction creep and bureaucracy. Hiding T 09:54, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Instructions like this should be implemented on a project-by-project basis - it is most certainly not something that can be externally mandated. If a project wants co-ordinators, then they will have co-ordinators. If not, not. It is pure instruction creep to make this anything official. It would, however, be a useful addition to the WP:COUNCIL WikiProject guide, as has been suggested above. Happy‑melon 20:55, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Official Guideline or Project Council guide
I see no arguments against the text in the guide itself. The discussion so far seems to be whether this text is most usefull as an Official Guideline or as a Project Council guide.

I say as a Project Council guide. IsFari (talk) 11:13, 20 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Counting opinions until now results in : 2 for Official Guideline and 6 for Project Council guide. IsFari (talk) 11:13, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I see that. I was actually going to make a move to change this to a merger yesterday, but decided to wait a minimum three days before suggesting a merge so that others could weigh in one way or the other. If the consensus is still to merge by the 23rd then I would be cool with removed the proposed tag and letting the council page obsorb this one. Just so long as there is some place to go and read up on it, I will be happy. TomStar81 (Talk) 18:42, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Go ahead with the merge. I don't see this achieving consensus for guideline status.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:57, 22 August 2008 (UTC)