Wikipedia talk:Policy/Procedure

Proposal
I moved this proposal here out of user talk space, so that the community can discuss it more conveniently. It originates from User talk:WhatamIdoing/Sandbox.--Kotniski (talk) 09:27, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Why I support this proposal
At present there seem to be no clear rules about the creation and modification of policy and guideline pages, and this leads to problems in practice. Substantial changes are often slipped in by individual editors without discussion; edit warring sometimes occurs as a result. New pages are marked as guidelines without community approval, exacerbating the existing situation where we already have far too many policy and guideline pages for readers to navigate and for the community to maintain. Discussion on proposed changes is chaotic, often running way off topic, generating ill-will, and leading to situations where it is not even clear what consensus has been reached. Editors often complain (with or without justification) that changes affecting them have not been sufficiently well publicized, whether before or after implementation.

This proposal would, while not solving all these problems at a stroke, at least go some way to enforcing standards in this area. It would make it clear that individual editors can't make policy on their own (although they most certainly can copyedit and clarify it), and make it explicit where new proposals are to be announced and how discussions are to proceed and conclude.

I therefore support at least the principle of the proposal, though some of the details and the wording may need improvement. Perhaps the requirements of multiple announcement could be pared down, particularly for minor changes. But in general all editors must be able to put one page on their watchlist so as to be sure that they will be made aware of all such proposals. VPP would serve as such a page, although it's not ideal since not everyone wants such a high-traffic page on their watchlist. Maybe a page like Template:Cent would serve this purpose better, since it gets only announcements and no actual discussion traffic.--Kotniski (talk) 10:45, 17 September 2008 (UTC) PS: or indeed simply RFC/Policies.

Why I wrote this proposal
At present, the standard promotion process seems to be "just slap a guideline template on it". This seems inadequate, and may well explain why we have 91 pages in Category:Wikipedia style guidelines alone, and some 150+ non-style guidelines (not counting dozens of proposed naming conventions). The current lone-editor approach doubtless explains why the folks trying to make sense of the Manual of Style are having such difficulties with guidelines that contradict each other.

Furthermore, most experienced editors, including myself, instinctively feel that promoting a page to guideline status simply by declaring our own work to be good enough to require every FA article to comply with it is, for lack of a better phrase, not very community-oriented. But what is a reasonable balance between creating a needless bureaucracy and promoting an unworkable anarchy?

For me, this issue came up because of Reliable sources (medicine-related articles). It's a decent guideline (status currently being edit-warred over by a discontented editor because it promotes a policy(!) that he objects to), but in starting that process, I found no information about the normal process, beyond a comment from User:SandyGeorgia that Manual of Style (medicine-related articles) was forced to jump through dozens of hoops, while all other style guidelines are apparently promoted by the slap-a-tag-on-it approach.

And what if there isn't unanimous agreement? What if only two editors notice the proposal? What if everyone supports it today, but tomorrow someone disagrees? Our current approach of "any editor may promote or demote a guideline" allows a late dissenter to reject the community consensus out of hand.

In the end, you can't simultaneously "promote" and "not-promote" an page to guideline status any more than you can simultaneously "delete" and "keep" the same article. So it seemed to me that the process we have is a bit more like Proposed deletion, and that we might benefit from a process of community notice and comment that is a bit more like Articles for deletion. At minimum, I hope to provide a recommendation for those editors that freely choose something more robust than an exercise in self-coronation. This, at any rate, would prevent them from trying to reinvent the wheel, which is what I feel like I had to do with MEDRS's proposal.

Most of what I suggested here is what we did at WP:MEDRS to publicize its proposal for guideline status. Some of it comes from listening to WP:MOSCO talk about the style guideline conflicts. Some of it comes from the input of other editors (which I welcome). The goal is to describe a useful, robust approach to identifying the community's views. The proposal is to add this towards the end of WP:Policies and guidelines, rather than creating yet another page that needs to be watched.

I would be happy to hear your opinions and suggestions for improvements. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:05, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Comments, questions, and responses
Views from all editors are welcome here. Please remember to sign your comments.


 * I am sympathetic, because a lot of good people like to keep up with changes to policies and guidelines and have a hard time doing it. On the other hand, it's hard to see how a proposal that says "you must do X before you can say Y" doesn't contradict current policy from WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY: "A perceived procedural error made in posting anything, such as an idea or nomination, is not grounds for invalidating that post."  See WP:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive 44 for Kim Bruning's description of what WP:CONSENSUS and WP:BRD and their talk pages have had to say about this.  On the other hand, I'm not saying you can't proceed with these ideas; I'm saying, if you want to win, then arm yourself with knowledge of how previous discussions turned out, and see about getting a change to current policy at WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 03:41, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't like needless rules and process either, but in this case it seems a need exists. There's nothing at WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY to rule out this kind of proposal. We already have quite strict processes in other areas (AfD, RM, RfA etc.), so they clearly are permitted where they are felt to be beneficial. Of course NOTBUREAUCRACY will still apply above this, so for example if someone corrects an obvious error on a policy page, there will be no excuse for reverting the edit just because it hasn't been through the procedure. But we need to prevent the mess we have now, where it's sometimes hard to distinguish real policy from the opinions of a few individuals.--Kotniski (talk) 07:19, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually there is something at NOTBUREAUCRACY: the sentence I quoted. AfD, RM and RfA are not about adding or deleting words to policies, they involve deleting a page, or moving a page, or adding a mop.  If I add words to a policy, and you tell me that the words don't count because I didn't follow X process, I can point out that current policy says that my words are not invalidated just because I didn't follow the procedure.  This is not some clever, new-fangled argument; see the link I gave, or check the archives of WT:CONSENSUS and WT:BRD. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 07:50, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, but this proposal (if accepted) would itself be part of policy, so in the situation you describe I would have a stronger case. Not that your words are invalidated, or that the letter of the rule has to be followed in every case, but that if you are acting against the spirit of the rules then you can expect to be reverted, to have it explained to you what rules you are breaking, and to be warned for disruption if you keep doing it. This situation would be nothing exceptional - it would be similar to the way other policies are enforced. --Kotniski (talk) 08:37, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Dank55, thanks for your comments. I cheerfully accept the right outcome; I value product over process. However, I think that offering a recommended process is not quite the same thing as saying "If you don't follow this process, your promotion will be reverted" -- which is not in this text (or, at least, I didn't put it there). I also think that having a process of broad notification will improve the quality of those guidelines that are promoted and that having a recommended process will reduce editwarring over the status by dissatisfied editors (see WT:MEDRS, and forum-shopping at other pages, at length). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:56, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Very good. Take all this as half-assed guesses rather than The Word, but I think you can make progress with that approach.  Again, adding process is very close to being a perennial proposal.  That means, if you work on this on a subpage for a couple of months without reading the previous discussions about why and how this kind of thing has been shot down in the past, and then show up at WP:VPP with your proposal, it's highly likely to get shot down.  The key to success is to show respect for current policy by actually reading the discussions and engaging with that logic. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 17:45, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Support: Recently having been lured into a guideline dispute with policy references being thrown around like confetti, couldn't find any guideline to guidelines either, even an essay with suggested steps, outlining common disputes and how to avoid or resolve them, would prevent cross-policy arguments and help to focus on the matter in hand of concensus building, so go for it as an essay and then guideline - not sure about as a policy, I think my head would explode if I started reading all relevent policy to building a policy - but I guess that's what you're trying to resolve :) LeeVJ (talk) 14:24, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Section on "changes"
I would prefer a stronger version than the watered-down version currently in the proposal. People editing existing policies substantially without clear consensus are among the major problems in this area. This should be subject to equally strong regulation as the creation of new policies, since it has just the same type of consequences. Of course it needs to be made clear that "minor" changes (suitably defined) don't need to go through the same process as major changes; but it should be similarly clear that for major changes the consensus-seeking and prior-announcement process is not optional.--Kotniski (talk) 07:26, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia might some day choose to have such a process. However, right now, we don't have a good "feel" for what counts as a major change.  Also, MOSCO is planning a bunch of major changes -- that is, excising all of the existing contradictions.  We don't want that process to be derailed by imposing a long series of "Thou shalt" commandments for proper notice to do The Right Thing™.
 * Fundamentally, I think we need to start small, with the least controversial aspects. There's no deadline.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:49, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

This is spot on
This is a great codification of process. It's simple, and goes pretty much with the way that consensus is gathered for other things already. The larger Wikipedia gets, and the larger the Wikipedia community of editors gets, the harder it is to get a wide sense of consensus on certain issues. I have quite frequently run into debates where people have trouble even deciding what the previous consensus was, let alone what the current consensus is. This is exactly what the community needs: a standard method for determining wide consensus. I wholeheartedly support it in its current form.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 21:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Absolutely. Recent turmoil at WP:OR (still possibly continuing), WP:MOS and WP:MOSNUM are good examples of why the present "system" is broken.--Kotniski (talk) 08:16, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't follow regarding, for instance, WT:MOS; how is it broken? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 17:30, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Report from the field
The procedures seem reasonable; although I wonder how they are working; the templates don't seem to be on many pages, and that's not because they're being removed; some of the transclusions are on pages long gone historic. We have had a large number of methods which were supposed to bring on general discussion, and only watchlist notification has worked. But the section on Changing existing policies and guidelines is at best a massive new codification, at worst a drastic change. By its own terms, it should be widely discussed, and it's been mentioned in only one comment, even here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 06:23, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * This is being further discussed here, and there is a proposal which would change the status of this page. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:18, 11 January 2009 (UTC)