[WikiEN-l] Crappy polices+guidelines

Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk
Sat Dec 1 23:13:24 UTC 2007


I saw below an idea concerning developing stable versions of policies. Pretty good idea, but why are we doing this?

IMO it's because there's a basic contradiction between a policy - a document that's pretty darn solid virtually by definition - and a wiki. Junk gets added to our policies over time, respect for them decreases, trouble begins.

So which polices have suffered most? Which polices do we love to hate? What needs rewriting? [[Wikipedia:Edit war]] used be to particularly painful garbage until it thankfully got rewritten (I think by Dmcdevit, PBUH).

My own selection of policy that sins by virtue of crappiness would certainly include [[Wikipedia:Civility]], for starters. I don't think this one got off to a great start, and it's only got worse. Particularly painful is all the stuff about removing incivil comments and personal attacks - why, oh why? Haven't we learnt by now that this just quadruples drama levels? We have - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_personal_attacks#Removal_of_text

Except that no one got around to fixing up [[Wikipedia:Civility]] in response to this. What policies and guidelines need fixing to reflect pain old common sense? Garbage removal? Copyediting? And how do we go about doing this? Taskforce Policy Fixers?

CM


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