Fastfission wrote:
Whether people will read it or not, having a set of concrete resources can aid in discussions with obstinate users as well. Resources can be forms of authority in and of themselves -- "Look at this, it says you are wrong."
Dealing with the obstinate ones, and enforcing rules is a different problem. The more immediate issue is getting people of good will to understand what they are talking about.
I don't participate in Meta, and I don't know what the gameplan is there. And though copyright law applies to all of the Wiki projects, it applies to them in different ways varying by their content. Commons is exclusively about image and sound media; Wikisource is about wholesale textual media; Wikiquote is about what degree of quotation is copyrightable; etc. So I think having resources tailored to individual projects makes sense, in the same sense that Wikiquote ought to have its own Copyrights page distinct from Wikipedia's (which it now does).
Certainly the "way" these laws are applied will vary, but we are still dealing with fundamentally the same law. If you strip a problem down to its basics it becomes much easier to see how each of these projects deviates from those basics. When sports teams begin to perform erratically a good coach will take the time to get the players to practice basic skills.
The goal of the resources I'm proposing is to focus on simplicity, ease, and low-investment (of time, energy, brain, etc.) on the part of the user. Whether some users refuse to make any use of it, I still think on the whole it's not a bad idea and could be quite useful. But it's just one of many such things.
Nobody's saying it's a bad idea.
Ec