Timwi wrote:
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this this too, on Wikiproject Cricket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories directly contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta" categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over that time has been useful.
More recently, there's been a bunch of arguing over the usage of transclusion in articles relating to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2005_English_cricket_season, in this case articles on individual cricket matches are being transcluded into larger articles that group them on various different criteria. I've been arguing that instead of transclusions they should be ordinary links, since this is the practice with other similar groups of articles on Wikipedia (and other reasons I won't go into here. I raised the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Unusual_transclusion_issue_not_covered_by_policy and was told there was also previous discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#transcluding_prose). I'm more worried about this one because subst:ing the transcluded article text could result in a very difficult situation to reverse if it turns out to be a bad approach.
Wikiprojects are excellent for bringing standardized style and organization to subject areas, but I find it trouble when this starts going in a different direction from the style and organization of Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia is supposed to be a general reference work, people will be reading it for all manner of different subject areas and if each subject area is organized differently it'll make it harder to follow (as well as looking more like a hodgepodge). I'm not sure that there needs to be a policy specifically about this, though; in theory it should be enough that Wikipedia's general style guide applies to all articles. In practice, it can be difficult to go against the desires of organized voting blocks like this because by definition they're more interested in these particular articles than other editors are. Not sure how to balance these things out. Perhaps we could start some sort of "WikiProject Wikipedia" dedicated to improving consistency and organization throughout the project as a whole? Seems kind of redundant, somehow.