On 2/9/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We should note that Steve has been working on just
that, with the
project to put a one-line description at the top of each policy or
guideline.
Oh yeah, there's [[Wikipedia:List of policies]] now, which contains
all those summaries. I was unable to convince the community at large
(or, less politely, certain individuals rather protective o individual
policy pages) of the benefit of having a one-line description at the
top of every single policy page. However, about a quarter of them have
such a thing, using {policy in a nutshell}.
I've also done what I can to chop some of the deadwood off some of our
sillier policies, and merge a couple here and there. And tried to
rework [[WP:POL]] a bit. But there's a lot of work left to do.
The next major thing to accomplish would be to come up with a definite
"recommended reading order" of policies (as hinted at on WP:POL) and
shove step #1 down newbie's throats. This should probably be a
condensed version of [[Wikipedia:Avoiding common mistakes]]. Then we
can start to educate them on the very very basic policies of V, OR,
NPOV, copyvio etc.
Now we need to hack away at the guidelines removing
everything that's
aimed at the clueless or at bad-faith editors, because they're the two
groups that don't or can't read the guidelines, and writing aimed at
them is the #1 source of instruction creep.
Nicely put. Maybe we should have policies, guidelines, policies for
bad faith editors, and guidelines for bad faith editors. Then we can
keep shovelling the instruction creep into the latter two categories,
so that they're there if someone really badly enough wants to beat
someone over the head with policy.
Then we can get to work on making sense of
badly-written policies ...
Most of them aren't that bad, I've concluded. Generally a bit wordy,
but they're fairly meaningful, and mostly cover actual situations that
arise, or so it seems. A firmer definition of exactly what a policy
is, and how a policy comes to be would be nice though. Someone
recently split a policy into three separate articles with no
discussion before or afterwards. Someone else insisted that [[WP:ENC]]
was policy. sigh.
Steve