On 2/9/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. 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. 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

On 2/10/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia(a)philwelch.net> wrote: I agree with your interpretation. I recently wrote an intro for [[Freddie Mercury]], which basically focuses on his good points. I simply didn't have anything bad to add. I was presuming at the time I added it that someone else would take the shine off, if needed. I'd generally rather see a slightly positively-biased addition than no addition at all. And probably the same for a slightly negative addition. Maybe we need a list of priorities for edits. Number one priority: no copyvio Number two: no vandalism etc etc Is this feasible? Steve