[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Sarah]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 14:16, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> I didn't list these particular examples because I thought they were
> necessarily the hardest problems on the wiki; I listed them because
> they're common questions and have historically been the source of a
> lot of discussion. This is by no means an exclusive list :) And
> guidelines need to be thought of in context too -- how do you get from
> someone asking about their citation to the guideline above? Is there a
> clear path? Is it easy to find? Let's think big here about improving
> the help pages in general.
>
There are clear paths to the ones I listed above, yes.

The problem with the policies and guidelines is one of too many cooks.
This can be a good thing for editing articles, but it's almost always
a bad thing for editing policies. Everyone who comes along has her own
idea of what needs to be added, and soon the policy's too long and
complicated to read, and doesn't reflect what actually happens. So no
one reads it. So everyone's confused.

Many suggestions have been made over the years: protect policies
against editing; create a policy committee and all substantive change
has to go through them; merge some policies and try to clean up the
writing. All are unsatisfactory or won't fly for various reasons.

Part of it is just the personality of Wikipedians. We have lots of
editors who like increasing levels of complexity and categorization.
It's that precision of mind that makes the project a success in many
ways. But it can go too far. The thing is, you can't turn it on and
off as needed.

Sarah