[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

[Stephen Bain]

On 6/14/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> 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.
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I agree with your concerns with these cricket articles. It's fair
enough for specialist WikiProjects to override global *guidelines*,
things like naming conventions are the best example, but overriding
global *policy*, like Wikipedia:Subpages, etc, is a Bad Thing.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com