Wikipedia talk:Style of policy and guideline pages

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[edit] New proposal

I am proposing this page as a new style guideline for how to create, update, and edit policy and guideline pages. The purpose is to keep our policy and guideline pages clear, concise, and effective. This is not meant as a radical departure from existing best practices - it is modeled on the better policy guideline pages, in hopes that the messier pages can be shaped up to their standards.

I hope we can agree to adopt this as a guideline so that we can have some stylistic consistency among all the policy and guideline pages. If not, I would like to keep this as an essay for now - I'll cite it as I go about my work cleaning up the language on different pages, and see how much acceptance it can get.

To anticipate a few of the most obvious objections/questions:

• Q: Why do we really need this? A: policy guideline pages are long, messy, poorly written, and hard to read. We can clean them up!
• Q: Isn't it instruction creep to add yet another guideline page? A: Normally, yes. But this page will more than pay for its disk space by making other pages better.
• Q: Won't this just encourage aggressive editing by self-appointed style mafia? A: I kind of hope so, but only good-natured editing. The page has a clear caution to go slow and only edit for style where it's uncontroversial and does not change the substance of a page
• Q: But is it necessary? Why not just do it instead of creating a page? A: By acknowledging on a global rule for what pages should look we get a consistency and predictability across Wikipedia, which is a good thing in itself.

Thanks for your consideration, Wikidemo 21:02, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

• I disagree with unenforceable. "Do not edit while intoxicated" is good advice, the sort of thing a guideline should provide, whether or not ArbCom will be able to enforce it later. That is all a guideline can do. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:05, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
• This strikes me as massive instruction creep, and most existing p/g pages break this suggested style. >Radiant< 11:52, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. As per above, if people were to buy in I think it would be massive anti-instruction creep. It's supposed to be about improving policy and guideline pages to what they should look like, not accepting them for what they actually do look like. As a "best practices" statement, I'm hoping that this reflects the accepted style for the best of them, so if this page contradicts any good practices we might want to expand or change it accordingly.Wikidemo

[edit] Demoting to an essay

There hasn't been much comment to date, suggesting that nobody's really interested for now. I'm going to reclassify it as an essay and use/refer to it as I go about occasional work on policy and guideline pages, and see where it goes from here.Wikidemo 13:16, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Possible source for addition of info

Help:Modifying and creating policy is now a redirect to Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines, but I don't believe that any of the text in that former help page was actually moved to the Policies and Guidelines page. I think there was some overlap between the help page and what's in this essay, so perhaps someone might look at the the last full version of that help page for content to add to this essay? (I thought the help page was actually a bit useful, or at least informative, but I don't have the interest in arguing about changing it back from a redirect.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:21, 26 October 2007 (UTC)