Forum:Reorganizing wiki policies
The Sims Wiki's policies and guidelines are a mess. The biggest issue isn't even that the policies are inadequate (though some are), it's that they're so confusingly organized that it could be difficult for a new editor to find and understand all the policies we have. The problem has grown worse over time as we have formally adopted new policies through consensus but have had no real formal organization scheme or standard. I would like to propose just such a standard now. This proposal has multiple parts.
One: Move all policies out of subpages. Some of our older policies exist as subpages of The Sims Wiki:Policy. For example, basic policies about user behavior are listed at The Sims Wiki:Policy/General Policies. This name is cumbersome and time-consuming to link to, as is often necessary when citing a specific policy on a user's talk page. A page name like "The Sims Wiki:General Policy" or "The Sims Wiki:General Policies" would do much better at this, and also make it a bit easier to find even without the help of a shortcut.
Two: Split independent policies into their own pages. Some of our policy pages (specifically our older ones) tend to list multiple somewhat related policies in a single page. The aforementioned General Policies page lists: General Rules, rules for using TSW's IRC channel, rules for TSW's forums, and rules for user pages on TSW. Each of these policies should be spun off into their own pages (or else merged into a relevant project page, rather than existing as a standalone policy page). So, instead of having The Sims Wiki:General Policies as home for TSW's forum policy, we would have "The Sims Wiki:Forum policy" instead.
Three: Retire redundant or outdated policies. In looking through our list of policies, I've found a few that either are redundant (because their functions are covered in other places) or else so outdated as to be worthy of termination. The ones I'm talking about are:
- The aforementioned Forum Policy; all rules in the current Forum Policy are already covered by The Sims Wiki's general behavior policy.
- The Sims Wiki's Userpage policy; it is outdated, and the few rules it does have that are still enforced could be incorporated into the general policy instead of split off on its own.
- Creation Policies - I've already spun Fanon Policies off onto their own page, so the rest of the policies on this page no longer serve a purpose.
- The Sims Wiki:Wikia community guidelines
Four: Re-classify existing policies and guidelines. I'd like to adopt some broad groups for our policies and guidelines, so that we can more easily refer to them collectively and more easily organize them on policy navigation templates. The groups I'd suggest (and the policies I'd place in each) would be:
- User policies, which would include general rules, the alternate and multiple account policy, and The Sims Wiki:Voting policy.
- Content policies, including: The Sims Wiki:Image and file policy, The Sims Wiki:Fanon Policy, The Sims Wiki:Notability Policy, The Sims Wiki:Site feature policy, and The Sims Wiki:Unreleased Games Policy.
- General guidelines (this grouping basically already exists and would be kept more-or-less as it is)
- Style guidelines, including The Sims Wiki:Manual of Style and the other sub-manuals
- Supplemental information
I'm proposing all of these changes in one single discussion, as they are all separately quite small changes and if done separately would probably take years to accomplish. The changes proposed here are first and foremost about clarifying policy organization, rather than changing (most of) our policies in any substantive way.
Thoughts? -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 00:31, May 28, 2019 (UTC)