Wikiquote talk:WikiProject Policy Revision

Roadmap
I would propose to make a roadmap not only for policy revision but also, if necessary, for policy drafting. If we have a vision, such as, the end of this year what we want to accomplish, it will help us figure out what we are going to do.

My suggestions as our annual goals are:
 * To write down all the current oral tradition around formatting both the way of formatting and the thought behind.
 * To make all policies official as far as related to daily sysop actions (i.e. blocking, deletion and protection).
 * To have a set of official citation and sourcing policies

You may have different thoughts. I would love to learn your ideas.--Aphaia 19:18, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with all those points and feel they should be put into effect. Re: to Makeing all policies official... If any users have problems with those policies, they should state them on the Village pump or this page... at which time we would review it as a community. Re: to Citation/Sourcing... we definitely need this, not just for stylistic reasons, but also for copyright/verifiable reasons...  Cbrown1023  talk  21:39, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm so optimistic as to think "to make all policies official" is in the least priorities among three (and perhaps with other goals you'd add). As Cbrown1023 says, if someone complains those policies (or policy draft), it would have been argued ... so while I would like to establish them, it looks me not an urgent issue.
 * Citation and sourcing are already drafted, but not have a good number of support at least in the latest campaign. We are better to review it, revise it if necessary, and again call for endorsement?
 * As for formatting, I think we are better to have a document (or few) which describes the idea behind the current formatting. Recently I joined two discussions about "what makes us prefer our current formatting way". If we have a brief document and can pass it to newbies, it would be a great help for both sides. --Aphaia 06:59, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
 * One another concern might be Quotes of living persons (now draft). I suppose however it may be a corollary of the third "citation and sourcing" - the possible conclusion on Living quote may be "no quote of living person without source". --Aphaia 12:58, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I propose now for setting our primary annual goal to establish source and citation rules. After observations other areas, including sysop related rules/habits and Essjay's import cleanup, I've conclude they are not our urgent concerns, because
 * As for Essjay's import from Wikipedia; most of his imports are regarding with user behavours (Assume good faith, Do not bite newcomers etc). I admit those are thoughtful and respectable ideas, but currently we need them as written guidelines; someday we would like to write them down, but it is not now hopefully, specially when we facing other problems we need to solve.
 * Sysop actions: now we have two of them as official policies (WQ:DP and WQ:BP), while the latter is sometimes stepped over. We have the protection policy still as draft, but currently protection hasn't been a big deal yet. Except drafting proposed deletion there is no urgent need - even for prod, our WQ:VFD has yet a room and it is not an urgent need.
 * Citation and sourcing are always being discussed on WQ:VP and other talks. It is obvious we would have benefits to reuse those results of discussions.      Also, we can expect establishment of proper citation way increases the legal sustainability of our project and hence the reuseability of our content. As relevant issue, we may want include elaboration of Quotes of living persons perhaps.

As for Quotes of living persons and citation, I would refer our sister project, German Wikisource reform. Since March 2007, they have banned all unsourced quotes from living people articles, and have limited the number of unsourced quotes up to five on departed people (de:Wikiquote:Person). Besides their strict way, I love their idea to have styleguides for each quote genre (people, theme or works); their styleguides are not templates, but rather the guidelines how to write the articles. Having both templates and such guidelines will be helpful for us too. --Aphaia 23:09, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Possible minor goals
Before jumping into policy drafting, revision, finishing and adoptation there are something we need to care in my opinion. During recent discussions, I found some points we may want to Expecting further discussions, I separate those items into sections. If you think I'm stepping into too much details, please feel free to poke me. --Aphaia 19:18, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Set a surer procedure
 * Review of current classification
 * The validity of "official policy" claim

Set a surer procedure
One thing we have discussed during this April was we have no fixed procedure to endorse a policy draft. I prefer the community convension, to make a draft, ask a review for the community for a certain term (the length may vary), and then if there is almost no objection, it will be considered as official policy. I think JeffQ would better explain the convention, but hopefully I wouldn't miss the core idea. The keystone is the draft hasn't been radically updated in its final stage of reviewing. From this point, I wouldn't like the way of the latest call for endorsement. As I stated before, it is not responsible to rewrite a draft already endorsed and not to ask the review again for those who endorsement, since people endorse a particular version, not the current version whatever. I hope we get back to the past formality the community has respected. For this purpose, I took a note of procedure at User:Aphaia/Policy making. I am not sure the community has to fix the procedure as rule at this moment, but I would like to prevent the latest case I described as the above, and think it would be nice for this project how to ask the community for review/endorsement in a bit more detailed way.

Also it would be nice for us to confirm we are not going to use "group sign". I think it is even no convention in the Wikimedia project community. I confessed last year I sometimes signed on behalf of Essjay as Election officer with consent of other officers, but now I think we had better to remove his name and left him in his absence. --Aphaia 19:18, 2 May 2007 (UTC)


 * We need this, basically your page seems to outline it well... I am also against the group sign due to the trouble I got into with it. :-P  Cbrown1023  talk  21:39, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Review of current classification
There are now three classes; Guideline, Policy and Policydraft. We may want to have a middle class as "tentative policy"? Or is it not our option at this moment? Also some documents classfied "policy needed to be revised" seem to me unclear why so labelled. In my opinion some are better to be called "need to frequently updated" or some don't seem "policies". Or we can just expand descriptions like "For convinience, you may find project documents need to be revised but never to be considered as policy or guideline." (History of Wikiquote or Announcement may never be a "policy"...) --Aphaia 19:18, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

The validity of "official policy" claim

 * Essjay introduced some policies from Wikipedia and labelled them as "official policy". He did it without any precedent discussion. He doesn't seem to have made an annoucement afterwards. No, it is not a criticism, I just would like you to give a look to its consequence; those pages are unnoticed. They have not been therefore linked from other project pages including Policies and guidelines, Community portal or Utilities and tend to be forgetten. The discussion about Username policy may be a good example. In a glance, most of those are unharmful, but I wouldn't like to keep them as official policy. Besides some of them seems to be better to be called as guideline, I strongly feel we have not adopt "official policy" in that way. If we have a document as an official policy, and they are linked from some templates and even some editors have joined to improvement, what is our benefits if the document itself is orphaned and forgotten from the majority? One another example is Vandalism - though it was stated as official policy (I removed the tag unanimously and replaced with "policydraft"), Vandalism in progress refers still the original Wikipedia version. Since Essjay didn't care for consistency, his imports are tend to be orphaned in this kind of inconsistency with other existing documents.  I think therefore we need to check those imported "official policy", integrate them to our other policies and ask the community to review them to determine their fates. Or those documents are not utilized by the community and again we are going to reinvent a wheel as username policy issue.--Aphaia 19:18, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, these definitely need review... I completely agree. I was also surprised with how many "I"s and first-person pronouns we had on the attached page!  We need to clean up our existing policy and probably "reconfirm" them, while we update our old policies and make new ones.  Cbrown1023  talk  21:39, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Also his "guidelines"; he even didn't try to replace "Wikipedia" in those documents or to fix links to Wikipedia pages. Some of those haven't edited since creation. I wonder what made him behave in such a way. --Aphaia 13:22, 3 May 2007 (UTC)