[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

Tue Jun 14 05:30:23 UTC 2005

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.