[WikiEN-l] One line summaries of WP Guidelines and Policies

Thu Dec 22 05:06:41 UTC 2005

On 12/21/05, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Criticisms have included that the suggested summaries simplify or
> distort the relevant policies, that the template is ugly (I agree :)),
> that the template is redundant considering the first sentence is often
> (but surprisingly rarely!) a summary of the policy, and that users may
> feel they have grasped a whole policy when they've only read a
> "powerpoint" bullet point version of it.

To copy what I said on [[Wikipedia talk:Semi-protection
policy<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Semi-protection_policy#One_line_summary>
#One line summary<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Semi-protection_policy#One_line_summary>
]]:

It seems to me that the problem isn't that we need a box to sum things up
but that we need better first lines. Just take the information which you
would put in the box and instead put it in the first line. Then, you don't
have a massive ugly box, you have all of the same information, and it
removes the simplistic summary of policies (i.e. from
WP:BAN<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BAN>,
the useless and
PowerPoint<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint#Criticism_of_Powerpoint>-eque
*"Users may be banned for varying times. They may appeal, but must not
circumvent the ban, so don't bait them or help them to try."*).

I feel that many people never read the guidelines, as there are too
> many, and they're not well structured or organised together. By creating
> a single page with an accurate, concise summary of each guideline, a
> user can get a very good feel for not only how Wikipedia works, but also
> how the relevant policies and guidelines are structured, so they know
> where to go for more detail.
>

I agree: one of my main complaints about WP is that the Help stuffs aren't
readily visible and hard to find (this becomes less of a problem once you
discover Meta, but hey!). However, we already have the one-liner page: it's
at [[Help:Contents <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents>]]. This
handy little page is easily accessible if you use the vastly superior
Classic skin (it's right underneath the link to your talk page), but is
somewhat more hidden if you don't. If it became more obvious then it would
alleviate some of the problems you're talking about (IMHO).

For those alternatives and reasons, I don't think that this box is
necessary.

--
[[User:Blackcap]]