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

Thu Dec 22 08:37:49 UTC 2005

Steve ran this past me, I objected at first, he went back and did it
differently and I said "hmm, you were right and I was wrong, go for it".

Steve Bennett wrote:

>  and that users may
> feel they have grasped a whole policy when they've only read a
> "powerpoint" bullet point version of it.

Any decent policy or guideline needs to be summarisable in a sentence IMO.

This objection falls into the error of assuming that you can solve not
reading instructions by putting more instructions in.

This is where we get bloated guidelines with every special case outlined
*right there*.

> 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.

Precisely. One page with the one-liners, each linking to the full novel.

This won't cram all the OMG INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT detail into everyone's
heads, but nothing else will either.

> Certainly putting the summary on certain pages *is* currently redundant,
> but that can obviously be fixed by changing the first sentence etc.

I see nothing wrong with putting the first sentence in a big visible box.

> Also, one user suggested modifying [[template:policy]] (and related
> templates) to make room for this one-line summary, which would certainly
> alleviate aesthetic concerns.

That's a side issue. The question is whether to do this at all. (I say yes.)

- d.