On Administrivia and Wiki Policy

Another ATT query about whether to use English or Japanese names for Anime and Manga characters. So I think it definitely needs to go on the Super Administrivia Booklet of Knowledge, given that this question is cropping up again.

Perhaps it should skip the booklet and become a regular style guide page for now if it proving a major issue, since the booklet idea is going nowhere fast right now.

I think everyone is secretly waiting for a mod to post and say if changing up Administrivia will be condoned or not before anyone puts too much work into it.

That might not happen. If the owners want to come down and say something, that is one thing. But I believe policy here is that the content of the site is up to democratic consensus. And that includes the organization of the administrivia pages.

We're certainly listening, both to gauge interest and feasibility.

edited 20th Apr '16 8:34:46 AM by Fighteer

I think the biggest problem with Administrivia is that it's so ungodly long. Merging a lot of pages into a style guide would help a lot, but I think the major obstacle is how much we're willing to cut. For example, here are some shortened versions of the following pages:

Repair, Don't Respond:

Examples Are Not Arguable:

Weblinks Are Not Examples:

What's above is probably about the length many pages would have to be shortened to be included in a "Style Guide". However, if you click on the original pages you can see that a ton of information has been left out of each summary. Are the extensive details in all the original pages worth keeping, despite how long it makes Administrivia as a whole?

I think that would work perfectly. Best of both worlds: One page with "laconic" entries of all the major rules, but more detailed pages for when somebody says "but there's no rule that says I can't spoiler text literally the entire page or rant about how black people are ruining Hollywood."

So, I've been making more edits to Sandbox.Manual Of Style with the idea that the purpose of the page is to summarize all the other "style guideline" pages.

Pages that are short enough to be fully included in the Manual of Style, such as Three-Day Rule, would be cut I suppose. Other small guidelines like "Use the most recent translation for names" could be included on the list without needing their own pages.

War877's sandbox has a list of pages that would theoretically be included in a page like this, but I'm not sure if they're all a good fit. I'm not even sure if "Edit War" really fits, even though I included it on my own page. What are the pages that should be summarized and consolidated?

Odd suggestion time: why don't we have a "house style"? We can work Administrivia into that framework. Then we can say, for instance, "don't natter — it's not how we write", because "don't natter — it's bad for readers" doesn't seem to be getting through to them. From looking at serial natterers, the one thing that doesn't get into their heads is that pages should be written in a single voice. I wouldn't mind if Administrivia were worked into something that tied into that overarching principle.

So, do you mean writing new guideline pages from scratch, rather than summarizing and squeezing together the existing Administrivia pages?

I don't want to sabotage this proposal, but I came up with a competitor over the past month.

(1) First, I would like to say that I still believe that everything that a user needs to read in order to edit a page needs to be as short and to the point as possible. Other administrivia stuff, like the historical section can be verbose no problem.

(2b) Anything that has to do with style: grammar, formatting, voice, should be virtually, or literally spun off to its own namespace. These pages will no longer appear on the list of administrivia pages, but a prominent link to the style guide page index will still be on the administrivia page list.

The above proposal is not incompatible with (2a) the notion of a single style guide page for less complicated style issues. But it does kinda reduce the importance of the single style guide page. Nor is it incompatible with (2a') the notion of a summary page for all style guide issues with links to pages that are longer than one paragraph.

(3) Independently, I would really like to see clear as possible distinctions between those rules that are critical to read before editing a page, those that have some bearing on editing a page, and those that are administrivia yet have no bearing on editing a page (fluff). And the critical stuff needs to be a very short list. I think this is a problem that extends to Welcome to TV Tropes, which is a little overlong and seems to be written for multiple purposes and also does not clearly indicate differences between what people need to know, what people may want to reference, and extra reading.

I attempted to make the above distinction (3) in my sandbox proposal, but I am not happy with how it turned out. I think it still needs to be done, just by a better editor than me.

Also, I have no problem with extra, completely optional "further reading" sections like Please No Natter, so long as they are never listed outside of the fluff page listings. They can still be linked at the bottom of style guide sections for further reading.

edited 20th Apr '16 6:52:33 PM by war877

As if my ideas are coherent enough for new proposals to be "sabotage".

When I read your ideas, to me it sounds like what you actually want is for the Administrivia pages to be sorted by importance, rather than by category. In other words something like:

Level 1: What TV Tropes is, and how to navigate the site.

Level 2: Basic editing tips, rules, and customs. You'll probably be suspended if you break these rules.

Level 3: Intermediate stuff. More complicated formatting and various how-to guides.

Level 4: Super specific rules (e.g. American vs. English spelling), advanced wiki tools, and esoteric markup and troubleshooting.

Level 5: Specific projects, fluff, and historical pages.

Though I may be wrong.

You are not wrong. That categorization would be one possible way to realise proposal (3). But I also still want the style guide spun off from administrivia (2b or 2a'). And want that independently.

edited 20th Apr '16 7:45:51 PM by war877

I feel like they might be mutually exclusive, though. You either have one master style guide with everything, or you split things up so that users encounter the important ones first (e.g. Conversation in the Main Page is more important than About Rhetorical Questions).

I don't think they are. I think the style guide could be spun off, then after, administriva (and maybe the style guide) could be reorganised to split up the important and unimportant from an editing perspective stuff.

But if they are incompatible, I would prioritise one of the style guide simplifications. As that would clean up administrivia more effectively and cleanly.

edited 20th Apr '16 8:36:48 PM by war877

I am starting to think this may be a question that might benefit from the new sight stuff. I recall the discussion about what is planned having some interesting methods of linking information in what sounded like a more intuitive and organized manner.

edited 20th Apr '16 8:58:27 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I thought the central part of the 2.0 information reorganising was basically to turn the example lists into smart tables with lots of fancy features.

I don't think we need to fundamentally alter the way the site works to clean up administrivia. I don't actually think administrivia would benefit in any meaningful way from new technology at all.

Administrivia will not gain too much from the 2.0 tech (whenever that happens), as it'll mainly be a set of description (text) elements, not examples. I'm completely speculating here, but there might be room to try to make it into some kind of context-sensitive interaction where clicking "help" on specific wiki objects takes you to a relevant article, or pops it up in a dialog or something. (I just thought that up now, so don't take it as any kind of promise.)

We might be able to do away with certain manual Administrivia indexes, such as lists of articles that need wiki magic, via automated reports. Other lists, such as No Real Life Examples Please, would become obsolete as we'd manage that via article flags. Still other lists, such as articles needing example sorting, would disappear entirely as sorting would happen automatically. These are indirect effects rather than direct ones.

Let's not get too caught up in what 2.0 promises for the Administrivia pages — most of them would have to be rewritten in whole or in part anyway. Let's worry about the present.

Seriously though, I'm mod hatting this as I want you to know you have permission to sandbox proposals for how to reorganize the administrivia pages to be more user friendly. We won't put them live until they've been gone over, but you are welcome to sandbox proposals.

That said, part of the reason we keep rule specific subpages, even for the short rules is that they can be linked easily when people need explanations of things. We're likely going to keep them, even with a laconic guide that covers them.

If anyone thinks they know where I'm going with my proposal but think they can do a better job, go ahead and edit right overtop my sandbox.

Personally I like what you have there so far.

It's definitely a good start.

Did a small edit there.

Ah. It was probably bias that led me to miscategorize that link. But since it is on the real administrivia page, I turned your delete into a move.

Regardless of what we end up doing for the rest of the index, I strongly believe that having a page that briefly summarizes the contents of all the minor pages will be very helpful. It would also let us add other minor style rules without making Administriva seem more bloated. So, for the moment I'm going to keep on writing summaries on Sandbox.Manual Of Style, and if anyone wants to help fix my mistakes I very much welcome it.