- "The code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."
- ―Captain Barbossa[1]
It's OOM here with a few more walls of text. These are the last in my years-long review spree of old site policies. The main Wookieepedia pages we're looking at are Wookieepedia:What Wookieepedia is not, Wookieepedia:About, Wookieepedia:Policies, Wookieepedia:Avoid instruction creep, and Wookieepedia:Soft redirect, with Wookieepedia:Attribution, Wookieepedia:Notability policy, and our good friend the {{Policies}} navbox also affected. The underlying motif is the topic of guidelines, or policy pages that aren't quite policies.
So, Wookieepedia runs on the basis of site-wide policies that are determined by community consensus, in accordance with Wookieepedia:Consensus. The clearer the policy, the better. Taking a look at the {{Policies}} navbox, which is shown on every policy page, we can see that the way policies are presented is a bit cluttered…
There are four divisions—article policies, user policies, site policies, and guidelines. It seems that "site policies" is a grey area straddling article issues and user issues, which is not ideal. Additionally, of all pages with the template {{Policy}} (which indicates that the page or section is an official Wookieepedia policy), there are several missing from the navbox, namely: Wookieepedia:Administrators, Wookieepedia:Rollback, Wookieepedia:Requests for removal of user rights, and Wookieepedia:Contact. These are listed on the {{AdminNav}} navbox, but they contain crucial rules approved by the community that affect how the site is governed. Adding them to the Policies navbox will surely add to its burden of information and space, but I think it should be re-organised anyway to remove redundant pages and, once that's done, have four clearer divisions while allowing us to link those important policies (more on this at the end).
I have put concrete proposals in bold and examples underlined in the three sections below, but in short, the respective sections are about:
- Merging WP:FANON in WP:NOT to WP:ATT. Merging and redirecting the rest of WP:NOT and WP:POLICIES to the About page.
- Deleting WP:AIC. Merging and redirecting Wookieepedia:Soft redirect to Template:Softredirect.
- Reorganise {{Policies}} navbox accordingly.
Contents
Being clear about what Wookieepedia is and is not
Unlike any other policy, Wookieepedia:What Wookieepedia is not (WP:NOT) doesn't provide a rule of its own for users to follow aside from the no-fanon rule (WP:FANON), which can be merged to the Wookieepedia:Attribution policy. WP:NOT is basically a relic of the Wikipedia page of the same name. We can make the information there more useful by placing them in Wookieepedia:About instead. The About page is virtually empty, and Wookieepedia:Policies is even more empty. None of them are really policy pages, and separately, they do not provide much utility. I think the information on all three pages would work much better looking something like this on the About page, with the Policies and WP:NOT pages redirecting to it.
Removing outdated guidelines
The remaining two guidelines on Wookieepedia, namely Wookieepedia:Avoid instruction creep and Wookieepedia:Soft redirect, muddy the picture. (The Discussions guidelines are something else; they're part of the Wookieepedia policy for the forum, so they're not part of this conversation.) What does it mean to have a "guideline" that, as the {{Guideline}} notice says, "illustrates standards or conduct that are generally accepted by consensus to apply in many cases"? Why aren't these guidelines actual policies? Editors are invited to update the guidelines "as needed," though they have been fully-protected (i.e. only admins can edit) since 2021. Both guidelines were written in 2007, each largely by a separate editor, and there are no records of them ever having been endorsed by the community. Their status is akin to the semi-official essays that we have, via community consensus, deleted in recent years (e.g. Forum:TC:Wookieepedia:Don't seek power) and are in the outdated tone of the late 2000s era guide pages that we have also deleted (e.g. Forum:TC:Wookieepedia:Advice for new administrators). A guideline on "Wookifying" articles from Wikipedia for use on this wiki was also deleted via community consensus back in 2014.
The two surviving guidelines offer very little in terms of content. Is it worth having them at all? "Avoid instruction creep" was adapted from the Wikipedia essay of the same name, which expounds on the wiki philosophy of being frugal with rules because they tend to increase in complexity and thus make it harder for everyone to follow all rules. That is good advice, but it isn't something for which we need to dedicate a page (we don't need official text stating that Wookieepedia is not a life advice blog!). In the decade since this essay was added to the Wookieepedia namespace, bureaucratic processes and redundant points have actually been piled on to a growing number of Wookieepedia policies despite those words, and only in recent years have we been trimming down on unnecessary instructions that make editing inefficient and intimidating. Ironically, I think "Avoid instruction creep" is actually unhelpful and should be deleted. Its closing lines tells us to "remove excessive requirements" from policy pages "as you see fit"—that goes against the entire principle of community consensus, and in any case isn't happening because they are all fully protected pages.
The other guideline on soft redirects is basically an instruction document for the {{Softredirect}} template, so why don't we just redirect Wookieepedia:Soft redirect to the template and add the relevant points to the template documentation? Also, in line with removing links to the unmoderated Fanpedia per the recently passed Forum:CT:Layout Guide revisions for interwiki link templates, we should remove from Wookieepedia:Notability policy the point "Alternatively, {{Softredirect}} may be used to point to a product's corresponding Fanpedia page."
Updating the navbox
Filed under the guidelines section as well on the Policies navbox (but not actually a guideline) is the 2023 statement Wookieepedia:An Apology from the Administration for Wookieepedia's Harmful History. It is an integral part of this community and shall remain as a pertinent record. However, being appended to the Policies navbox undermines its purpose—an official statement from the administration that no policy could make up for—and undermines the purpose of the Policies navbox—a portal for official rules as determined by community consensus. I do not think the Policies navbox is the best place for it now. As the writer of another obsolete wiki guideline (this one was classified as a "proposed policy," a type of page that has also since been deleted) said in its deletion vote over a decade ago, it has "served its purpose."
Finally, just as Wookieepedia:About should be a clear introduction to what this site is, the Policies navbox should be updated to be a clear portal to the rules, perhaps looking something like so. It'd be divided between policy pages pertaining to community, content standards, leadership, and special procedures requiring admin tools.
Please do make suggestions below if you can think of other ways of splitting the pages though, and suggestions of any kind to any of my proposals above. In the spirit of avoiding instruction creep, there have also been discussions about making guide pages summarising the main points of lengthy policy pages that could be especially helpful for newcomers, while retaining the full policies as long, "legal" text, given that a lot of points tend to be addressing exemptions here and there. That is certainly something we should be considering.
That's enough from me for now. What do we all think? OOM 224 21:16, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
Discuss
- Solid work as usual, OOM. May I suggest something like "to comprehensively and accurately document official Star Wars media, creators, and their stories, including both the Legends and current canon continuities" for your "About" draft? Axing guidelines make sense; in the case of instruction creep, I might be able to see how this could stand on something as massive as Wikipedia, but I don't really see the point for us. While I'm not opposed to the existence of the Apology itself, its location in the policy navbox has always looked to me like some kind of auto-da-fe/auto-flagellation and not something that really allow for growth past the (collective) penance. I really like your navbox draft, but it's missing Wookieepedia:Notability policy/Video game items. Also, that would be a good occasion to rename Wookieepedia:Notability of fan projects into "Wookieepedia:Notability policy/Fan projects", as to be consistent with other policy subpages titles. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 18:12, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- Another point I'd like to raise in somewhat direct connection to the proposal, but only to take the measurement of the community in this regards for now: it was been, for quite a while, my belief that Attribution and Sourcing should be merged. Both handle different aspects of the same concept, and having them separated does seems contrintuitive to me, and even confusing for new editors. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 18:12, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- While I do agree with merging the two and am leaving a note since its for polling opinion on the concept, it would be a bit bigger of a project and IMO it would be ideal if the rest of this went on ahead without that. Its has enough bones to it to stand as a proper SH standalone (and probably needs one, for wording ironing).—spookywillowwtalk 22:45, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- Oh, don't worry, I was only seizing the occasion of this SH to test the waters for future (far future probably) works. Not my intention at all to move the focus on this at the moment. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 23:24, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- Good points all. I've implemented your suggestions, which also remind me that our policy page titling are inconsistent in whether or not they include the word "policy." I wonder if it'd be good to change the outstanding ones to include that (e.g. Attribution, Sourcing, Spoilers, and Sockpuppetry, while leaving things like About, Layout Guide, Manual of Style, Discord etc. as they are)? OOM 224 19:32, 18 August 2025 (UTC)
- While I do agree with merging the two and am leaving a note since its for polling opinion on the concept, it would be a bit bigger of a project and IMO it would be ideal if the rest of this went on ahead without that. Its has enough bones to it to stand as a proper SH standalone (and probably needs one, for wording ironing).—spookywillowwtalk 22:45, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- NEW: Forum:CT:Policies and "guidelines" review OOM 224 10:22, 21 September 2025 (UTC)