Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-10473115-20170214023153/@comment-112155-20170218220030

Mrkermit wrote: Special kudos for Shabook actually trying to figure the problems with our decision making. How to close discussions is indeed a problem for us. I think that it's less about a time given to discussions but more about lack of willingness to close those. As we don't have policies or even a convention how to do that, it's easy to understand why nobody wants to make that call. I can also tell from my previous experience that closing a discussion is a difficult task. You have to give weight to all opinions and craft a decision hoping that everyone can agree.

Thank you for the consideration. One of the reasons having a timeframe for discussions is that, in the end, nobody has to close them, time itself marks the end, and from then on, anyone can objectively reach the same outcome for the topic that has been discussed, objectively choosing the most agreed upon or most voted choice, independently of personal preferences.

Mrkermit wrote: It's also very difficult to decipher a consensus from massive forum thread with very cluttered discussion. I think that learning the consensus from forum thread is only possible for very precise and clear defined suggestions. Forum is very good for gathering opinions and brain storming but if it seems that voting is needed, Talk pages are much better suited for that.

That is something that tends to happen in many of the "hot" threads in this wiki. I'm used to the model we use at the Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki, where these kind of "wikia-wide" subjects are discussed in a talk page. If no consensus is reached, then we vote, and the voting process is open exactly for a week (a timeframe that works for us). After that, as I said above, we only have to apply the most voted choice.

Mrkermit wrote: To come back to problem which prompted this thread, the original proposition was much too complex to discuss in a forum thread without unanimous decision. Shabook proposed on the declaration thread to split decisions up to smaller ones. That could work and definitely would be improvement to current situation but I think that best option for this would have been to draft a policy/guideline page and allow everyone to edit it with continuing discussion on a forum. Policy page would have allowed everyone to clearly see what's proposed and it would have been served as document after the decision. Forum threads aren't good at referencing policies, we should have those at own policy pages at project namespace. If we would have done that, this confusion could have been avoided and we would have a page to refer.

Another related problem is that I feel that, even when a discussion is finished and a consensus is reached, many times it is left in the air and not written down in a policy page. Personally, I feel that both the Layout Guide and Template Fields guides are vastly incomplete, and those two should contain the basic rules for this particular subject and many more.

Going back to the model of the MCU Wiki I'm most familiar with, I personally spent a whole lot of time crafting and writing a couple of Layout Guides that explained with great detail what to write and how to write it in every different kind of article. It took a lot of time, mostly because I had to did it all by myself, but I feel that it saved a lot more of time in potential rewrites of articles, discussions over personal preferences...

If you liked the model, feel free to adapt it to the particularities of this wiki.

Mrkermit wrote: I agree with a proposition on this thread to unhighlight a problematic declaration but didn't want to do it myself. There's many others who can push the button if they want to. Also I feel that without answers from other admins I might be only one thinking that way.