@quid I am in favor of more published policies. It helps guide decisions and makes producing content in line with those policies easier. To me having to revisit discussions and policies is not a bad thing, part of working in a community driven site is that we should always be balancing the needs and wants of all the people involved. Being responsive to people’s concerns and being willing to adjust and shift balance based on various needs is something that a healthy community needs to be.
Guidelines allow for purpose to be discussed abstractly without becoming legalistic, while also leaving room to address corner cases.
If written conservatively enough, they should be able to leave plenty of room for individual opinion, while allowing everyone to operate within a common context
user131753
3:21 AM
That may arguably be correct in general (and indeed that's one of the benefits of the unofficiality). But enforcing strict and largely unambiguous (if not fully) policies will also give the new users also the "tool" to refer to when they need to. In case of guidelines there will be plenty of useless rhetoric.
These concerns can be resolved, though. It's possible to include strict and unambiguous policies for situations that are unambiguous-- that's what I mean by "corner cases."
user131753
@AlexanderGruber Now the question is who will be those "policy makers"?
And regarding the rhetoric being useless, I'd say that really depends on the rhetoric. CoC is a bit wishy washy, but the general "be nice" bit is one of the most actionable rules we have here.
@QthePlatypus I should maybe clarify that a key word in my phrase is "detailed." Arguably, there are some things that should be clarified, and for example we did publish some new guidelines lately. What I don't think is useful is having pages of text that specify exact procedures. Not only but also as they then won't be followed and that's a situation I prefer to avoid.
You raise a good point regarding the revisiting. That's actually tricky. I think an example where this did not work out well are the guidelines, the policy, the recommendations, the FAQ, whatever you want to call it, on non-English content. It maybe did make sense back then, but by now it's just unrealistic and it's in my opinion a poor idea to pretend that it is a feasible idea to just ask in some language other than English. Now, if one is lucky it might still work out.
But the way the thing is phrased is just not really helpful. Then, in practice it's mostly irrelevant, since hardly anyone cares about what's written there anyway (either way), mostly since many just might not even know.
It also shows another issue, namely that sometimes there can be a tendency of people being too idealistic in abstract and to try to be too welcoming. This, abstract ideal then fails in reality and it would have been better to have something more realistic to begin with.
