Wikisource:News/2006-08-28/Policy and guideline changes

Sweeping changes were made to the policies and guidelines since the last news story nearly four months ago.

Newly enacted

Inclusion policy

Following a previous story^[1], the inclusion guidelines were adopted as policy on 07 May 2006 with a consensus of four votes. The inclusion policy defines the types of works that are included or excluded, and reflects the previously unwritten rules of the community. A major change was later introduced excluding reference material (see "Vote excludes reference material", 02 May 2006).

Administrator policy

Pathoschild drafted and proposed the Administrator policy, which came into effect 23 May 2006 following lengthy discussion and a unanimous vote^[2]. The policy most notably limits administrator access to one-year periods followed by automatic confirmation votes. The first confirmation votes are scheduled for September 2006, and will concern Yann, Dovi, Jusjih, and Zhaladshar.

The policy also allows users to call an unscheduled confirmation vote, which is automatically accepted so long as at least two other established users support the need for a vote; the administrator's next confirmation vote is postponed to a full year following a successful called confirmation vote. It codifies other specific procedures for the obtention and loss of administrator access, and adds rollback guidelines to the existing policies on administrator access.

A current discussion on the Scriptorium^[3] raises the possibility of modifying the degree of opposition needed to lose adminship and the process for calling a confirmation vote.

Featured text guidelines

The Featured text guidelines were written following the recent main page redesign^[4], which integrated featured texts. The guidelines, unanimously supported with nine votes, define the procedure for selecting texts prominently displayed on the main page as among the best Wikisource has to offer.

Initial debate arose after enactment concerning the Text quality rating required for featured status— the policy stated that a minimum of 100% was required (complete and fully proofread by multiple proofreaders), but some felt that 75% was sufficient (complete and fully proofread by one user). The policy eventually remained unchanged, and the featured text process generated four featured texts up to date, scheduled at intervals of one per month up to October 2006 inclusively.

Bot policy

The bot policy was proposed by Pathoschild and implemented in June 2006 by a consensus of four votes. The policy governs bot use and naming, as well as guidelines on supervision, edit throttling, and publication of source code.

Image use guidelines

The Image use guidelines were first proposed by Spangineer in July 2006 as the Image use policy (its status was later changed to a style guideline), and is being voted upon until 30 August 2006. The guidelines primarily promote uploading all public domain images to the WikiCommons, the Wikimedia repository of free multimedia, and lays out categorisation and naming conventions.

Modified

Deletion policy

The deletion policy was amended several times in an effort to streamline the deletion process. Criteria G6 (copyright violations) now covers author pages listing works that are all most likely copyright while criteria A1 (transwikied articles) now includes images on the Wikimedia Commons. Criteria M2 (unneeded redirects) was expanded to define "unneeded", significantly limiting the traditional deletion of redirects from page moves and integrating the use of the new template {{dated soft redirect}} to designate redirects from page moves that are no longer useful.

Protection policy

The protection policy was expanded to cover the protection of featured texts.

References

1. "Inclusion guidelines move to discussion phase", 05 March 2006
2. "Administrator votes of confidence", Scriptorium, May 2006
3. "Administrator policy: Confidence threshold", Scriptorium, August 2006
4. compare the previous and new designs; see "Main page redesign", Scriptorium, May 2006