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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Register (2nd nomination)

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was move to User:Wavelength/About Wikipedia/Manual of Style/Register, is a reasonable compromise, in particular as the original author is fine with it. kelapstick(bainuu) 20:32, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Register

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Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Register (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

This page does not belong in the project space. Whilst I would prefer deletion, I would tolerate userfication. Essentially, this page is an essay. It has no community backing behind it, yet it labels itself an "information page". It largely serves as a way for a few editors to commentate on various disputes in the MoS, almost as if it were like the MoS equivalent of the Hadith. I don't think that we should have project pages serving as a WP:SOAPBOX for the opinions of a certain few editors in this manner. At present, the page serves as a PoV fork of WT:MOS, so as to allow people to who've had unproductive disputes there to have another place in which to play. I don't think this is acceptable. Such a page as this is fine in the user space, but it shouldn't be labelled as anything other than what it is. Given the recent dispute that occurred over the contents of this page, this seems even more pressing. RGloucester — ☎ 05:52, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • Strip it down only to a listing of the discussions which have occurred regarding a particular topic, if not a full delete. The page presently makes comments about what is believed to be the consensus version even though the consensus version is clearly what is listed on WP:MOS (or its subpages). Agree broadly with Gloucester's comment. --Izno (talk) 18:55, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    Even if stripped down, I still don't think that this belongs under the "MoS" banner. It is the personal project of a few editors, not part of the MoS. RGloucester — ☎ 20:37, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    I see it as a better-organized archive index, so I don't see how particular editors upkeeping the document make it particularly problematic. What is problematic, as I previously said, are the statements regarding consensus. --Izno (talk) 20:55, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    Such a project might be useful, but I would suggest creating a new page for that purpose (e.g. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Index). I'd also suggest that consensus should be attained in an RfC before creation, so as to clearly define the scope of the page. That would prevent what has happened here. RGloucester — ☎ 22:14, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    The one-user usurpation of MOS:FAQ as an anti-consensus platform, despite the fact that it was created by consensus for a specific limited purpose and only supposed to exactly describe core consensuses about MOS and why it is as it is (i.e., the exact same purpose envisioned here) tells us this proposal is both redundant, at least in some measure, and will not work as expected. Also, the proposed WP:Manual of Style/Index name will easily be confused with Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive index (why do we need two /Index pages?), and the "WP:Manual of Style/Foo" sub-namespace is used only for actual guidelines, which this index would not be.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  02:49, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    The WT:MOS/Archive index page is/was an automated index of topics; the bot performing that work hasn't been on the job in quite some time. But that index also isn't sorted sectionally relative to the MOS, which I think the value in a page like the Register has (and which can really only be done by humans). No opinion on the actual name of the page, which doesn't get to any core of an issue, since pages are easily renamed. The FAQ can certainly be used to document perennial issues regardless of how the Register looks. --Izno (talk) 12:37, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    I think this discussion is the generation/demonstration of that consensus (if such exists); a separate RFC would be WP:BURO. --Izno (talk) 12:39, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    There's probably another archive-trawling bot we can use. There is no value in a would-be index of almost nothing but a handful of topics two people want to battleground about. That page has not noticeably grown in years, other than in FUD. "Can really only be done by humans" is the very crux of the problem: The pseudo-work at this page is time and effort robbed from the actual, productive goals of Wikipedia. Because only two or so editors care about it, it cannot ever be anything but a personal, minority-view essay; no community of editors will ever waste the time on to it to ensure it accurately represents consensus. There are no issues we need to document with regard to MoS other than the perennial ones, so the entire raison d'etre of this page is redundant. We only need to document those things for potentially confused new editors, none of whom will find or be able to understand a "register" page and what it's trying to convey anyway. Consequently, the only use the page and its get is from longer-standing editors with an axe to grind against some point in MoS, or against MoS itself.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  (talk)
Maintaining the Register is like caring for the natural environment: the situation is better when the work is shared fairly by everyone involved. However, not everyone shows appreciation for the benefits. Some commenters on this MFD page have exaggerated the perceived problems and minimized the benefits. At 23:13, 6 January 2010 (UTC), Noetica said, on WT:MOS, about his proposal for a record of past discussions: "This would provide means of stabilising MOS, identifying topics that need further treatment, and informing all future discussion on this talkpage." (Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 112#Proposal to defer discussion of dashes)
—Wavelength (talk) 03:00, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Nothing like maintaining the environment. Terrible real-world consequences happen if we do that. Nothing at all happens if we don't maintain this page, other than we do more productive things. No one is going to "fairly share" the workload of maintaining this time-waste, because it is not real WP work, and expecting them to devote valuable time to it is what isn't fair. Noetica quit. I know Noetica off-WP, and know that he would not agree with what's been done with this page, but neither of us can speak for him. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions"; it doesn't matter what the idea behind the page was five years ago, only what's been done with it in the interim, and no "benefits" have come from it, only long-term disruption. I'm sure communism in Russia seemed like a good idea in 1917.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  14:27, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I never intended the page to be used as an essay or an opinion page. Probably each contributor regards his own statements as expressing facts and not opinions. I have watched some of the development of the comments on the page, mostly from User:Darkfrog24 and User:Dicklyon, and I was hoping that they would resolve their differences about what the comments should say. I was reluctant to remove their comments, partly because they have some usefulness. It is unfortunate that the page has been nominated for deletion at a time when (if I am not mistaken) both of those editors are restricted from editing the page or discussing it. I might have contributed more to the page, except that I have many other goals (both on Wikipedia and elsewhere), and maintaining the Register is made more cumbersome by the fact that many sections of WT:MOS have headings that are too long or too uninformative. More details are at Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines.
Please see the comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Register (June 2013).
—Wavelength (talk) 22:06, 25 January 2016 (UTC) and 01:59, 26 January 2016 (UTC) and 03:00, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • You are mistaken about the TB results. Yes, people should to read the original MfD. Zero of the predictions about how the page could become useful have come to pass, and 5 years is more than long enough for them to have materialized. Instead, it's caused nothing but problems. Your own comment in that MfD says why: "There are very many things needing to be done on Wikipedia (see WP:BACKLOG), and very many articles need to be corrected for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and compliance with WP:MOS". That's correct. The last thing we need is people ignoring that real work (which itself takes a back seat to working on the encyclopedia content) to build ophaloskeptical documentation of documentation. Re: Probably each contributor regards his own statements as expressing facts and not opinions – Of course they do. It takes consensus to formulate consensus. When someone goes in and tries to form a new "personal consensus" about the consensus, all you end up with is stinky opinions.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:21, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Off topic
  • What do you mean by "the TB results"?  (I found wikt:omphaloskeptic.)
    —Wavelength (talk) 21:50, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    The topic ban results are that Darkfrog24 is banned from editing in relation to quotation punctuation, thus could edit the page in other parts of it (though has been warned that they should probably avoid MoS-related discussion altogether); Dicklyon wasn't banned from anything, but suggested to voluntarily step away from the quotation marks issue for a while. So, the TB has no direct effect on anything to do with the page other than one segment of it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  03:55, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete – Even with Darkfrog24 banned from participating in anything related to quotation style, I would not see a good way to turn her collection of argument links into a register of what the consensus is. My minor tweaks that she fought so hard did little in that direction, and I've been advised by arbs not to push this myself. The MOS itself should be the representation of consensus. If we need a register of relevant discussions, it would need to be well curated by neutral editors. This one so far is just a collection of very un-neutral links and commentaries, designed apparently more to undermine than to support the consensus in the MOS. Dicklyon (talk) 23:43, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The Register is a collection of links to past discussions, and the notion of "neutrality or non-neutrality" is irrelevant. The version of 23:03, 26 January 2016 says: "This page is a work in progress, a working draft of a supplement to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style."
—Wavelength (talk) 03:00, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That's fine, but it has no consensus behind it. If you want to have a personal project of this sort, by all means do so. We can simply move the page to your user space. At the moment, the page is not a mere collection of links, by the way. RGloucester — ☎ 03:12, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per WP:ENC / WP:NOTHERE, WP:POLEMIC, WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY, WP:NOT#SOAPBOX, WP:NOT#ADVOCACY, WP:NOT#WEBHOST, WP:Consensus (overall, and WP:FORUMSHOP in its own right), WP:POVFORK, WP:DE, WP:OWN, and WP:Common sense. This is not part of the MoS, it's someone's campaign-headquarters essay on what "issues" they want to highlight about and fight over at MoS, which discussions about them they think are important, and how to interpret them.. The only visible use of it so far has been to foster battlegrounding against already-established consensus at one of our most important guidelines. We do not keep essays that are used for warring against consensus, per WP:POLEMIC. Even if the page didn't have this advocacy campaigning problem, WP does not exist to quixotically and narcissistically catalogue old discussions about the drafting of its own internal documentation, instead of writing and sourcing actual encyclopedia articles.
Detailed policy and common sense rationale:
Whatever the original intention of the page, it's become a two-editor personal thing, and a lobbying platform (for one of them) on pet-peeves to fight consensus on at WT:MOS. It is literally impossible for the page to ever be complete and comprehensive without the studious devotion of numerous editors to doing utterly pointless, non-encyclopedic busywork meticulously documenting internal decision-making, and it would always only reflect the opinions of editors focused for no apparent reason on second-guessing consensus and engaging in circular "curation" of arguments that are old, old news. If someone wants to waste their life doing that, they can start an independent webpage for it. WP does not need hand-tailored index pages dwelling on, and breathing new life into, past disputes. The ostensible purpose, of documenting consensus, is silly since MOS's current status (except in the rare event of editwarring) is that guideline's own text. This is true of all of WP:POLICY. The WT:MOS talk page already has searchable, complete archives, a tool that allows anyone interested to make up their own mind what discussions are relevant to what concerns, instead of having someone with a bone to pick tell them what issues are important and which cherry-picked prior discussions addressed them in what way with what result (according to that personal opinion). The productivity- and civility-drain of trying to establish consensus on how to outline consensus discussions that have led to consensus cannot possibly be worth the near-zero utility of this misleading page.

The actual use of this page has been to pseudo-source a handful of things in MoS in a way that pointedly steers perception of whether consensus exists for the chosen topic (usually wrongly implying a lack of it). When I looked a year or so ago at one of the "fully developed" register topics, I looked in the actual archives and found relevant, consensus-influential discussion on it in the archives but not in the Register, and realized what a boondoggle it is. This thing has been nothing but a magnet for disruptive, tendentious lobbying against consensus until "WP:WINning", and is closely related to the recent partial MoS topic ban of Darkfrog24, among much other WP:DRAMA. Like WP:Esperanza, the page was a potentially interesting experiment, which has failed (5 years is more than long enough for it to have done something useful). If all our WP:POLICY pages' talk pages had "registers" like this, little would get done here other than "busy work" on navel-gazing trivia in projectspace, and new disputes about that purposeless nit-picking. Kill it with fire. There is not and never has been a consensus in favor it it at WT:MOS or at the MOS wikiproject. Editors with an unusual and unproductive interest in fighting against consensus at a guideline page are not in a position to force on it a never-ending dirt list of water-under-the-bridge threads. Ask yourselves if you'd tolerate a page like this about, say, WP:RS or WP:NPOV. To the extent that MoS needs a page to address frequently asked questions about certain consensus points, it already has one at MOS:FAQ, a template that is transcluded into the top of the WT:MOS talk page.

The arguments in favor of keeping it all amount to a combination of WP:ILIKEIT, WP:PLEASEDONT / WP:HARDWORK, WP:ITSUSEFUL (without even any showing that it is or could be), WP:HARMLESS (five years of its misuse to push anti-consensus views disproves that anyway), WP:VALINFO (but no value has actually been demonstrated), WP:INVOLVE (case #2 in particular), and WP:FALLACY (one or another argument in favor of this page is not sufficient to keep it in the face of all the arguments against it); WP:NOTINHERITED is also relevant (while this isn't a notability matter, the reasoning flaw is the same: "because MoS is important, something about MoS must be important and kept").

The only acceptable results of this MfD are, in order of decreasing preference: 1) delete; 2) possibly userspace and tag with {{User essay}} if anyone wants it (other than Darkfrog24, who is TB'd from a substantial portion of its contents), but this is a rather poor idea; or maybe 3) move it to WP:WikiProject Manual of Style/Register and tag with {{Essay}}, but this is a really bad idea (and it cannot reasonably be tagged with {{Wikiproject advice essay}}, as there is no consensus for it at the wikiproject). : — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:21, 26 January 2016 (UTC). Edited, 05:17, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments. At 22:31, 26 January 2016, I removed two paragraphs of disputed information, thereby remedying the basic problem mentioned in the opening post of this second nomination. Incidentally, I have seen edit warring on WP:MOS, but no resulting request for that page to be deleted.
—Wavelength (talk) 03:00, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not a valid argument. For years and years now it's been considered patently disruptive to nominate a guideline for deletion (I think that's covered at WP:POINT). The problem remedied by your cleanup (and it is cleanup; I certainly don't dispute that) isn't really the central problem, though. The PoV pushing in it was an effect not a cause of why this page is a big FAIL: It's a pointless vacuum sucking away editorial energy from what we're actually here to do. Because virtually anyone can recognize that, no one will be willing to work on this page but someone with a viewpoint to push about particular pet peeves, so it will never, ever be complete, what it does have in it will be subject to PoV pushing and not reflect consensus for long, and if it ever did become comprehensive, we should all be sad and ashamed, for having wasted time writing deeply internal documentation about internal documentation instead of writing an encyclopedia.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  06:19, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
—Wavelength (talk) 00:03, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.


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