Wikipedia:Silence does not imply consent when drafting new policies
 | The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. |
Wikipedia keeps growing, both in article size and in the number of rules. This represents an increasing problem for a Wikipedia editor. Not only do editors have to learn continuously about new policies and guidelines, but editors also need to continuously track changes within all these policies and guidelines as they keep changing, and therefore they change the way editor can edit Wikipedia.
The more policies and guidelines there are, the fewer editors can focus on editing them, [1] and the more space there is for bureaucracy holes. All new policies should be regarded as instruction creep until firmly proven otherwise.[2]
WP:NOMORE says there should be no more policies or guidelines unless a guideline or a policy is really shown to be necessary by a community that is wider than community of that policy's or guideline's editors. In other words, there should be a really broad input about the guideline or the policy from people not previously familiar with the proposal.
All policy and guideline proposals should be advertised on relevant WP pages and noticeboards. If the proposal does not receive a significant input from new editors, it means that most editors do not care about the policy/guideline and therefore policy/guideline is not needed. Some editors think that "Silence implies consent". WP:NOMORE assumes something else, that silence implies indifference. If proposal produces indifference in the community, it is not needed.
WP:CONSENSUS states that Silence implies consent if there is adequate exposure to the community. WP:NOMORE in a way tries to 'measure' the exposure. When a proposal has been discussed by a significant number of editors, that means that proposal was noted by editors, and that proposal has received adequate exposure in the community.