User:SMcCandlish/How to promote a WikiProject style essay to a Manual of Style guideline

Various wikiprojects have long-standing style advice pertaining to the topical category of the wikiproject's scope. This material, which may exist as one or more separate pages or just be inserted into the main wikiproject page, has the authority level of a wikiproject advice-page essay. A small amount of it actually should be integrated into our WP:Manual of Style (MoS) guidelines instead of lost in a wikiproject backwater, but getting there takes some work.

When to do this

Iff such pre-existing wikiproject style material meets all these criteria:

1. it already clearly represents a consensus about how to write and arrange Wikipedia articles across a particular subject area;
2. it has advice to give that is pertinent, needed, and not simply repetitive of generic, across-all-topics advice;
3. it is not in conflict with other advice or policy;
4. and (not "or") it covers a large number of articles of general interest, not a niche topic area (most of the material for which has already been written anyway);

then it is actually desirable that this material become part of our centralized WP:Manual of Style (MoS) guidelines, which have a number of topic-specific pages. This helps editors (especially new ones) find the pertinent material, invites more compliance with the recorded best practices, aids with dispute resolution (because a guideline has a higher consensus level than essay material), and better enables editors to keep all of our style guidance in sync by centralizing and indexing it.

When not to do this

There are many (likely too many) wikiproject style-advice essays, most of which are old cruft that do not qualify.

What we especially do not need is more "MoS bloat" – the instruction creep of inventing new writing "rules" that Wikipedia does not need. If you think "your" topic which doesn't have any style advice suddenly needs some and that you should create some with the goal of promoting it eventually into the MoS, you are almost certainly making a mistake. See, for example, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing (failed proposal), which was rejected so throughly that not even a single line-item from it was retained in any guideline anywhere. And it is not the only such community rejection of MoS bloat.

After more than two decades, Wikipedia pretty much already has all the rules it needs (and probably some that it doesn't). This page outlines a process for ensuring that the style best practices we already have and use are properly named, tagged, and categorized as such, not for creating more of it.

How to do this

the following is simple step-by-step guide to getting from wikiproject style-advice essay material to official MoS guideline page:

• Consolidate the style material: Wikiprojects often have their writing, article layout, and other style advice scattered across multiple pages. All the pertinent material should be combined into a single page, at something like "Wikipedia:WikiProject Subject here/Style advice".
• Rewrite to use guideline-appropriate language.
  • Study the wording style of existing guidelines, starting with WP:Manual of Style itself. Note the careful way that advice is provided: firmly but not dictatorially. Style and other guidelines are not policies, and should not be peppered with words like "must", "required", "forbidden", "mandatory", etc. Such terms should only be used in a guideline when summarzing a policy or technical requirement that really does resolve to "must".
  • Fix informal wording, long-windedness, supposition and opinion, etc. A style guideline is not an expository essay.
  • Normalize the usage to current Wikipedia terminology (a lot of old project material dating from the 2000s uses terms that WP didn't eventually settle on, instead of familiar WP-isms like "notability", "due weight", "independent, secondary, reliable sources", "lead section", "original research", "living persons", etc.).
  • Avoid advice that doesn't advise, like "some editors prefer X and some prefer Y", unless it is really important (due to repeated prior dispute) to record that something in particular is left to editorial discretion. Really, everything is left to editorial discretion that isn't subject to a specific guideline about it, so it's usually not necessary to say so.
• Trim redundancy:
  • Avoid repeating other parts of MoS except for particular topic-specific applications; link to or explicitly cross-reference other guidance, as needed.
  • Remove generic non-style material already convered by other policies and guidelines (how to cite sources, etc.), except maybe notes about how to apply them to this topic in particular, if there's some kind of style-connected rationale to include it.
• Do not conflict with other policy and guideline material: Wikipedia does not tolerate "policy forking" for long after an instance of it has been detected.
  • Make sure any sectioning advice agrees with MOS:LAYOUT (and MOS:LEAD as applicable), and with the way articles in the subject area are actually written (especially modern Good Articles and Featured Articles); often old sectional advice in such wikiproject documentation is actually wrongheaded by current standards.
  • Delete any conflicts with MoS, with other guidelines, and especially with policies, or revise the line-item in question to stop conflicting. A common conflict source in such documents is over-capitalization that doesn't agree with MOS:CAPS, and title strangeness that contradicts WP:AT or WP:DAB, or a subject-specific naming-conventions guideline.
  • Remove content advice that's not at least vaguely also style advice (maybe put it back on the main wikiproject page if it's important). There is a difference between style guidelines and content guidelines; people rebel against MoS proposals when they wander into trying to govern content. Same goes for behavioral matters. If a particular line-item seems to be both a style and a content matter, then go ahead and include it.
• Avoid advocacy: The purpose of guidelines is recording existing best practice, not imposing new practice you think it better.
  • Delete or fix any "advice" that is not actually usually followed. In particular, look for old "we wish it would be this way, even though it's not" stuff and remove it.
  • Another gotcha is viewpoint-pushing of the writing preferences of some off-site organization that is not universally recognized as authoritative. Even if there is such a body in this subject area, there is still no guarantee that Wikipedia will choose to write like they do: We have our own style guide and they presumably have theirs. Previous attempts to impose external writing "standards" on Wikipedia have failed (sometimes after a great deal of intervening disruption and drama.
    • Wikipedia only adopts specialized style when: a) its use within a field is nearly universal; b) its use is also very common in non-specialist material when writing about the subject (in newspapers, magazines, dictionaries, other encyclopedias, general academic journals like Nature and Science not confined to a specific discipline, etc.); and c) it does not conflict sharply with normal-English writing style, will not astonish the average reader, and isn't a usage confined to a particular national dialect.
• Elminate gaps: Do not leave out important aspects or leave matters open to conflicting interpretations.
  • Add important advice for anything that represents definite current on-site best practice in the topic area that wasn't covered in the old material. Don't go wild in this regard; if the material looks recently broadly expanded, people will notice and question its consensus level.
  • Policy and guideine writing is hard. Review every sentence and make sure nothing is confusingly worded or creates a loophole for wikilawyering. If something can be interpreted in more than one way then it needs to be rewritten to have only one sensible meaning.
• Make and announce the proposal: A guideline proposal is typically done as an RfC.
  • When the cleaned-up wikiproject style-advice essay seems to be in tip-top shape, propose in an RfC at WP:Village pump (policy) that it be promoved to a guideline and moved to "WP:Manual of Style/Subject here" (use the same term that agrees with the subject-specific naming-conventions guideline if there is one). "Advertise" the proposal at relevant places like WP:Village pump (proposals), WT:Manual of Style, and the talk pages of any relevant wikiproject, naming convention, notability guideline, noticeboard, and other subject-specific talk pages at which topically interested editors are apt to congregate. A WP:Centralized discussion listing might also be appropriate if the wikiproject covers many thousands of articles.
  • The proposal at VPPOL about "MOS:CS" can probably be used as a model, including the process for resolving improvement requests about the material. [When that link no longer works, please update it to the eventual archive location, which will probably be here or here, depending on what the archiver bot does.]

The most important part is making sure that what it contains is what is actually done, i.e. it already represents consensus, and just deserves the {{Guideline}} approval stamp, and renaming and recategorization as an MoS guideline instead of a wikiproject style essay.