Template talk:Outdated

Problems
I feel the suggestion made by this template is less than helpful. If an editor cannot get clear word on our policies by reading the articles that supposedly expound them, then editing this wiki is a useless proposal to anybody without the guts to. This is a situation we need to have some balls to get out of, either by laying down policy, or by not having a policy at all. I'm not opposed to use of the template to point out these kinds of situations (which it does not do effectively currently, vis-a-vis lack of an auto-category to collect such problems for future review), but use of it as a permanent white flag of surrender is not positive either.

Also, do not ever subst any BaseInfoBox template into an article. The entire point of the system is that descendent templates respond to design changes in their parents, so that the generated HTML can be changed if necessary, and styling is kept consistent across related notice types. I would like to have that suggestion removed from the template documentation. --Quasar (talk) 15:35, 10 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I took out the substing part &mdash; testing showed it was a bad idea anyway because not recursive, so any extra categories still would need manual removal. (Though if someone seriously attempted to recreate such a guideline, old template formatting would be the least of their adversity.)  I see you've added a maintenance subcategory, which makes sense; thanks.  Still thinking about your other paragraph.    Ryan W (talk) 23:06, 11 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Quasar, your post succinctly describes the current bleak situation. The recent flashpoints happen to be person notability and mod notability, where I myself don't have specific improvements to propose, but I hoped that pointing out discrepancies would be better than nothing in the meantime.  I've reworded the template so it won't sound like the issue is closed.


 * either by laying down policy, or by not having a policy &mdash;  My personal opinion is that clear policies *do* often prevent conflict.  It's easy for someone to yell "bureaucracy!" when they wouldn't be volunteering their own time to clean up the mess.  VfDs and images were routinely total headaches before we put up a few rules.


 * That said, I don't edit such documentation much anymore, because I keep seeing it totally fail our contributors, especially new ones. We ask people to post on central processing if they have a big new idea, and no one replies, which kind of kills the momentum  .  They start an article about their favorite WAD or mapper, seemingly within the rules, and then it gets deleted under other people's interpretations of the same text (or worse, unwritten text ).  Meanwhile, other people add content without reading the rules and it stays, or at least creates a long debate when the letter of the guideline says it should be deleted .  Now we have someone wanting to see notability standards withdrawn altogether , instead existing "organically" via individual article creations and VfDs, which has never even been suggested as far as I know.


 * There has to be some way that policies and guidelines can be maintained (in response to trends or widely attended threads), and linked to in discussions, without sounding too pedantic to take seriously, or like pulling rank (many of those familiar with our rules are also admins). Apparently I do it wrong too, because most newbies to whom I've given links have stopped editing.  So there's a cultural aspect to this also, and not just making sure wording gets updated, which by itself is just power users taking turns shouting at a wall.    Ryan W (talk) 02:58, 14 August 2014 (UTC)