CZ:Proposals/CZ Community pages should be revised for simplicity

Summary

Part of what is keeping our "elitism shield" up is that many (if not all) of the community pages are overly complex. A campaign to heavily review and edit the pages will give us leaner, easy-to-comprehend documentation and improve our external appearance.

Process

• A well-rounded discussion
• Aggregated Review of the community pages
• The review should include opinions and analyses from everyone who wishes to voice their concerns
• A focused effort on slimming up the documentation ensuring that their meaning is not lost

Discussion

I have two reactions to this. (1) The summary and process above don't constitute a complete proposal. Everyone recognizes the need to improve our community pages. I plug away regularly at them, and I am constantly begging people to help with them. The problem, quite obviously, is not that we needed a "proposal" to tell us we need to improve our community pages. The problem is how to motivate people to actually work on them. If you had a proposal to address that effectively, well, that would be interesting. (2) The fact that there is no driver for your proposal I take as further evidence that this is a problem. --Larry Sanger 20:49, 12 February 2008 (CST)

Let's go straight to very specific proposals. e.g.

1) To replace CZ: Article Mechanics with CZ:Article_Mechanics/Draft_rewrite.

2. To replace CZ:Neutrality Policy with CZ:Neutrality process new draft

How do we decide to do this or not? What exactly is the mechanism. Gareth Leng 04:00, 13 February 2008 (CST)

Exactly my question. That is, if no one wants to answer that question, or any other such specific questions about how to revise community pages for simplicity, then this proposal won't (can't!) be implemented. Right now, the only mechanisms are: someone makes the change and sees if it sticks; or I do it.

However, I don't think we should entirely replace the former with the latter. I think we should put the latter (or versions of the latter) first, and then direct readers to the former (or versions of the former) for fuller versions of our policy. That is particularly important for Article Mechanics. --Larry Sanger 07:22, 13 February 2008 (CST)

Let me restate my concern. I think part of the reason why there isn't much effort is because there is a worry that "the changes won't be right" or "they're incorrect". There is an implied, non-verbal restriction on editing these pages. I certainly respect that this is your project, but despite the encouragement no one wants to "rock the boat"--I may be mistaken, but I think I am not. Only a response from the community will verify this hypothesis. --Robert W King 10:11, 13 February 2008 (CST)