User:Jruderman/If I were King of Wikipedia

“ Who died and made you King of the Wiki? ” — Sara Bareilles, probably

Tyrannical proposals(?)

Proposals ordered from least despotic to most despotic.

Consensus-based decision making

• #TheNewWikiWay, which I discovered during the 2024 CrowdStrike article naming saga, will become policy for complex move discussions.
  • Anyone who is allowed to close (conclude) a move discussion should also be allowed to act as a consensus shepherd instead.
  • Acting as a consensus shepherd – using tools from social choice theory to bring a conversation closer to consensus – should be preferred over closing a discussion as "no consensus".

Better support for straw polls

• Software polling system. Not in the sense of legitimizing voting as an alternative to consensus. Just in the sense of making it easier to record everyone's opinions in a straw poll, when some weirdo decides to use polling as one stage in an overall process that is expected to end in consensus.

Manual of Style

• MOS:BOLDFACE: The common practice of bolding subtopics which are also ''subsets'' of the main topic would be allowed and encouraged.
• MOS:LINKING: include table of ways to make it clear that you're linking to a dictionary definition.
• MOS:DASH: "unspaced em dash" phased out in favor of "spaced en dash".
• MOS:QUOTE: “Curly quotes” decriminalized.
• MOS would include less instruction creep. Wait, don't remove that rule, that one's important.

IP & Temporary accounts

• Temporary accounts should get silly names such as "avid banana 2024" instead of unmemorable names such as "~2024-12345-67".
  •  Not done - recognizability does not seem to be part of WMF's goals for temporary accounts. This is okay. Maybe I'll write a user script to make IPs and temporary accounts appear as if they had silly names, instead.
• Temporary accounts should have full access to wiki features such as Watchlist
• Temporary accounts should be convertible into real accounts by renaming them
  • Choice to keep the name as-is, drop the year (if open), or enter a new name for the account

Fandom interwiki links

• Articles such as Tatooine should be allowed to have a little box in the top-right like "Wookiepedia has an article on this fictional planet. Wookiepedia is a fan wiki affliated with neither Wikipedia nor Lucasfilm/Disney." This should be general policy for entertainment-related articles, subject to consensus that the fan wiki is good enough, and subject to consensus on which Terraria wiki is the real one.
• TVTropes too, but only for the narrow category of "articles that are unambiguously about tropes".

Humor as law

• Sockpuppets shall be instructed to put on shoes and touch grass.
• Humor shall be legal, with the oversight of a Wikipedia:Bad-Joke Identification and Elimination Team.

Truth, Verifiability, and a relentless effort to avoid being misleading in any way

• The core content policy of Verifiability should be joined by the twin new policies of Truth and Not Being Misleading (aka ensuring that most reader will come away believing true things).
• Talk pages should be filled with concerns about how readers might be misled.
  • Talk:YIMBY example with non-central fallacy.
  • Talk:Eugenics example with anchoring bias.
• Articles themselves should just cut out bullshit instead of trying to contextualize it, characterize it as incorrect, or counter it.
  • This is clearly the necessary result of WP:NPOV (as interpreted through WP:FRINGE, WP:DUEWEIGHT) and WP:VERIFIABILITY (as interpreted through WP:NOR).
    • Or is it? Few people agreed with me when I raised this point in a deletion discussion and when I made similar arguments in another deletion discussion (not linked to avoid canvassing an open discussion).
•  Not done – The Truth angle is a perennial proposal and I don't need to insert myself there.
•  In progress – I'm putting together a squad WikiProject small Discord server for editors interested in the Not Being Misleading angle.
•  In progress – I may help out on articles such as List of cognitive biases.

Dear loyal subjects,

Tell me on the essay talk page which of these I should actually advocate for, maybe.