Wikipedia:Issues/Long-term discussions

This is a Wikipedia community issue page. This page is just getting started. The first goals when starting an issue page are:

Analyzing the problem
Researching the history of the problem
Cross linking the page to discussions about the problem
Defining the problem with concise open-ended language
Creating a list of criteria or community concerns that any solution should meet
Generating community consensus on the definition of the problem

Discussions about the writing and editing of this page should happen on the talk page. This is not the forum to discuss the issue itself, rather this is the place to document and summarize discussions that are happening in other venues such as Wikipedia:Issues/Long-term discussions/Forum

It is difficult to have discussions about important topics over long periods of time, except where the discussion centers around a static page that is steadily revised -- such as an article, a policy page, or the like. Discussions that are not about a specific policy, including proposals that are brought up, debated, and closed down (or a class of proposals, each of which is either merged into another discussion or closed down), tend not to last longer than a few months. As a result many important topics are brought up again in many different places, or in the same place many times over, and repeatedly archived.

WP:PEREN is one example of this -- these are proposed changes to address an underlying issue. The proposasls listed on that page are always rejected, but the underlying issues are important and deserving of more discussion than "all proposals to address this issue have been rejected", which does not help facilitate discussion or improvement.