Wikipedia talk:Don't cite essays or proposals as if they were policy

Advice that's never followed

when the topic is too difficult to discuss in a short talk page message, cite an essay in a way that clearly says it's an essay. Make sure the cite is given as advice, not admonishment.

I never see people do that. Instead of saying, "The WP:COATRACK essay says..." they say, "You're not supposed to add this kind of content to articles! See WP:COATRACK." Compy book (talk) 13:04, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

This badly needs rewriting

The whole problem here is the "cite" mentality in how this is written. It's out-of-step with actual Wikipedian perception and practice. When editors mention or link to an essay they are not "citing" it as if it's a policy or guideline.

When someone actually does cite one, then they're making a mistake, and we can detect that. One editor used to do this a lot at WP:RM: "Per WP:YOGURT", etc. Their essays (which did not reflect consensus) got userspaced by WP:MFD, and the "WP:FOO" shortcuts to them were deleted by WP:RFD. I.e., we already have effective process for dealing with this problem, which is quite infrequent.

When someone links to or mentions an essay as part of their rationale, it means "This page presents a carefully articulated argument, which has been archived there and refined over time, to save everyone the trouble to typing the gist of it out over and over again or having to read through someone typing it all out over and over again." It is not offering an essay in place of a WP:P&G page, it's saving everyone the time and pain of lengthy rehash of common debate points. "That's just an essay" is not a sensible response to people using essay-provided reasoning, unless they're offering the essay against actual P&G, or against actual consensus in some other form (e.g. procedural rules like how to do an XfD properly), or against reliable sources.

As a secondary matter: This whole page doesn't actually apply to all essays; we have several that effectively have the community buy-in level of policies or guidelines, most notably (off the top of my head), WP:COMMONSENSE, WP:BRD, WP:INDY, WP:NOTHERE, WP:CIR, WP:DUCK, WP:ROPE, WP:AADD, WP:ASPERSIONS, WP:CCOS, and WP:WIARM, among several others. They've even been directly incorporated-by-reference into P&G pages, and several are directly integrated into process, including sanctions. It is actually perfectly fine to cite these pages in the same way we do P&G pages because they do in fact enjoy that level of consensus. (Some have a different banner, for "Information page" or "Supplement", but they have the hierarchical authority level – to the extent the community even believes in one – of essays, and are categorized as subcategories of essays.)

I'm skeptical this page ever really accurately reflected our community approach to essays, but it certainly does not in 2018, even if some of its basic observations and advice remain valid.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:25, 15 July 2018 (UTC)