User:Hex/Notes/Changes to policies and processes

Wikipedia has no coherent record of how and when changes to policy (I use the term loosely to include "accepted practice") have occurred. Many changes have been entirely forgotten.

In early 2004, following the requested de-sysopping of The Cunctator in December 2003, there were several attempts at establishing processes for raising concerns over an administrator's actions along the lines of the "request for comment" model. Wikipedia:Requests for comment itself was created at the same time and eventually absorbed them.

• Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Archive 9 (January 2004)
• Wikipedia talk:De-adminship (January-March 2004, merged into the below)
• Wikipedia talk:Possible misuses of sysop rights (January-December 2004)
• Wikipedia talk:Requests for review of administrative actions (January-June 2004)

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents subsequently became the standard venue for doing so. [Details?]

In 2021, a review of the requests for adminship process initiated a new process, Wikipedia:Administrative action review.

On 15 February 2006 an editor added this text to Wikipedia:User pages, a month after someone else had commented on the talk page that "My impression is that the standard has been to not delte [sic] user talk pages":

As a matter of practice User talk pages are generally not deleted...

It survives in modified form today at WP:DELTALK.

Until 2010 there was a habit, without any formal policy basis, of deleting the talk pages of indefinitely blocked users. Discussions in early 2008 led to the deletion of a template used to tag "temporary" user talk pages, but people kept adding the pages by hand into a category for it, until that was finally deleted in 2010. Thousands of user talk pages were deleted this way - for example, in 2008 a single admin deleted nearly 12,000 of them.

Speedy deletion on Wikipedia is an extensive area of policy which has been assembled ad-hoc over decades, and logging the times at which and reasons why will require significant effort. It does however have the rare distinction among policy pages of having a list of the discussions which led to the retirement of obsolete criteria.

Speedy deletions were originally handled at Wikipedia:Speedy deletions, until they were superseded in 2008 by the CSD templates.

CSD U2 permits the speedy deletion of some user pages:

U2. Nonexistent user This applies to user pages, user subpages, and user talk pages of users that do not exist on the English Wikipedia (check Special:ListUsers), except user pages for IP users who have edited, redirects from misspellings of an established user's user page, and redirects created due to a user being renamed. Pages of users who exist on other WMF wikis but do not have local accounts are eligible for deletion.

It was created on 29 July 2006, less than two hours after being proposed as:

Nonexistent user. User pages of users who do not exist. Check Special:Listusers to verify.

On 14 Dec 2009 an editor unilaterally added conditions, which went unremarked-upon:

except userpages for anonymous users and for the previous name of a recently renamed user (which should normally be left as a redirect to the new name for a reasonable time).

This remained unchanged for the next seven years. On 28 Nov 2016 an editor removed the parenthetical condition, after an extremely brief discussion which itself was only referring to an even briefer discussion they had had elsewhere with a single editor, whose opinion was "There is usually little to no harm in leaving the redirects be."

This ruling has been holy writ ever since, despite having the flimsiest of foundations.

A discussion from September 2003 predating the introduction of "speedy deletion":

• Wikipedia talk:Personal subpages to be deleted

In the mid-2000s many users had "secret" subpages as a game for other users to find. A controversial purge in 2008 wiped out most of them and disagreement over the topic continued for at least a couple of years after without establishing a basis in policy. This essay by the late editor Bahamut0013 goes into detail and links to many contemporary discussions.

Early discussions in 2004-6 leading up to the formalization of our policy of notability have been collected, and former user Pixelface put together a highly detailed implementation timeline in 2008.

• Wikipedia:Abuse response ran from 2006-2013 - created by Essjay, of all people

• WikiWikiWeb:OnionInTheVarnish
• Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people - a similar effort started in 2005 and abandoned a year later
• User:Wavelength/About Wikipedia/Manual of Style/Register - a similar effort to document the history of changes to the Manual of Style. Unfortunately its author departed long ago and it only extends to 2014. Some day I may integrate it here