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On the subject of your essay, I suspect that a philosopher would disagree, and that if there is a true duty at all, it is a "duty not to violate" (a subtle distinction) and that it is subordinate to Wikipedia's values and principles (i.e., a duty to not comply, if compliance results in a worse article). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 22 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Things like not putting in a citation are not forbidden! But more importantly I'd prefer not to encourage vandals by listing various ways they can cause trouble, or put off someone who wants to contribute by implying the they might be beset by vandals. WP:5P doesn't point to ways to vandalize Wikipedia - it assumes the people reading it want to be good contributors. There is the guideline WP:Disruptive editing but I don't think we push it in front of people who want to contribute! It's there in case there is some disruption. NadVolum (talk) 18:49, 22 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"The point of these template boxes is not to list every single redirect for any given page (that's what Special:WhatLinksHere is for). Instead, they generally should list only the most common and easily remembered redirects. One way to check which is the most common is through the Pageviews tool (replace the examples with the shortcuts you are testing)."
WP:ADHERE is not "the most common" (it's barely used at all, since you created it yesterday). Nobody except you and me "remembers" it. Nobody except you uses it. So why should it be listed?
My preference (others may disagree, but I believe my view is common) is to have just one shortcut for a ==Section==, and to have two displayed only when those two are either both very common (e.g., WP:DUE and WP:UNDUE) or when they have completely different names (WP:YESPOV and WP:WIKIVOICE). With WP:ADHERENCE and WP:ADHERE, neither of these situations apply.
Although it doesn't have to be this way, for better or worse, on English Wikipedia, shortcuts typically become jargon terms used directly within the visible text. Having multiple jargon terms referring to the same set of guidance diminishes the effectiveness of jargon. So while I feel it's more work than it's worth to try to prevent new shortcuts from being created, I agree with limiting the number of shortcuts that are publicized, in an effort to avoid new jargon terms, and to help the effectiveness of existing ones. isaacl (talk) 17:07, 18 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Shortcuts (2)
How many shortcuts should the top of the page have? I think that WP:RULES is sufficiently different from WP:PG to warrant mention in the shortcut box (even though policies and guidelines are not really rules). I understand now that five is a bit excessive, and that WP:P&G is redundant to WP:PG, but I think having more than one could be useful. Pinging @WhatamIdoing for an opinion. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 23:28, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Shortcut § Link boxes suggests listing "only the most common and easily remembered redirects." (Typically there will be push back starting at three or four shortcut links.) Because the English Wikipedia community frequently turns shortcut links into jargon (as I discussed previously), personally I think the shortcut should be fairly intuitive to someone who doesn't already know to where it points. Although I think both fare poorly on this criterion, WP:RULES is slightly better in that it's a word (though in my opinion, it's not obvious which rules, and that the link would end up on this page). What are the commonly used redirects? isaacl (talk) 00:20, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
WP:PG is by far the most linked; it has 6824 links. The next most common is WP:POLICY with 4996. WP:RULES is fairly common with 1736 links. The other two (out of the five that were originally there) have no more than about 800 links each. If we had to narrow it down to three, I would pick WP:PG, WP:POLICY, and WP:RULES. Just WP:PG by itself is probably not the best solution. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 00:27, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Isaacl that you usually have one or two. Three begins to attract objections, and four is too much. For single sections, the rule of thumb is to subtract one: you usually have zero or one, but you might have two (especially if they're opposites or very different), and almost never three. I think your reasoning about PG vs P&G is sound, but I don't actually care which ones you choose. I am really only interested in having a reasonable/small number of shortcuts advertised. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:49, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've changed the second one to POLICY after checking the stats, but forgot to check the talk page for this page before doing it. Luckily it seems it wasn't against consensus. I agree 1 is not enough and 3 is too much, and I agree POLICY is better because of the link counts. One can change it back to RULES if they want (I would weakly oppose it, but I don’t care that much). I also linked this page for future editors in a hidden comment. FaviFake (talk) 21:33, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not a big fan of hidden text (some of the potential implications are discussed at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Hidden text). Personally I'd only add it if there were somewhat frequent changes made to the displayed shortcuts. I think WP:POLICY also passes the criterion of being intuitive. isaacl (talk) 04:22, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@FaviFake, about this change to the nutshell, one of the concepts that we try to retain is the distinction between the True™ Policy (what the community does) and the written policy (the editable wiki page, which may or may not match the True™ Policy at any given point in time). I'm not sure that it's important for the nutshell itself to address this, but I wanted to let you think about it for a bit, in the hope that you'd have an idea about how to communicate this better. It's one of the things we could IMO do better at. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:43, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! I had thought about it, but I reached the conclusion that it said the same thing. Did I misread what it used to say?
OG: Wikipedia's policies and guidelines are pages that serve to document the good practices accepted in the Wikipedia community.
new: Wikipedia's policies and guidelines document the good practices accepted in the Wikipedia community.
I suspect that the "are pages" bit was meant to signal the distinction between the True™ Policy and the written one. But I don't think it does a good job of this, and it sounds pretty bad (and I say this with every likelihood that I'm at least partly responsible for the old wording).
I don't object to the change (if I did, I'd have reverted it). I'm leaning at least 80% towards saying that the nutshell is the wrong place to address that philosophical concept anyway. But it probably should be addressed somewhere on this page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:04, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, ok, I thought the "document the good practices" bit helped with the distinction (i.e., they document them, not set them).Feel free to edit the nutshell, I only wanted to make it shorter nd don't mind it being revameped. FaviFake (talk) 08:41, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm happy with the cut down version. We don't need nutshells to exactly say everything and yet only occupy a couple of lines. Next step is trying to make titles include everything which some editors seem to try and do! :-) NadVolum (talk) 10:15, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've occasionally wondered if this policy could ...just not have a nutshell at all? I know that's kind of a radical idea, but maybe?
