Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines
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Add some images
I talked to someone a little while ago who did some work with new editors. One of the problems she identified was that all of the policy, guideline, and help pages look the same. The result is that everything blends together, and they can't remember it. This is actually two problems:
- They all look like Wikipedia articles, and
- They all look like each other.
The first probably isn't under our immediate control, but the second is.
The problem makes sense (the human brain keeps track of different colors, unexpected things, little jokes, etc. better than an oblong gray blur of text), and I think that we should take advantage of the way the brain works by adding a picture or colored box here or there. I'm not suggesting that every policy should have a big picture in the lead, but these are all good things:
- the painting in Wikipedia:Neutral point of view#Describing aesthetic opinions and reputations,
- the photo of researchers at the top of Wikipedia:No original research,
- the comic at the top of Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources, and
- the picture of the telephone directories in WP:NOTDIRECTORY.
If this makes sense to you, then please consider adding an image occasionally, whenever you find a page (or section) that could use a little lightening and anchoring, and an image that is a good fit for it. If you're interested in this idea but not sure where to start, then Wikipedia:Image use policy should probably have an image to illustrated every major point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:01, 4 December 2022 (UTC)