This page is intended to be a historical record of how various policies and guidelines at Wikipedia have been created. Care is taken to note the relative roles of such processes as description of already-existing practice, consensus-building, and the use of straw polls or surveys.
- Policies
- WP:IAR - the official first entry on our "list of rules" page, this has been a foundation of Wikipedia for, like, ever. There was quite a lot of dissent about it; when the p/g/e distinction started, this led to a lot of confusion and disagreement, and caveats added, and so forth. Eventually Jimbo stepped in and declared it policy by fiat; since then, efforts to verbosify it have been resisted.
- WP:NOT - this is pretty much our oldest (and most diverse) policy. Most of it is pretty much unchanged over the past few years. Additions are frequently suggested but generally don't get anywhere. One of the more recent ones that worked is "not a dating site". My personal addition is "not a bureaucracy".
- WP:CSD - as far as I know, started a couple years ago to codify when it is and is not appropriate to delete-without-discussion, which was previously based on admin discretion. At two points, a group of major additions have been proposed and put to a vote; these are among the few actual "policy votes" we've ever had. For the last year or so, changes have been discussed on the talk page instead. CSD is one of our most strict and legalistic policies, and hence it sees a lot of rewording. It has a couple of perennial issues.
- Guidelines/Processes
- Disputed/Other