If the purpose of this project is to review all the policies to make sure that changes were voted in, you're going to have to review the changes going all the way to the start to make sure that other unilateral changes were not introduced. A lack of doing this would be targetting changes by recent editors and not focusing on finding out what the actual issues are and have been. -EckserahHead Dataminer 17:25, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
If you look here, the date of the first change reviewed is 2017. If you scroll down to August 4, 2021, you'll see that one of my own changes is listed as well :)
2017 takes us to an era where even sneezing near the policies without a vote was unthinkable. I have no objection to going further. Agent c (talk) 17:52, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
To answer the question, yes I have been reviewing the policies. Constantly from 2011 through 2018. It was part of my job to ensure that the policy amendment process was followed correctly, including ratifying them. I'm not trying to sound flippant here, but like Agent c said, anything that touched those pages was reviewed by many, many people and anything not in compliance with the policies at that time was corrected or removed. That process has changed over time. I am very confident that the extant policies and guidelines as of late 2018 were correct. Therefore, I am looking at policy changes from that point on. I have yet to find anything that is a material change in the 2018-2020 time frame that was not supported by the correct procedure. My reporting of changes primarily focuses on changes made in 2021 and 2022 because that is where I have found material changes that may be in question. As for changes before 2011, as I've stated, the policy amendment process differed over time. There are numerous policies here that began at that time when Ausir would simply write the policy and that's what it was. The process of voting over changes started before I got here, though, and I'm confident that all changes to policy before 2011 were legitimate for how the policies were produced at the time they were produced. There is no need to back in time to find forums for all policies and changes primarily because that is not always how it was done, and they simply aren't there. That does not make them illegitimate. They are simply "grandfathered in" now that there is a different way to amend the policies.TheGunny2.0 (talk) 18:33, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
How were policy amendments made before? -EckserahHead Dataminer 19:00, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
I guess that depends on when the change was. I know that by the time I was active (late 2011), it was common practice to hold discussion and votes. It was a much less formal process early on, IIRC, as there may have been some policies added after discussion only where there was no disagreement, or when things went strait to votes without much discussion, but I would have to dig through each policy discussion to find any. By the time I was an admin/crat (early 2012), everything that I can recall went for discussion and then a vote. The policy pages were very rarely edited, as you can see by the histories, as it was made clear that they should remain as close to their original wording as possible. There were also a few times, I believe, that a bc invoked the decree rule. This may have happeded, like, maybe twice? I never used it. As for before me, I've spent a fair deal of time looking over old policy discussions and the further back you go, the less voting you see. When you get back to Duck and Cover days, I believe a number of the policies were just added because they were deemed needed, most probably by ausir. Most everything is in the forum records. It's possible some of the discussion took place on the policy page talk pages, but I don't recall.TheGunny2.0 (talk) 00:03, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
Head Dataminer 17:25, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
4/27/22 [12:42pm]
