Guidelines revision: what changed and why posts 61–90
This is a continuation of a long topic, addressed by post number rather than by page. Start at post 1.
Post #61 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
A note on scope: what I am saying about guidelines revision applies to the case in the first post and I would not extend it further without checking.
What I would tell a new member reading about guidelines revision for the first time: the confident posts are not the reliable ones, and the reliable ones are longer.
Everything in post #65 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
Reading the changed pages: the diff is smaller than the announcement implies, which is reassuring rather than disappointing. A large change to a documentation page usually means the previous version was wrong.
A qualification I should have led with rather than closed on.
Narrowing post #65, because the general version has more than one answer.
Guidelines revision would be much easier to settle if anyone reported the denominator. Almost nobody reports the denominator.
On post #65 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Trying to state the guidelines revision position in a way that someone who disagrees would recognise as fair, because I do not think the version in this thread passes that test.
Picking up post #69: that is the part I would want checked first.
Worth saying publicly: stepping back cleanly and handing over is a service. Documents with an absent maintainer go wrong quietly, which is the worst way for them to go wrong.
Happy to be the one who is wrong here if it settles the question.
Guidelines revision was covered in the wiki last year and the page has a review date on it, which is a better starting point than my memory of a thread.
On post #70 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
The number people quote for guidelines revision is a central estimate presented without its interval, and the interval is wide enough that the estimate is nearly uninformative on its own.
Post #72 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
One question about the transition rather than the policy: what happens to topics that are in flight when it takes effect? The announcement is clear about posts and silent about drafts.
The mechanism is plausible, which is not the same as established.
Archives: older announcements are archived by date. Checking archives is useful if you want to know what changed when.
The answer changed when I changed how I was measuring, which was informative.
When announcements are made: major policy changes, technical changes affecting site function, planned downtime, and changes to guidelines all get announced here.
Whatever the answer on guidelines revision turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, invite the correction.
Reading rather than answering, but this is the post I would point somebody at.
The rare case here is the one that costs somebody a week, though, and the common case costs everyone ten seconds. I think the trade is clearly correct.
Post #80 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.
Thank you for announcing it in advance rather than after. The number of places that do the reverse is remarkable.
I am not the right person to answer the follow-up to this.
Announcement about the vendor documentation set. Two pages have had their review dates brought forward because the underlying records changed. The pages themselves say what changed and when, as they always have.
Someone should write this up properly, and it should probably not be me.
Two people in this thread mean different things by guidelines revision and are disagreeing about the definition while believing they are disagreeing about the facts. Worth pausing to define it.
Collapsed as off-topic by two members at trust level 3 or above
The arithmetic in post #83 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
Taking guidelines revision seriously for a moment rather than deflecting: the honest position is that the community has observations and no controlled comparison, and those two things support very different sentences.
The version of guidelines revision that circulates here is a simplification of a simplification. It is not wrong, but it has lost the conditions under which it holds, and those conditions are where the interesting cases live.
Everything in post #83 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
Archives: older announcements are archived by date. Checking archives is useful if you want to know what changed when.
Adding it because I spent an afternoon working it out and nobody should have to twice.
Narrowing post #87, because the general version has more than one answer.
The edit is clearer. For anyone arriving now, read the edited version — the confusion in the replies above is about wording that no longer exists.
I would be interested in a counterexample if anyone has one.
The failure mode on guidelines revision is boring rather than dramatic. It is almost always the step everyone assumes was done correctly because it is too simple to get wrong.
Confirming post #87 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.
Adding a reference point for guidelines revision. Mine is a single case, collected without controls, and I am posting the method alongside it so it can be discounted appropriately.