Archiving proposals

One of the topics we discussed on the recent Karlsruhe Hack Weekend was our wiki’s usability. One concern is that users looking for advice on mapping a certain feature will sometimes be overwhelmed by the large number of pages presenting inconsistent instructions on the same topic.

Of course one part of the reason is that there are sometimes actually different “schools” of mapping. However, I’d like to focus on one of the less controversial challenges here: Dealing with accepted proposals.

When a proposal is approved - by vote or tagging practice -, content will usually be copied to Key:* and Tag:* pages. These will be updated when tagging practice evolves, while the proposal page will stay around unchanged (mostly as a historic document) and become increasingly less useful as mapping documentation over time. My suggestion for dealing with approved proposals is to actively archive them as can be seen here:

Proposed features/Number of steps

The new “Archived proposal” template makes it clear that this is not supposed to be up-to-date documentation, while the existing (but underused) “Approved feature link” template provides a prominent link to the relevant documentation page. Nevertheless, the old content is still easily accessible for those with interest in a feature’s history.

What do you think?

I support this idea. :wink:
Let’s move the template from your usersubpage to Template:Archived propsal and start using it on all finished proposal pages.

Thanks for your support! :slight_smile:

That’s the most straightforward option and it was my first idea, too. However, I’m now considering to instead merge this into the Proposal Page template. The same could be done for Approved feature link. These would basically become two additional parameters for Proposal Page, to be set after the voting has closed.

This has several advantages: There would only be one template to understand for people, no need to worry about the order/placement of the templates, and the additional parameters could be more easily explained within the existing template documentation. It would also make parsing the template information easier for bots (such as my own). And it would offer more flexibility for future design changes - say, changing the background colour of the proposal box for archived proposals, placing them next to each other, or changing the order; neither of which would be possible if we used three separate templates.

For now, I’ve implemented the more straightforward solution:

Template:Archived proposal