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Should Wikipedia essays be moved out of Wikipedia namespace?

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This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Wikipedia has pages in Wikipedia namespace that are classified as essays, e.g. W: Wikipedia:Don't bludgeon the process and W: Wikipedia:Civil POV pushing. These are neither policies nor guidelines. The banner says that "it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community", per W: Template:Essays and W: Template:Supplement. Despite the unknown consensus support, they are often referenced from discussions. They even have shortcut redirects to ease referencing, e.g. W: Wikipedia:BLUDGEON and W: Wikipedia:SEALION.

Should these essay pages be moved away from Wikipedia namespace, e.g. to user space?

Wikipedia essays should be moved out of Wikipedia namespace

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Arguments for

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  • Pro By being referenced from discussions as if they had policy force and applied as if they did so, they are de facto policies to some extent. And yet, they mislead the reader into thinking they are not, and that it is not known whether they have consensual support. They create an unpleasant environment with a taste of dishonesty, in which experienced users know which of the essays have the force of policy and which do not. This runs counter to the requirement of openness of the project and fairness of administration.
  • Pro Expanding on the above, some of the essays contain clearly untrue statements, which creates the impression that they are not taken seriously. To wit, W:WP:BLUDGEON states "The more often you express the same ideas in a discussion, the less persuasive you become.", clearly untrue. And yet, BLUDGEON is being invoked as a policy, and has convenient shortcuts WP:BLUD and WP:BLUDGEON to ease such referencing. BLUDGEON is templatized as "supplement".
  • Pro There are over 2000 pages in the English Wikipedia classified as essays. No one can be reasonably expected to read them, and then try to figure out whether they are supported by consensus.

Arguments against

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  • Con Regulating everything only via formal policies and guidelines would be overly bureucratic.
    • Objection If there is a consensus that a particular text should become a guideline--an overridable policy or a weakly enforced policy--it should be easy to get it to a request for comment and have it formally approved. Then, the page would state it is a guideline, and it would not mislead anyone by stating its consensus status is not known.
    • Objection The application of a page expressly marked as having an unknown consensus status as a policy seems to be very problematic, and this concern overrides the need to have informally created artifacts.
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