Wikiversity:Community Review Policy

The page documents an official English Wikiversity policy with wide acceptance by participants as a standard you should follow. Please propose and discuss changes to ensure your revisions reflect consensus.

Community Review is a tool used by the Wikiversity community to discuss particular issues of contention on a case-by-case basis, which are either not covered by official policy or where the application of policy is unclear. If a consensus is reached on a community review, the result will have the same weight as policy, and can overrule other policies where consensus contradicts policy.

Types of community review

User conflicts

If you are unable to resolve a conflict with another Wikiversity participant on your own, you may request community feedback at Wikiversity:Community Review. The ideal outcome is that the Wikiversity community can resolve the conflict without incident. However as a last resort the Wikiversity community may decide as a result of reviewing the situation that sanctions are necessary to resolve the conflict.

When requesting a user conflict-related community review, you must provide links demonstrating the problem, links that show attempts to resolve the problem on your own, and a detailed description of how the edits or actions may violate official policies or guidelines, or otherwise harms Wikiversity. You must also notify any users that you are discussing on their talk page, and notify any participants of the learning projects that could be effected by a community decision.

Questions of scope or appropriateness

If there are questions about whether a class or category of learning resources or other pages falls outside of Wikiversity's scope or may otherwise be inappropriate, you should request community feedback at Wikiversity:Community Review.

When requesting a scope-related community review, efforts must be made to list the resources within this class or category, and notify the participants in these projects. An announcement should also be made on the Colloquium, and in cases where a large class is being discussed the discussion should also be linked from the sitenotice and/or the mailinglist.

For more limited cases that do not involve a whole class of projects, Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion should be used instead.

Requests for clarifications

In cases where a Custodian, Bureaucrat, or Checkuser is unclear about how to use their tools, or when a questions arises about how those tools are being used, a request for community feedback may be opened at Wikiversity:Community Review. Such requests should always be announced on the Colloquium.

Requests for community statements

On occasions where a statement of the community's opinion may help clarify things, a request may be put forward for a community statement. Such requests should be announced on the Colloquium.

Closing a community review

Community reviews should be closed when it is clear that there is a consensus, or when it becomes clear that a consensus will not be reached.

After a community review is closed

In cases where a community review was found necessary because current policies were insufficient to address the issue, efforts should be made to update the policies in order to take the decision into account so that it may be applied to similar cases in the future, should the need arise.

Recent amendments to this policy

The following resolutions have been provisionally adopted as a result of the discussion at Wikiversity:Community Review/CR process discussion/Resolutions, and should be integrated into the policy when that review is closed:

• The main page of a community review will:
  1. Begin with a brief statement which explains the purpose of the review.
  2. Have a list of questions with yes/no answers. Questions can be added as indicated by the statements of the participants.
  3. Have statements by individual contributors about the topic, under their own headings, not to exceed 700 words. Threaded and long-form discussions should take place on the talk page. Statements may contain links to other discussions or longer statements on another page.[1]

• Resolutions approved using community review will be noted on the policy pages affected by the resolution under a new heading, to be later incorporated into the policy's main text through the normal editing process. In cases where a resolution modifies a proposed policy, the resolution heading should be left in place until the policy is approved.[2]

• Individual resolutions should not be seen as "written in stone", and should be revisited if they are thought to have unintended negative effects that harm Wikiversity's mission. [3]