User:Scott/Notes/Policy changes
Wikipedia has no coherent record of how and when changes to policy (I use the term loosely to include "accepted practice") have occurred. Many changes have been entirely forgotten.
Administrators, concerns over actions of[edit]
In early 2004, following the requested de-sysopping of The Cunctator in December 2003, there were several attempts at establishing processes for raising concerns over an administrator's actions along the lines of the "request for comment" model. Wikipedia:Requests for comment itself was created at the same time and eventually absorbed them.
- Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Archive 9 (January 2004)
- Wikipedia talk:De-adminship (January-March 2004, merged into the below)
- Wikipedia talk:Possible misuses of sysop rights (January-December 2004)
- Wikipedia talk:Requests for review of administrative actions (January-June 2004)
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents subsequently became the standard venue for doing so. [Details?]
In 2021, a review of the requests for adminship process initiated a new process, Wikipedia:Administrative action review.
User subpages, deletion of[edit]
Discussion from September 2003 predating the introduction of "speedy deletion":
Speedy deletion itself was originally operated at Wikipedia:Speedy deletions until superseded in 2008 by the CSD templates.
In the mid-2000s many users had "secret" subpages as a game for other users to find. A controversial purge in 2008 wiped out most of them and disagreement over the topic continued for at least a couple of years after without establishing a basis in policy. This essay by the late editor Bahamut0013 goes into detail and links to many contemporary discussions.
User talk pages, deletion of[edit]
The text "As a matter of practice User talk pages are generally not deleted" was added to Wikipedia:User pages on 15 February 2006 and survives in modified form today at WP:DELTALK.
Until 2010 there was a habit of deleting the talk pages of indefinitely blocked users, without any formal policy basis. Discussions in early 2008 led to the deletion of a template used to tag "temporary" user talk pages, but people kept adding the pages by hand into a category for it, until that was finally deleted in 2010. Thousands of user talk pages were deleted this way - for example, in 2008 a single admin deleted nearly 12,000 of them.