[Vim-l] New guidelines (policies) for editing tips

[John Beckett]

When the now-working Vim mailing lists have settled down afer running for
another week or so, I plan to post some messages trying to get help from the
community to work on the Vim Tips wiki.

To prepare for this, I have been working on a set of guidelines for how to
edit tips. I think this is important because we really need help, and I
think we should try to make the best use of people's time if they start
taking an interest.

In particular, I'm concerned about the weak tips, and the tips which have
pages of comments. IMHO the best thing to do, in many cases, is to
ruthlessly prune weak tips and comments (delete them).

Sure, we need to keep useful tips and comments, but I think that if we are
too cautious in our approach, we will NEVER FINISH editing the tips into a
reasonable state. So, I've given some fairly aggressive guidelines to try to
overcome the conservative approach that I anticipate most Vimmers would
apply.

I would appreciate any feedback on the guidelines that I have created. I
anticipate that most controversy would arise from my suggestions to be
ruthless about deleting comments, and to NOT use the discussion page of tips
under review.

If you're going to disagree, please check my maths.
 Number of tips = 1400
 Number of tips fixed each week = 5 (probably less than this)
 Number of weeks remaining = 1400/5 = 280 (more than 5 years)

You'll find what I've done in 'Recent changes'.

The new guidelines (and supporting templates) are:
    Vim_Tips_Wiki:General_guidelines
    Vim_Tips_Wiki:Title_guidelines
    Vim_Tips_Wiki:Comment_guidelines
    Vim_Tips_Wiki:Category_guidelines
    Vim_Tips_Wiki:Discussion_guidelines
    Vim_Tips_Wiki:Delete_guidelines
    Template:Merged
    Template:NavPolicy

To find these, go to any tip with a {{Review}} box, and click a link. You
will notice that I've changed the Review text.

John