Overall, I like lots of these changes. A lot of the overly long parts were pared down, and the added Guidelines are good ideas that help users understand how good crit works nowadays. I really like the changes made to relay a more welcoming message.
I made some changes on the sandbox page. Pretty much every change was for accessible wording. I listed the ones that weren't.
EDIT: I did also make some changes to add some examples back in. Terse is excellent, but examples can be very helpful to readers. This is a matter of preference, though, and some or all of those can be cut if we wish.
Changes should all be taken as suggestions.
- Changed "Do not make personal statements about the author" to "Do not make personal attacks on the author" to better reflect the current policy.
- If this was an intentional change in policy meaning, let's discuss!
- Returned both Rules back Guidelines (see below).
- Also extensively reworded some of them. Current title for the "Stylistic Choices" bullet is "Keep an open mind".
- I took a page from Taylor's book and moved "don't tell an author "The problems with this article should be obvious"" to a sub-bullet of "Your posts must contain some kind of content" and reworded a bit. The content should be the same, though — this really was just an extension of Rule 2!
- Added a longer explanation for Forum critique should be relatively in-depth. Forum Crit Team should check this out and see if they like it.
- Changed the text of "Critique on posted articles can be minimal:" to reflect that it's a guideline, not a rule. (The 'rule' part was repeated from earlier. I made the wording more gentle.)
- Additionally, the wording "but must still contain reasonable content." contradicted the actual rule ("must contain some kind of content"), and implied a harsher standard. This doesn't seem to be the intent.
- Added examples of short critique on posted articles. Site Crit Team should check this out and see if they agree.
- Split off "dogpiling" back into its own guideline, because it had nothing to do with post length.
- Split final bullet into its own section, Taking Critique, and split it in two.
ABOUT THOSE NEW RULES:
The point Criticism should be helpful in some way was intentionally made a guideline, because "helpful" is often in the eye of the beholder. Enforcing this as a rule, independent of breaking another rule, is currently an overstepping of disciplinary authority.
Currently, this is never enforced except on posts that moderators find insulting or spammy, which is covered by the current update on Site Rules.
If we're going to change that, I think we need a more in-depth discussion than simply moving the bullet to the Rules section.
Similarly: Respect different stylistic choices is not enforced as a hard rule at all! At this very moment, some people are arguing about whether a current SCP is Too Much Like A Tale, and not being disciplined for it.
It's true this has been disciplined for when people go overboard with it, but that's not solved by simply moving the whole thing to "Rules".
(Note: Confirmed that this should be a Guideline and not a Rule with Soulless & Mann, 2 of the 3 people with final say on Crit.)
As a rule of thumb, please specially highlight rules changes in rewrites separately, so that people are aware they were changed. Everyone I spoke to who read this thread was not aware, even though Taylor was clear about having moved the bullets in the collapsed part of their post.
A QUESTION:
- Should we specify that readers can post "I love this!" on articles, within reason? Technically, this is the positive version of "Meh"… but it's always been allowed, because praise essentially always benefits articles. (Who doesn't love seeing expressions of simple praise on their work?) The problem is, this can get complicated to explain, since if someone says "love it" on 682, 076, and a few random other articles, that's just spam. Is it worth explaining in the policy?
- Example: Exception: You can just say "I love this" so long as you don't post this and nothing else on several articles. (Needs tweaking.)
I want to particularly thank taylor_itkin for putting a lot of work into this, and also being very dedicated to following up on it.