Hi Zyn and AbsentNihilist, as the person who actually performed the action in question, I'd like to put in my point of view. Firstly, I hope that you don't condemn mlister too harshly for making this post, since I was the one who ultimately acted on his suggestion out of impatience. I accept full responsibility for my mistake. In my defense, however, I'd like to point out how I've consistently tried to act in good faith and solicit input from staff about my proposed change, albeit imperfectly.
Firstly, when I created the second of these articles back in February 2017, there was a post from Roget saying:
Is this documentation a GoI format? It could be added to the new hub and I find it to be pretty fitting. Might inspire some other Sarkic articles.
In my response, however, I replied that it was a quasi-GoI format, in part because I did not want to unilaterally impose this format others. However, considering that this was posted back when there were no _goi tags and the GoI format creation process seemed even more nebulous than it was today, I doubt that I would have had any serious opposition back then if I had rebranded the articles as GoI formats at Roget's suggestion.
Two months later mlister made a post in the GoI formats hub, asking if my articles warranted their own section. This post received the following responses from Zyn and Roget, respectively:
ETA: Those are tagged as tales, so they're technically not GoI formats, so they wouldn't be listed here. Should the Horizon Initiative get a standardized GoI format template, then they'd be added to the list. Thanks GreenWolf for telling me.
I've messaged the creators of the HI about the ongoing project to fill in the missing GoI hubs so we'll see where that leads.
At this point I was pretty excited because I thought that my format was in the process of receiving some "official" sanction. However, to my knowledge, literally nothing came out of this in the following months. (However, I would happy to be corrected!)
For almost a year I gave up on this issue, until December 2017, when I posted my thread "What are the actual requirements for branding an article as a GoI format?" in the policies and proposals forum. Here I made an attempt to solicit input from staff about what actually needed to be done about making a GoI format, since there appeared to be no real rules on the subject, a viewpoint that is probably supported by the existence of this discussion on the O5 forums. However, this post received no official response of any kind from staff for three months, with the only responses being from other authors telling me that they had unilaterally imposed their formats (back when this was considered acceptable before the advent of "official" tags, I suppose).
At one point, I even popped into the staff chat briefly asking for someone to look at the thread. However, I don't think anything came out of it. I probably should have been more persistent, though. Still, having received no official sanction of any kind, I let the issue go, until finally mlister made this very post. Having waited for literally a year for any real action to be done on this issue, and operating without knowledge of standardized GoI format rules, I finally gave into impatience and acted on mlister's suggestion. While it ultimately accomplished my goal, it was certainly not how it should have been done. I should have asked for more input from staff and probably the GoI creator, but I was acting more out of ignorance than out of malice. I hope that the staff see this issue as a good catalyst to finally create an official set of rules and procedures to make GoI formats, because all of this could have been easily prevented if such a set of rules and procedures existed.
tl;dr I literally waited for a year before I made my impatient decision to retag the articles myself, and attempted to solicit staff input at least twice during that time because I was unsure about how to "officially" make my articles GoI formats.
