User:Hex/Notes/Changes to policies and processes
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
When there are concerns over an administrator's actions they're brought up at WP:AN/I. However in early 2004, following the requested de-sysopping of The Cunctator in December 2003, there were several attempts at establishing processes for it 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)
User talk pages, deletion of
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.