Guidelines revision: what changed and why Writing it up because I had to work it out twice and would rather nobody else did.
I was wrong about guidelines revision in a thread last spring and I would like to correct it publicly rather than quietly.
The error was in the units, which changed the conclusion by an order of magnitude. Setting out the corrected version, and the way I now check for that class of mistake.
My experience of guidelines revision contradicts the reply above. I am posting it as a data point rather than as a refutation, because one person's experience is exactly that.
I read the opening post twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Guidelines revision is well covered in the tag pages, and the older discussions are better than the recent ones because they were argued out properly. Worth twenty minutes before adding to this one.
Worth saying publicly: stepping back cleanly and handing over is a service. Documents with an absent maintainer go wrong quietly, which is the worst way for them to go wrong.
The rare case here is the one that costs somebody a week, though, and the common case costs everyone ten seconds. I think the trade is clearly correct.
This is the sort of exchange that makes the archive worth searching.
Coming back to post #5, because the follow-up matters more than the original answer.
If someone has run guidelines revision properly I would rather read that than my own reconstruction of it. Posting mine only because the thread has gone quiet.
Picking up post #5: that is the part I would want checked first.
Marking my uncertainty on guidelines revision explicitly. I am confident about the direction, much less confident about the size, and not confident at all that it generalises past the case in the first post.
Post #10 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Guidelines revision: I would want to see the raw numbers rather than the summary before agreeing. Summaries lose exactly the information that would settle this.
On post #8 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
The reason guidelines revision is hard to answer is that the obvious measurement and the relevant quantity are not the same thing, and substituting one for the other is silent.
Bookmarking this. I will come back when I have something worth adding.
Reading the changed pages: the diff is smaller than the announcement implies, which is reassuring rather than disappointing. A large change to a documentation page usually means the previous version was wrong.
I looked this up rather than remembered it, which is the right order.
A definition problem is doing most of the work in this guidelines revision discussion. Once the term is pinned down I suspect the disagreement mostly goes away and what is left is small.
When announcements are made: major policy changes, technical changes affecting site function, planned downtime, and changes to guidelines all get announced here.
The evidence for this is thinner than the way I have phrased it suggests.
Nothing to add, except that this is the answer I would give if asked.
Announcement about the vendor documentation set. Two pages have had their review dates brought forward because the underlying records changed. The pages themselves say what changed and when, as they always have.
That is the version I use. It may not be the version that is correct.
The edit is clearer. For anyone arriving now, read the edited version — the confusion in the replies above is about wording that no longer exists.
The bit of guidelines revision that nobody enjoys is that the answer changes depending on what you are trying to decide with it. Say what the decision is and the thread will converge.
Reframing guidelines revision slightly, because I think the disagreement is about the question rather than the answer. If the question is "does it happen", yes. If it is "how often", nobody here knows.
On post #21 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Archives: older announcements are archived by date. Checking archives is useful if you want to know what changed when.
Take the reasoning and check the arithmetic; I do not always get it right.
Useful. I have added it to my own notes with the date on it.
Post #28 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
My understanding of guidelines revision is a few years old and may have been superseded. If it has been, I would genuinely like to know rather than keep repeating it.