User:HouseBlaster/A creepy history

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Here on Wikipedia, we dislike institution creep. There is widespread consensus that overly complex and bureaucratic rules and regulations are bad for the project. Despite this, we have a very large amount of policy creep. Currently, there are about 72 policies^[a] and over 200 guidelines on Wikipedia.^[b] I am going to attempt what may be a fool's errand: on this page, I will catalog each policy and guideline, along with their origins. Hopefully, this will allow us to understand the scope of our bureaucratic problem. Help is welcome: if you happen to know of a policy or guideline not listed here or the location of discussion where a rule achieved consensus, please go ahead and add it!

Sortable table of rules

Date^[c]	Rule	Discussion where consensus was achieved	Notes
13 May 2005	Wikipedia:Be bold	None	Marked as a {{stylehowto}} (the predecessor of {{how to}} and {{style}}) on 6 October 2004.
23 September 2006	Wikipedia:Notability	Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archive_2#Guideline?	After the {{guideline}} template was added, there was still much debate over if consensus had actually been achieved. By January 2007, people were discussing deprecating the guideline.^[d] See also a history of notability.

Notes

^ Calculated as the number of pages in Category:Wikipedia policies, but this is almost certainly inaccurate
^ Per the lead at Wikipedia:List of guidelines
^ Measured as when consensus was reached to mark the page as a policy or guideline. If it was a BOLD change, the date of said BOLD change is used instead.
^ I take this as confirmation that opponents of WP:N had acknowledged that it was in fact a guideline.

[1] Calculated as the number of pages in Category:Wikipedia policies, but this is almost certainly inaccurate

[2] Per the lead at Wikipedia:List of guidelines

[3] Measured as when consensus was reached to mark the page as a policy or guideline. If it was a BOLD change, the date of said BOLD change is used instead.

[4] I take this as confirmation that opponents of WP:N had acknowledged that it was in fact a guideline.

[a]