Consensus products: guidelines, directives, and article layout-pages

At the core, I think that there has not been a method for turning decisions into written directives and article layout-pages. Plus consider the prior dilemma: any article could be totally rewritten, so it would seem futile for a decision to pinpoint an article's content when it could be re-written away. It is imperative that articles be based on a "solid" foundation of layout-pages, which a consensus group could modify to enact their decisions. Otherwise, consensus decisions are like "herding water" and that must have been demoralizing to groups who studied the issues and had no document which could cause a decision to become "binding" about article contents.

Another major danger: we must beware the legal liabilities of Wikipedia, if a content-control process is established, then any libelous remarks (in an article text) might be seen an officially released text from the Wikimedia Foundation management. Hence, the decisions offered from negotiation, by a consensus-group, must be handled as advice to the editors, rather than a gateway which authorized the release of exact (libelous) content in articles. For those reasons, we need some legal advice about how to word a guideline, which gives a step-by-step process, to resolve content disputes about articles (without being viewed as controlling libelous content).

I don't mean to imply "wait until the lawyers come" (NO), but rather, a guideline, for a content-dispute process, should expect to be modified to avoid connecting Wikimedia personnel as being liable for various editors' written remarks linked to that guideline. Such changes in wording, to avoid legal liability, should be simple, if we remember that the results of a content-dispute are advice to editors acting in good faith.

I like everything you're saying. I always tend to focus on "how could this go wrong", and to me it could go wrong if we get into instruction creep, and do directives on stuff like "naming convention for Barack Obama versus Barack Hussein Obama versus Barry Obama". But I think that's easy to resolve if we just establish a threshold where a directive is more appropriate than a localized or small decision.

I might also prefer the term "social contract". "Directive" sounds like it's coming from the top down, and it isn't (nor should it). It should represent something that a bunch of diligent, good faith editors arrived at after some discussion, and agreed between them was a fair way to handle a contentious issue.

But yes, I think you're onto a fantastic idea. Yeah, let's deal with contentious subject areas by having editors discuss layouts and conventions. And, where necessary, provide legal input (I'm thinking of libel for BLP debates). We just need to offer some guidance about how to use it for good, not evil.