Wikipedia:Editing policy pages

This is a failed proposal. Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

This is a proposal to limit the editing of policy pages (but not guidelines) to administrators, or to editors with a certain amount of experience.

While Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, there's no reason that principle should extend to the structure of the project, which is what our policies are. We've recently had a spate of new users, and in one case a notorious sockpuppeteer, turn up at policy pages in order to change them in their own interests. The WP:NPOV, WP:V, and WP:NOR talk pages were plagued for weeks by a user with very few main namespace edits, who was editing with three accounts and wanted to insert his OR and POV into articles, and so decided the policies had to be changed. He was joined by other new editors, sockpuppets, and one vandal, and NPOV and NOR ended up having to be protected. At the end of April, banned User:Zephram Stark, one of WP's most notorious sockpuppeteers, managed to initiate, then take part in, a rewrite of WP:SOCK using two sockpuppet accounts, and was busy at it for three weeks before it was noticed.

It takes a certain amount of experience before the way the policies interact begins to make sense. There's no indication that allowing new editors to edit the policies provides any benefit to the project, as they're generally unfamiliar with both the rationale behind the policies, and how they work in practice.

I'm therefore opening this up for a poll and discussion, with two proposals: (1) that policy pages be protected and edited by admins only; or (2) that policies should be edited only by users with a minimum of six months experience and 1,000 article edits. With the latter, there would be no technical means of stopping other edits, so it would be up to the regular editors on the page to monitor it.