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It's certainly no secret that our rules are a mess. In fact, a lot of our posts that create the rules for submissions and challenges mention this problem. This is bad for newcomers, who must sift through 2 decades of answers on meta posts just to know if basic things are allowed or not, but it's also simply bad even for veteran users and moderators who must also do the same to motivate the deletion or closing of a post.

It's also no secret that this discussion has already happened. Several times.

I would imagine "Yes" otherwise we're just having this conversation again in a couple years

AdmBorkBork, 8 years ago.

The goal is to, this time for real, and we really mean it for sure, solve this in a permanent fashion.

This post is aimed as a platform for us to voice our proposed solutions to this problem, discuss them and their implementation, as well as eventual concerns we might have in general about this sort of process, up to and including thinking we shouldn't change the ways things are now at all.

I'm going to share in an answer the result of a discussion that happpened in chat earlier today, but this is by no means a done deal. Please pick apart the proposal I'll write, and please submit other proposals if you think they would be better suited and pick those apart too.

The eventual result of this process will be, I hope, a solution that supersedes previous rulings in a way that the fact meta is a mess is no longer a problem, while not actually changing the rules as they're currently interpreted. To reiterate the previous point, the goal is not to change the rules, but to change how "what even are the current effective rules" is decided in the first place.

When it will be apparent consensus is reached on this post, I will make another meta post discussion the result of this consensus in particular, so that users who don't care to discuss various proposals can still vote and express themselves on the proposition.

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I don't think this will work...

This is my own personal opinion, not Word of Mod.

...but it's by no means a bad idea

The fundamental issue with this idea is, as identified by xnor:

This strikes me much like the classic "we're going to rewrite all our code from scratch and get it perfect this time" that tempts developers everywhere. It seems like a massive undertaking with high upkeep costs, on a site long past its prime with dwindling activity.

Source

Even ignoring the part about activity, this very much feels like literally a "mandate from heaven" i.e. something too ideal to be practical/true. As the resident CGCC historian and long-suffering content moderator (both before and since my diamond), I can confidently tell you that CGCC's rules are intricate, complicated, contradictory and nigh-impossible to understand in their entirety. The problem with this idea isn't that the rules will contantly be evolving, as yes, in theory, we can constantly update such a document with each new rule change. The problem is that this document would be so dense as to not even be writable in the first place, let alone readable to the veteran user. New users would be lost at the beginning.

After the canonical tag, the tag is as close to Word of God as we can get on the site rules. There are 250-odd questions, dating back to 2011. And, not only are a substantial number of these questions outdated, but only specific parts of them are outdated. For instance, for years, we pointed users to Command-line flags on front ends when discussing command-line flags. But also, at the same time, people counted command-line flags as additional bytes per a policy from 2011. And don't even get me started on the Great Debate About "What is a Language?".

In fact, don't even get me started on the fact that literally every language has, in some way or another, unique rules.

In short: such a document, while it would work, would be so impenetrable that it'd fail at its primary job of providing a single source of all rules. At that point, why not just consider Meta itself as said "document" or source? In fact, isn't that what the tag is supposed to be?

My suggestion

As I already remarked, we have a community-editable document/guide containing (ideally) all the information a new user should reasonably need to know before posting on the site. The Welcome page is, unlike our unhelpful Tour and help pages, editable by any member of the Community, and so can be updated with any rules changes. It's linked in our Welcome box, is used by multiple users by default when welcoming new users, and contains exactly the information a new user should need to know when posting.

Yes, I wrote the first version. No, it is not my post. It is the Community's post, and, if it's missing information or isn't immediately accessible for new users, then:

Please edit it!

I've suggested posting another answer, one that covers essentially "ok, I've read the answering/asking post, do I need to know anything else?", and such a beginner-rules pamphlet would, in my opinion, be perfect for this. A resource where anyone from the most experienced user to a recently-joined user can find the most useful information is precisely what this post is for, and if it's failing to do that, it should be improved to fix that.

Therefore, my suggestion:

  • Have a follow-up discussion to this, wherein we formulate what "new user rules info" should be included in such a guide
  • Post a new answer to the Welcome page containing this information
  • Update the existing answers so they are up-to-date, contain all relevant information while still being accessible
  • Update the tag so that we can point users to that for rules clarifications
    • Potentially, create a new post along the lines of "I have a rules questions I couldn't find an answer to elsewhere. What do I do?" This would contain links to some of our most often-linked questions, with snippets clarifying what the settled-on policy was within the
    • This prevents users having to search through to find a single answer, but also prevents it from becoming an impenetrable mess of descriptions/clarifications. A bullet-pointed list of "important policies", followed by a "if you still are unsure, ask on meta" would be ideal
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The Canonical Rules

This proposal is effectively what was proposed by Martin Ender 8 years ago, but in a more rigorous way.

In short: we write a unique document that is the canonical rulebook, about every rule that we have, definition of terms and keywords and it becomes the source of truth for all rules.

This would have, of course, the massive disadvantage of needing to be written in the first place. It would also not, by itself, solve the problem of the rules being intractable for newcomers, which is why a "newcomer pamphlet" would be written (in fact, I would write it first, because it would highlight future problems I would be likely to encounter writing the full rules) that details the rules a newcomer needs to know before submitting their first answer, but nothing more.

so then, the full proposal about what that looks like in the end:

  • There exists a single document that details all hard rules, and all terms that may be up for interpretation.
  • This document is never out of date, because it is what decides what the rules are. If a rule is not in it, it isn't a rule (it might still be a valid recommendation e.g. include a TIO link).
  • Changing the rules (and therefore the document) is done according to a process detailed in the document. Essentially, the way to change rules is to create a "change proposal", on which the community discusses and votes, before the document is updated to include (or not, if the proposal fails)
  • The document is initially written to include a comprehensive understanding of all currently effective rules.
  • To simplify moderation, moderators are granted by the document the final word. They already have it anyway, but the goal is to avoid drama in case of crisis.
  • There exists a non-binding "welcome pamphlet" that explains in simpler language to newcomers what they can and can't do, but only including things a newcomer might be aware even exists (for example a newcomer probably doesn't need to understand what currying is, at first).

TL;DR: the Magic The Gathering rulebook but code golf.

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