Guild Wars Wiki:Suggestion pages restructuring

Consensus among the community is in favour of a change in the organization of the current suggestion areas (ArenaNet:Guild Wars suggestions, ArenaNet:Guild Wars 2 suggestions, and their respective subpages). This page is the central place for planning and discussion regarding this restructuring. Everybody is invited to join the discussion on the talk page.

Background and reasoning
Since the inception of the ArenaNet-namespace suggestions areas, many hundreds of suggestion pages have been created. This, plus the relatively small number of people attempting to maintain the pages, has made it harder to find a good way to organize and maintain them. Many duplicate, uninformative, or unsatisfactory suggestions were also created, cluttering the namespace with unqualified pages. Another problem was that some creators did not maintain or watch their suggestions, leading to suggestion pages with missing information or discussions where the initial editor wasn't a participant. On the flipside, some creators were too protective of their creations - despite the open-edit notice on the main suggestion pages, some people saw suggestions as being their own rather than the community's. This usually lead to revert wars and other forms of disruption.

On top of that, it has always been unclear if the suggestion pages were read by ArenaNet. As of now, we still have not received an answer to our questions posed to ArenaNet users on how the namespace is seen by ArenaNet.

Basic idea
To bind editors to their own suggestions, the community decided that game suggestions should be created only in userspace in future. This would require users to register an account on the wiki, but on the other hand allows the creators to organize their suggestions however they like - unlike the community-'owned' ArenaNet namespace. Bound to the suggestion creators, we hope that there will be more satisfactory suggestions and less community maintenance required.

The pages that are currently in the Arenanet namespace will be removed from the ArenaNet namespace on 15th April 2009; however, anyone can move a suggestion to their userspace before that time. After that date, no further suggestions should be created in the ArenaNet namespace. To prevent new suggestions from being added to the ArenaNet namespace, the form objects were removed and notes were put up to ask editors to add their suggestions in their userspace instead.

ArenaNet:Suggestions is going to work as a central spot listing suggestion pages in the user namespace, along with explanations of how users can create their own suggestions.

Topics to discuss

 * Should the suggestion pages be removed at all? What other options can we consider?

If we are to go ahead with the basic idea above,
 * When is the deadline for removal?
 * How should users organize suggestions within their userspace? Should there be any restrictions at all? The suggestion pages require a category (either Category:Guild Wars suggestions or Category:Guild Wars 2 suggestions) to appear in the dynamic lists; should we ask users to only have one main suggestion page with that category from which they can add additional sub pages with other suggestions?
 * How should we deal with suggestions created outside of an individual's userspace, particularly in the talk pages of ArenaNet users (considering their talk pages explode in size relatively quickly)?

What now?
Please join the discussion on the talk page if you have any ideas or objections to the deletion of the suggestion pages.