Proposal: Make Agpedia's own analysis optional

Status: Adopted on 16 October 2026 with OKA's approval, under the bootstrap provisions of Governance, with the reasoning below as the published rationale. The wording for Values comes from the forum discussion. Values and Citation Standards are protected pages, so an admin applies the text below.

What changes

Values currently says that, when materially relevant, we SHOULD offer value judgments on how a topic affects human agency. This proposal replaces that paragraph with one that says what agency as a value means, without asking every article to judge it. Contributors may still add their own analysis to an article. The rule for it stays in Citation Standards, which already governs Agpedia's own analysis, and now says two things plainly: such analysis is optional, and when it is included it rests on Agpedia's values as a whole.

Why

The current sentence asks every article to take a position. Read as written, an article about extreme poverty, social media or a labour law is incomplete unless it judges the topic's effect on human agency. The rest of the policy set does not work that way: Citation Standards and the Style Guide treat analysis as something kept apart from reference content, in dedicated sections, and nothing else requires it.

A standing instruction to judge every topic also weakens trust in the reference content. Readers can rely on a sourced, clearly labelled analysis section; they have less reason to rely on factual prose written under an instruction to take a position.

Values should still say what Agpedia holds agency to be, because that is what analysis draws on when it is written. The new paragraph does that: agency is a central good that always counts, alongside other goods, without settling every question or requiring a judgment in every article. When and how analysis is written is a question of method, and belongs with the other rules on evidence and attribution.

Text

In the Human agency section of Values, replace the paragraph:

Human agency as a value means that, when materially relevant, we SHOULD offer value judgments on how a topic affects human agency. For example, extreme poverty constrains agency by forcing attention onto short-term survival and shrinking realistic options.

with:

Human agency as a value means that Agpedia holds it to be a central good. What widens people's agency is a benefit; what shrinks it is a harm. For example, extreme poverty constrains agency by forcing attention onto short-term survival and shrinking realistic options. Agency is not the only good: one person's agency can limit another's, and health, safety or the natural world can weigh against it. Agpedia's position is that agency always counts, not that it settles every question, and not that every article must judge.

In the Agpedia's Own Analysis section of Citation Standards, after the list of places where analysis belongs, add:

Such analysis is optional: an article is complete without it. When it is included, it MUST be grounded in Agpedia's Values and in cited evidence for each step of the reasoning.

No other text changes. The Scope entry on "grounded value judgments that are explicitly labeled as such" already treats analysis as allowed rather than required, and the Style Guide's rules on labelling and editorializing stay as they are.