Proposal: Make Agpedia's own analysis optional

Status: Proposed. Adopted once approved by OKA, under the bootstrap provisions of Governance, with the reasoning below as the published rationale.

What changes

Values currently says that, when materially relevant, we SHOULD offer value judgments on how a topic affects human agency. This proposal removes that sentence. 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 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.

Finally, Values should state principles, not editorial practice. When and how we write analysis is a question of method, and belongs with the other rules on evidence and attribution. Tying analysis to the Values page as a whole, rather than to one value, keeps it consistent with every principle there, including secular reasoning and the line between established truth and value judgments.

Proposed text

In the Human agency section of Values, delete 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.

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.