Projects:Laws

Despite being called the Consumer Rights Wiki, we have surprisingly few pages on consumer rights laws... Let's change that!

The purpose of this project page is to organise the creation of articles about consumer-relevant laws from around the world. It's been started off with a few red links as well as the articles and countries we already have, but please do go ahead an add in more. Laws discussed by the wiki do not have to be explicitly consumer-rights focused, so things like laws focusing on how consumer products can be prepared (e.g. food standards laws) can be included.

There are two types of pages that we want to create here. The first are pages about existing laws that are in force, and the second are laws which are either current proposals, or past proposals that failed to become law and have since been dropped.

The kinds of details which would be useful to have on a page about a law include (but are not limited to):

• The date the law was enacted
• The date from which enforcement began (if different from the enactment date)
• What the law aims to achieve
• A summary of the key provisions and requirements
• The debate and controversy surrounding its enactment
• Any notable amendments since the original enactment
• Retrospective assessments of how effective the law has been in practice (cited)
• Relevant enforcement bodies or agencies responsible for the law
• Notable enforcement actions or court cases related to the law

To help keep things sane for readers, any page about a proposed or failed law should include some term like 'draft' or 'proposed' in the page name to make it clear to readers that the law described within is not active.

At the moment, we do not have a specific page template or any metadata collection for pages about laws. The only real rules are that they need to follow all the standard wiki guidelines, as well as be included in the relevant category (e.g. laws of the United Kingdom) so that readers can find them. One of the big things here is that article writers should not attempt to interpret the laws themselves, and instead should rely on citations to back up any statements about what the laws mean in practice. If you find or create a format you really like and you think could be generally applicable to pages about laws, feel free to propose that it be made into the default.

If you spot any articles about laws already on the wiki but which haven't been included on this page, please add them in!