[WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research

[FT2]

Policies and rules don't work that way, exactly. They're a bit "zen", they
point to the moon, but they aren't the moon themselves. if you want a formal
policy that everyone /must/ follow, then 5 pillars, or WP:CLUE are in some
ways more speaking to the spirit of things, rather than the detail of it.

No written page can capture the full precise black and white version,
because there isn't such a thing. We fix it to get fairly close on big
stuff, and hope people figure out the small stuff on their own, or by seeing
how others react to their trying things out.

If you try and run Wikipedia literally "by the policies" (including IAR) but
not the spirit, you'll get close but there will regularly be areas you'll
miss the point, the "what a clueful person might intuit" (which will surely
be divergent with others!)

FT2





On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > > 1) That doesn't seem to be actual Wikipedia policy.
> > One of the functions of IAR is to protect us from becoming slaves to
> > policy that leads us to information which defies common sense or which
> > leads us into absurdities.
>
> IAR is only useful when everyone agrees that what you want to do is common
> sense.  If there's any conflict about it, IAR is pretty much
> worthless--that
> is, it's worthless exactly when you need it.  And Wikipedia is peppered
> with
> conflicts where rule wonks always want you to follow rules, and quoting IAR
> to them means you lose.
>
> And as I pointed out, if you need IAR to make a rule not totally break
> things
> in the cases where the rule matters--that's really a sign that you should
> just fix the rule, rather than quoting IAR.  Of course, rules are nearly
> impossible to fix (except by abusing other rules).
>
>
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