On 1/30/06, Jon thagudearbh@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
[[WP:NOT]] is the worst policy we have, it doesn't need to be expanded!
Why can't we express ourselves positively. The policy should be:
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia
You're obviously not aware of [[WP:ENC]]. *groan* But if you like, there's always [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia in eight words]].
well, Wikipedia is not anything you'd care to mention that isn't an encyclopaedia.
Well, Wikipedia is lots of things that no other encyclopaedia is (including user-editable, unreliable, inconsistent, multilingual, frequently up-to-the-minute etc etc).
To get really picky though, I thought the official line was that Wikipedia is a *project* to *build* an encyclopedia. Or maybe "Wikipedia" is the name of the encyclopaedia being built by "The Wikipedia Project". In that case, half of the entries at WP:NOT refer to the project (wikipedia is not therapy, a game, myspace, a chat site) and half refer to the actual encyclopaedia (not an indiscriminate collection of information, not a jargon file etc).
To answer your original point though, "why expand WP:NOT"? Basically because the nature of Wiki means that people can endlessly expand the project in new directions. Saying "WP is X and nothing but X" doesn't really pose any limits on this expansion. Saying "WP is X, but definitely not Y or Z" does.
Steve