On 30/09/2009, FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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!)
In my experience the problems are usually more to do with people not
following policies. It's precisely the people that *think* they
understand the wikipedia that usually become deletionists or
inclusionists.
I don't know, I tend to find deletionists and inclusionists are the ones
who tend to follow policy to the "very" letter. "But you're forgetting
the editing policy says we should preserve information", usually
countered by deletionists stating that "Wikipedia is not the place for
indiscriminate information". Most everyone else knows the truth is
actually found in the debate, which focuses on the merits of the
content. Anyone not interested in being an extremist will almost always
reach a consensus. The trouble is, we've gotten so used to cramming our
arguments with [[WP:THIS]] that we've made it hard to separate the good,
the bad and the ugly.