T P wrote:
I think many people fail to realize that Wikipedia is and always will be a work-in-progress. We really don't know what our notability policy is, and there are no easy answers. Stan Shebs was quite right when he pointed out that there are no known solutions to this problem.
That being the case editors and admins should stop pretending that there is a solution.
This is kind of related to the whole "Wikipedia is Failing" controversy, in that so many people have such different ideas of what Wikipedia should be, and a lot of them conclude that Wikipedia doesn't measure up.
That conclusion is not the only possible one to derive from your premise. People do indeed have different ideas of what Wikipedia should be, and some of us would conclude that that is a good thing. "Measuring up" implies having predetermined notions about what would be a standard for success. The standards for a collaborative environment have yet to be defined. Applying the old hierarchical standards contradicts the collaborative model Wikipedia fails when it closes off avenues to innovation and collaboration.
Keeping those avenues open is scary business because it means accepting that a technique that you were long convinced was the only solution may suddenly be found wrong. Validation does not come in the form of the immediate intangible reward of having your idea accepted and written in stone. In a truly collaborative environment every policy or idea is permanently open to change. It doesn't matter that at some point there was a vote to adopt a policy. If someone disagrees at any time in the future he should have the right to add his negative vote, or change his previous vote. If enough people do that the policy could be reversed.
"Ignore All Rules" was never meant as a convenient drop-dead tool for excusing misbehaviour. The notion should precede the action rather than follow it. It requires that one has carefully considered the relevant rule and found it wanting.
People think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia, but that's just an analogy. The truth is Wikipedia is something new and different and what it is is a matter of negotiation within the Wikipedia community.
I don't think that this line of reasoning gets us anywhere. It just gets us into a lot of semantic debate about the nature of an encyclopedia, a debate for which there is no firm answer. This debate was largely superceded with the founding of the sister projects as spin-offs for ideas that did not really fit into the definition of an encyclopedia. What is new and different then is Wikimedia.
I wouldn't worry about Wikipedia failing to live up to your expectations or someone else's expectations. Wikipedia is what it is. The fact that it is useful enough to be in the top ten websites is success enough.
Absolutely. Expectations come from a What-do-the-neighbours-think? kind of mentality. We want accuracy and reliability, but on our own terms, not on terms which we imagine have been set by others. If our neighbours complain that we are being unreliable about some specified issue we will examine it and change it as circumstances require; sometimes we will find no need to change it at all. We should never be panicked into action by vague general claims of unreliability, though I fear that some editors feel flea-bitten by such repetitive comments.
Ec