It's best to define things in terms of what we are.
Not least as suggesting things that we're not just gives people ideas.
Let me give an example. You know what a blue door is. Well, don't think of a blue door. Think of anything other than a blue door, and wipe your mind of all thoughts about doors that are blue.
Now tell me what you're thinking of, and whether you'd have been thinking of it had I not mentioned blue doors.
Expressing things positively is important. It's very tempting to express things negatively, but that way tends often not to work well.
Incidentally, I had seen [[WP:ENC]]. The shame is that [[WP:ENC]] is not the policy, and [[WP:NOT]] is not the joke.
All the best Jon (jguk)
Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote: On 1/30/06, Jon 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.
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