Keegan Paul wrote:
Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references?
- d.
Ah, well, that's the advantage of a wiki. If you know what to do and can't explain it, you can {{sofixit}} yourself with others to review and figure things out on their own.
Instruction creep: The dumbing down of the world.
It's dumbing down, but that too derives from the premise that everything has an origin. Computer geeks tend to be fanatically logical, and that does not leave much room for alternative explanations or sources. In many subjects we can fill in the blanks later when someone has the time to spend tracing things, but that approach is not shared with those who believe in the immediacy of a deletion debate. The older ones among us, and seniors in general, have an enormous amount of background thinking built up. Nevertheless, we may no longer have access to the references that we used to build this up 40 years ago. A mathematician working through an explanation of a complex theorem should not need to reference why a + b = b +a unless the contrary would be meaningful in that context.
When sourcing and original research rules start to exemplify a phobia about being wrong the system has come around to bite us in the ass. The trickster/raven has come home to roost.
Ec