Ray Saintonge wrote:
If the French Wikipedia feels that it is appropriate to include being a dictionary that's their business. I don't see the need for them to be bound by one of Larry's rules from a year ago when thay had no opportunity to participate in its development. Demanding that they "straighten up" would be unnecessarily dictatorial.
I agree with this, to an extent.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary is simply a statement rejecting as a priority some types of entries that are just simple explanations of word usage. This is a relatively minor point in the grand scheme of things, and one that is open to a consensus of the people actually working on the project.
But "Wikipedia is not a joke book" is not the sort of policy that's open to consensus change. The judgment that we don't ban people for working towards NPOV (thus preserving some political slant that we prefer) is not the sort of policy that's open to consensus change.
If I went on vacation for two weeks and came back to find that the developers, with full consensus on the part of contributors, had decided that Wikipedia would henceforth be pro-atheist, pro-libertarian, pro-reason, and pro-technology _as a matter of policy_, and started banning people for political disagreements, then I'd forcefully start taking away sysop privileges and unbanning people, consensus be damned.
That's *even though* I am personally pro-atheist, pro-libertarian, pro-reason, and pro-technology.
The reason is that openness and neutrality and that wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a joke book are all fundamental parameters for the project, in a way that decisions about the exact cutoff between an encyclopedia and a dictionary are not fundamental at all.
The article that I would write, on another website, as a polemic, about, let's say, Ed Poor's religion, or Eclectiology's unrepentant leftism, would be critical and one-sided, let's suppose. And they might, on another website, criticise my atheism or libertarianism.
But here on wikipedia, we leave all that at the door, and we appreciate that our differences do not stand in the way of writing an _encyclopedia_.
--Jimbo