That's interesting - my take on AGF always was that it was a way to avoid assumptions - another way of saying to give people the benefit of the doubt without being such a cliché (even though it's probably even more of one now).
But yeah, good points.
On 18/02/14 13:43, pi zero wrote:
I find it fascinating what a successful meme AGF is. I was so successfully indoctrinated by it during my first three years or so on en.wp that when I first encountered en.wn, where they explicitly reject AGF as intrinsically incompatible with news production, I wondered how they could possibly operate without it (this is after having wondered, when I first arrived at en.wp, how they could possibly function *with* it). For a few years I tried to satisfy both camps, with the idea that it was appropriate for Wikipedia but not for Wikinews. Eventually I've concluded that AGF has done huge damage to en.wp, creating a highly toxic culture there. The en.wn alternative is Never assume (which I'm realizing, more and more, is not just a code of social interaction, it's a philosophy of life). AGF, if taken literally by its name, advocates assuming something, which contributors to an information provider should never be encouraged to do. If taken the way it seems to be meant (per WP:ZEN), it teaches people to say something different than what you mean, also not good. And, AGF can be, and is, used successfully by people of bad faith to avoid responsibility for their own behavior and get their victims in trouble.
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