[WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

[Jon]

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 at 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.

Steve
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