Jimmy Wales wrote:
Joseph Hiegel wrote:
As [[WP:POLICY]] makes well clear, the nature of the wiki is such that nothing is immutable; were most frequent contributors, for example, to determine that we should no longer require [[WP:V|verifiability]], it's likely that Wikipedia would (d)evolve in a fashion consistent with community consensus (surely Jimbo would consider whether to jump in at this point, but I think even he would concede that his capabilities to act unilaterally contrary to an evident consensus are somewhat limited and that, in any case, the community would look with strong disfavor on such unilateral action),
Actually, I consider WP:V to be so central to Wikipedia that if there were ever a significant majority of contributors who wanted to do away with it, we would have an internal war on our hands that would make the userbox wars look simple by comparison.
There can be no serious argument against the concept of verifiability, but verifiability standards can vary according to the subject matter. To be sure the standards must be highest when we are dealing with the biography of a living person. For the walk through of a video game or the plot outline of a movie the game or the movie itself should be adequate verification.
The important thing to remember here is that merely existing and typing in a web form does not make one a Wikipedian. The community is defined by the goal of the community, and people... no matter how numerous or vocal... who do not accept that goal are not a part of the Wikipedia community.
But on finer grained issues of editorial judgments, another core principle of Wikipedia is a strong embrace of a diversity of opinion. Some editors may consider human dignity to be an entirely pointless factor, while other may give it a fairly high weight. We can live in harmony with such differences of opinion, and we can have a healthy give and take and rational discussion about specific cases.
Superficially "human dignity" is a fine standard, but like notability it is a subjective standard. This makes it difficult to narrow the scope of its application.
Ec