[WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research

[Surreptitiousness]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 30/09/2009, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Policies and rules don't work that way, exactly. They're a bit "zen", they
>> point to the moon, but they aren't the moon themselves. if you want a formal
>> policy that everyone /must/ follow, then 5 pillars, or WP:CLUE are in some
>> ways more speaking to the spirit of things, rather than the detail of it.
>>
>> No written page can capture the full precise black and white version,
>> because there isn't such a thing. We fix it to get fairly close on big
>> stuff, and hope people figure out the small stuff on their own, or by seeing
>> how others react to their trying things out.
>>
>> If you try and run Wikipedia literally "by the policies" (including IAR) but
>> not the spirit, you'll get close but there will regularly be areas you'll
>> miss the point, the "what a clueful person might intuit" (which will surely
>> be divergent with others!)
>>     
>
> In my experience the problems are usually more to do with people not
> following policies. It's precisely the people that *think* they
> understand the wikipedia that usually become deletionists or
> inclusionists.
>   
I don't know, I tend to find deletionists and inclusionists are the ones 
who tend to follow policy to the "very" letter.  "But you're forgetting 
the editing policy says we should preserve information", usually 
countered by deletionists stating that "Wikipedia is not the place for 
indiscriminate information".  Most everyone else knows the truth is 
actually found in the debate, which focuses on the merits of the 
content. Anyone not interested in being an extremist will almost always 
reach a consensus. The trouble is, we've gotten so used to cramming our 
arguments with [[WP:THIS]] that we've made it hard to separate the good, 
the bad and the ugly.