Wikipedia

User:Neuromath/Wikipedia policies and guidelines

< User:Neuromath

Global caveat

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The sections here that contain expressions of opinion are all rough drafts, works in progress. If anyone links to them, please note that fact. Those sections are intended as incubators for ideas that may eventually be expressed in coherent essays on separate pages.

Seriously flawed Wikipedia policies and guidelines

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Wikipedia:Assume good faith (WP:AGF)

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  • "It is not necessary to attribute an editor's actions to bad faith, even if bad faith is obvious, as countermeasures (like reverting or blocking) are performed based on behavior rather than intent. ... There are processes for dealing with all of these, and sanctions for repeated violation of policy apply regardless of whether bad faith was involved" (2008-09-12). False. Blocking and other sanctions are based on prediction of future behavior, not on past behavior alone; and intent is central to prediction of future behavior.
  • WP:AGF, like any other dogma that tiptoes around obvious unpleasant realities, is a recipe for double standards and inconsistent behavior. Conscious attention to the issue of intent is critically important to optimal handling of disputes about behavior. Those who pretend that intent doesn't matter will sometimes act on flawed assumptions about intent, and fail to subject them to rational examination, while at other times they will forestall legitimate discussion of well-founded charges of improper motivation.
    • To be more specific: I have seen deletionists (who would no doubt profess allegiance to WP:AGF if asked) conduct page-deletion discussions on the assumption that self-promotion was the motive for the creation of the page in question. For examples, see the deletion debates over AndLinux (deleted) and TopologiLinux (kept).

Wikipedia:Be bold (WP:BOLD)

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  • As an inclusionist, I find it particularly sad that I should need to characterize WP:BOLD as seriously flawed; very broadly construed, it is the foundation of inclusionism, and should be every inclusionist's pride and joy. Unfortunately, the current version is seriously flawed, in that it lacks adequate safeguards -- even in its "recklessness" section -- against destructive actions. When I first joined Wikipedia on 2006-12-10, the version of WP:BOLD at the time included the statement "Be bold in contributions, but not in destructions." There is more wisdom in that one sentence than in all the megabytes of Wikipedia's current policies and guidelines. In what Nietzsche would have called a world-historical irony, that sentence was removed by a vandal on 2007-02-28, and for some reason was not restored when the rest of the vandalism was undone. I'm not sure this was an accident. The destructive actions endorsed by Wikipedia's currently prevalent deletionism are generally far easier to perform than the construction of what they destroy.

Wikipedia:Consensus (WP:CON)

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  • Note that Wikipedia:Silence and consensus (WP:SILENCE) should be considered simply as part of Wikipedia:Consensus, even though it stands alone and calls itself an "essay". WP:SILENCE uses the {{supplement}} template to say that "While this essay is not a policy or guideline itself, it is intended to supplement WP:Consensus", and Wikipedia:Consensus in turn says that "Silence implies consent if there is adequate exposure to the community", with a link to WP:SILENCE, thus endorsing, and effectively incorporating, WP:SILENCE.
  • The success of the Wiki is based on the fundamental principle that, on the whole, more effort will go into constructive than into nonconstructive work. Calling the result a "consensus" adds nothing worth saying, and falsely implies agreement ("consent") on the part of those who let stand a result that they disagree with. It also falsely implies that the fundamental principle will apply in each case individually; clearly this is not so, or page protection would never be necessary.
  • The Wiki process only works well, even on average, where anyone interested in a topic is free to contribute, and continues to be so over a long period of time. There are two important cases where this assumption fails, and the Wiki process fails with it, and the label of "consensus" is used to cover up the failure:
    • Policy setting, where discussions that most editors will not have time or motivation for can have far-reaching effects on several million articles. Wikipedia:Consensus perversely and misleadingly states that "Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. In the case of policies and guidelines, Wikipedia expects a higher standard of participation and consensus than on other pages."
      • The claim about what "Wikipedia expects" is simply false as a matter of fact, as the history of certain notorious changes in policies and guidelines (especially the establishment of Wikipedia:Notability as a guideline) will demonstrate; the changes in question have taken place with little or no discussion on the relevant talk pages at the time. The deletion of "Be bold in contributions, but not in destructions" from WP:BOLD is another example.
      • Even when a proposed change does get serious attention, disproportionate contribution from a few individuals is common (see the talk-page history of the defeat of the proposal for soft page deletion, for example). Such disproportionate contribution can, and often does, amount in practice to a thinly disguised threat of Edit warring or of administrative sanctions against those who try to express their disagreement in their edits.
      • In practice, it is often the enforcement of Wikipedia policies and guidelines (especially those which have undergone major "consensus" change over time) -- not disobedience to such policies --- that looks more like "consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time" overriding "community consensus on a wider scale". But such conflicts of interpretation merely underscore the dubiousness of using the concept of "consensus" at all in such cases.
      • The attempt to impose a higher standard for policy setting also creates a deadlock. Consensus is supposed to arise from the cumulative effect of bold editing by different people, but boldness is inhibited by the stern warning of the {{policy}} and {{guideline}} templates that editors should make sure they have consensus on their side before editing!
    • Page deletion, where a five-day discussion - which frequently draws interest from individuals of questionable motivation, who would not otherwise be interested in the article's topic - can permanently forestall further work on that topic by the entire world.

Wikipedia:No original research (WP:NOR)

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Wikipedia:No personal attacks (WP:ATTACK)

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  • The problems with WP:ATTACK are essentially the same as the problems with WP:Assume good faith. There are plenty of controversies where someone's personality and motivation is relevant to the issue at hand, and to pretend otherwise is a recipe for hypocrisy and double standards. For example, in dealing with a tagger who repeatedly adds "cleanup" tags and other "consensus"-sanctioned graffiti to Wikipedia articles, it is intellectually dishonest to avoid remarking on the transparent hostility and aggressiveness that often motivates such behavior.

Wikipedia:Notability (WP:N)

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All subordinate notability guidelines will also be included in my critique of WP:N.

Wikipedia:Reliable sources (WP:RS)

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  • The lie of objectivity. WP:RS tries to pretend that the reliability of a source is an objective matter. Although objective facts may be cited in support of a claim that a source is reliable, our evidence is so fragmentary that such claims must almost always rest largely on a subjective judgment call; the evidence underdetermines most such judgments.
  • The lie of reliability. Such objective evidence as is available offers surprisingly little confirmation - and a great deal of disconfirmation - for the idea that even such paradigms of "reliability" as mainstream media sources and peer-reviewed scientific journals are truly reliable or are systematically fact-checked. (Need to cite history of hoaxes, and of bias and sloppiness in peer-reviewed science, to support this point.)
  • WP:RS misconstrues the principal reason why citations and references are beneficial to scholarly discourse. Citations are not there primarily to prove the assertions to which they are attached; thus, the "reliability" of the sources cited is of secondary importance. The main purpose of citations is to enable readers to check, reconstruct, and reevaluate the author's reasoning processes. The importance of leaving an audit trail of citations to facilitate this process is independent of the reliability (or otherwise) of the author's sources.

Wikipedia:Vandalism (WP:VAND)

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  • If vandalism is merely "nonconstructive editing", then much of the "cleanup" sanctioned by Wikipedia's current policies and guidelines is vandalism! There is a note somewhere in Meta, written by an inclusionist, that states that deletionism is a form of vandalism. When I first read that, I thought it was too extreme; but after watching the swift "cleanup" of material that took a long time to create, I've concluded that the characterization of deletionism as vandalism is very close to literal truth. And it is not only simple deletion of material that is closely akin to vandalism. The same applies to tagging pages that are no more flawed than average with "cleanup" templates and other "consensus"-sanctioned graffiti. I suspect that in many cases the real intent of these tags is not to spur constructive improvement of the pages, but to start building a "consensus" for page deletion, or at least for sweeping removal of material.
  • An adequate notion of vandalism must include nonconstructive intent, not just a nonconstructive outcome. The examples of "what vandalism is not" make this clear, but in order to state it explicitly, we must be prepared to contradict WP:AGF. As far as I'm concerned, so much the better. And it should also be noted that nonconstructive intent need not be conscious in order to be real. Human beings are too good at hiding their real motives from themselves for lack of conscious evil intent to be acceptable as conclusive evidence of innocence. That is the grain of truth behind the current insistence on looking at behavior. But behavior alone is not enough either. What we need to look for is a pattern of behavior that makes nonconstructive intent, conscious or not, the best explanation available for the observed behavior.
  • Above all - and I must find a way to make this point more central to my whole argument, not just to my critique of WP:VAND - Wikipedia's true success will be hindered as long as it is easier to destroy than to create. Destruction is sometimes necessary, but when it is too easy to accomplish - as it usually is - it will inevitably be overdone. Enough barriers and roadblocks to destruction must be in place to ensure that creation and destruction can compete on a level playing field. Wikipedia is nowhere near that goal at present, and appears to be traveling away from it, not toward it.

Wikipedia:Verifiability (WP:V)

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Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not (WP:NOT)

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Other seriously flawed influential assumptions

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The maintainer myth

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The "maintainer myth" is the idea that the bulk of the work, and especially of the important work, is done by a relatively small (in proportion to the number of articles), elite group of dedicated editors, each of whom contributes to and improves a very large number of articles. Aaron Swartz, in his landmark essay Who writes Wikipedia?, adduces evidence the contrary: the bulk of the work on Wikipedia is done by a very large number of subject-matter experts, each of whom individually makes relatively few contributions and edits relatively few articles.

  • The maintainer myth is at the root of a lot of deletionism; I recall having a deletionist try to explain his viewpoint to me by saying that "we found that there was a limit to the number of articles we could maintain", or something like that.
  • The maintainer myth also supports deletionism indirectly, by creating the illusion that the "Wikipedia community" is small enough, and its average participation level is high enough, to legitimize the claim that a "consensus" governing Wikipedia-wide policies and guidelines can be attained through discussion on forum pages.

Inclusionist literature

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Some caveats:

  • Listing these documents here does not imply that I agree entirely with them.
  • Nor does it imply that their authors or contributors would all accept the label of "inclusionist" (although some clearly would). Listing expresses my opinion that the tendency of these documents is inclusionist.
  • Because of Wikipedia's increasing trend toward deletionism, much of the inclusionist literature on Wikipedia is quite old, and may not have been updated recently. But it has not been refuted by the mere passage of time, nor by the "consensus" trend away from inclusionism.

Inclusionist essays on Wikipedia

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Inclusionist user pages on Wikipedia

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Inclusionist essays on Meta

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Inclusionist essays posted to websites outside Wikimedia

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Aaron Swartz essay series on the 2006 Wikimedia elections

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Inclusionist articles formally published outside Wikimedia

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Deletionist literature

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Some caveats:

  • Listing these documents here does not imply that I disagree entirely with them (although in some cases my disagreement is, in fact, total or near-total).
  • Nor does it imply that their authors or contributors would all accept the label of "deletionist" (although some clearly would). Listing expresses my opinion that the tendency of these documents is deletionist. Because of Wikipedia's increasing trend toward deletionism, some deletionist authors or contributors claim to be inclusionists, just because they don't go to the grotesque, obscene extremes of deletionism that the Wikipedia "consensus" or statistical norm is currently traversing. Thus we have the spectacle of "inclusionist" admins deleting, and even salting, articles like AndLinux. That isn't inclusionism.

Deletionist essays on Wikipedia

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  • User:Isomorphic/Essays/Deletionism
    • This essay seems to be much less well known than Uncle G's essays (linked below). It deserves to be better known, because it is the only deletionist essay I have seen that successfully argues for any limitations whatsoever on inclusionism. And I say this as an inclusionist who disagrees vehemently with most of the essay. The grain of truth in it is that the motivations for self-interested, unhelpful modifications to Wikipedia (spamming, essentially) are so strong that some mechanisms must be in place to discourage spamming, or it will destroy Wikipedia. There is room for considerable disagreement - to put it mildly - on where to draw the line, and Isomorphic's views on that matter are, in my firm and considered opinion, over the top and around the bend. But the essay is well worth reading even so.
    • The fundamental deficiency in Isomorphic's reasoning is that he sees only one side of the problem. Counterbalancing the very real urge toward self-promotion (spam) is the equally genuine urge toward wanton destruction (vandalism), which requires at least as much consideration (far more, actually) in deciding where to draw the line between encouraging inclusion and encouraging deletion. Deletionists are in massive denial about the seriousness of the problem of vandalism if they think it is limited to the very narrowly defined behavior addressed in Wikipedia:Vandalism.
    • Even though most of the reasoning in this essay is conducted at a level elevated far above the norm for deletionist advocacy, its last sentence is disturbing and unsettling: "If blanket statements about inclusiveness still sound like a good idea to you, well, I don't know what else to say." That hints at an ugly impatience with the complexity and length of the reasoning needed to address any important question. It should go without saying that it will take far more than one brief essay to get to the bottom of anything as deep as the inclusionist-deletionist controversy.
  • User:Isomorphic/Essays/The Rule of Law
  • User:Uncle G/On notability
    • This essay is very well known on Wikipedia, and seems to be the de facto theoretical underpinning of most expressions of deletionist sentiment on Wikipedia. Its fame (or notoriety) is unfortunate, because it is almost entirely without merit.
  • User:Uncle G/On sources and content
    • Much the same comments apply as for "On notability" (above).
  • Wikipedia:Amnesia test
  • Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions (WP:ATA)

Egregious deletion debates

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Wikipedia guidance documents read in full

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The term "guidance document" is deliberately vague and includes, but is not limited to, documents stating official Wikipedia policies and guidelines. I invented this term because "guideline" has a very specific technical meaning in Wikipedia, and I wished to include all documents that offer guidance, in a more general sense, to editors.

Overviews

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Policies

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Guidelines

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Manual of Style

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Tutorial and reference documents

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Open proposals

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Rejected proposals

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Opinion pieces

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This does not include essays listed above as "Inclusionist literature" or "Deletionist literature".

Recently noted

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These are pages (often essays) that I have not necessarily read in full, but have "bookmarked" here because they may be of interest.

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