User:Dumuzid/sandbox

With apologies to Winston Churchill, Wikipedia is probably the worst possible approach to a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, except for all the other ones. Wikipedia has many policies and guidelines. A manual of style with sometimes conflicting and confusing mandates. Some of these principals are fairly rigid, for instance, guidance regarding biographies of living people. Others require much more interpretive nuance, like determining the respective importance of opinions in reliable sources. There is a tendency among editors, both new and experienced alike, to believe that simply pointing to a policy or an isolated source is enough to carry the day on a disputed edit. Occasionally, this is true. Unsourced negative information in a biography? No question. That must go. But far more common than that situation is one where policy does not admit of a clear solution. Negative information in a biography that appears in a few sources? The answer is no longer obvious.

And that's where the Wikipedia ethos truly comes to the fore. The combination of our policies regarding consensus and the explicit ability to ignore rules when it would help the encyclopedia means you can make any edit at all--so long as you can convince a consensus of others it is an improvement.