User:El Sandifer/TPANTP

Wikipedia has many policies, and many pages describing these policies. However, the pages are not the policies. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is essential to understand this if one is to contribute usefully to the project.

Policy does not scale
It is simply impossible to create a coherent and consistent set of rules that apply sensibly to two and a half million articles. No dogmatic rule of any complexity whatsoever can hope to apply to every topic covered in Wikipedia. That's why one of the rules is to ignore the rules - because the nature of Wikipedia is that nobody can hope to know even a little bit about every area we have coverage in. It is an absolute certainty that any given set of rules will apply horribly to a substantial portion of our articles, simply because of how many we have. As a result, policy pages tend to be written about the articles that cause the most problems.

The problem is that these articles are a tiny subset of the two and a half million articles we have. Yes, of course Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a messy article that is overrun by people who let their own investments in the issue get in the way of writing an encyclopedia article. But if you hit random article a few times, most of the articles you get will be uncontroversial ones that do not need the same level of prohibition. A policy page written with a more problematic article in mind is not likely to apply seamlessly to a small and uncontroversial article.

The purpose of laws
The purpose of laws is not to provide an instruction manual on how to behave, but to provide a system under which transgressions can be dealt with. Just as one is not expected to consult one's local legal code before venturing outside every morning, one should not be expected to consult every policy and guideline before editing. A sane person who is behaving thoughtfully should be able to edit the encyclopedia without the policies, and, in practice, thousands of people do just that.

If our policies and processes are treated as a rudimentary system of laws it becomes much easier to see where they should and shouldn't be enforced. Articles that are detailed, informative, comprehensive, and seemingly accurate probably do not need to be raked across the coals of our policies, just as users with eccentric user pages that do not seem to be bothering anybody probably do not need to be targeted. If nothing else, one ought not use our policies to go looking for trouble. The policy page is just a tool to fix problems - it's not an absolute definition of what a problem is.

Policy pages are documentation
It may also be helpful to think of our policy pages not as policies, but of documentations of policies. In truth, our actual policies are often quite simple. Many, such as No personal attacks and No original research basically explain themselves in their title. Even one of our more subtle policies like Neutral point of view really amounts to "Present all significant viewpoints on an issue in their own words." Why, then, do we have such lengthy policy pages?

Because even a simple policy can have complex effects and issues of implementation. As a result, we write lengthy commentaries on even the simplest policies to help explain how to use them. The policy pages can thus be thought of as instruction manuals for the actual policies. But with the number of articles we have, these manuals are not and cannot be perfect. And, in fact, all of our policies are just that - lengthy and flawed attempts at implementing principles in a thorough way.

That is not to say that the pages are unnecessary - any more than the manual for a piece of software is unnecessary. There is a lot to be learned about "no original research" from No original research. But not everything in the manual is applicable to every possible use of the policy.

Similarly, anybody who has ever read an instruction manual knows that they are full of all sorts of dogmatic advice that nobody in the world actually follows and that the writer of the manual knows nobody follows. While it's possible that a coffee machine might work better if one ran vinegar through it monthly, virtually nobody does so. Our policy pages are full of similar prescriptions - stuff that might be nice, but that is rarely done, and will not cause the project to fail horribly if this continues. Policies often describe our best practice, but that is not equivalent to our only acceptable practice.

A final note
To be clear, our policy pages are in no way useless (though sometimes a policy page will go pretty badly awry). Even our most problematic policy page has a lot of good advice that should be taken very seriously no matter what article you're working on, and most of them are, in fact, full of advice and direction that can be followed pretty reliably in the vast majority of cases. But it is important not to become dogmatic about the application of specific statements on policy pages. Wikipedia is a big project, and one of the fundamental principles on the project is that the wiki process determines content. That is to say, decisions are made not by robotically checking policy pages, but by discussing the decisions and coming to a consensus on how best to achieve the goals of the policy pages.

Policy pages are valuable guides to how to do that. But they do not replace the process of discussion.