User:Richard Daly/principles

Principles I Believe Wikipedia Should Adopt
These are collected here for my convenience, but feel free to discuss them.


 * Consensus is not democracy.
 * 67% vs 33% would carry a super-majority democracy, but does not necessarily indicate consensus.
 * XfD and RfX ought not be votes.


 * Notability is a technical policy term, and has a meaning distinct from its normal English meaning when used in Wikipedia policy discussions.
 * There are no borderline cases of notability.
 * Notability is like being pregnant, either you are or you're not.
 * The purpose of notability is to insure the possibility of a neutral and verifiable article. Either it's possible, or it's not.


 * Notability is not popularity.
 * The popularity of a subject has no correlation with its notability.
 * Many unpopular things are notable.


 * Coverage in Wikipedia is not an honor.
 * There is no merit requirement to be the subject of an article.
 * Fascists get articles, quack science gets articles, Pokemon get articles. These articles are not endorsements of the subjects, they are neutral and verifiable accounts of the subjects.
 * "This subject doesn't deserve its own article" places too much importance on the subject's nature and not enough on the nature of Wikipedia.
 * Organizing a subject into one or more articles is a matter of organization. An article is not an award.


 * The mission of Wikipedia should be to collect and organize every truthful, neutral, and verifiable secondary source into an indexed, searchable, cogent whole, no matter the subject.
 * WP:NOT


 * Encyclopedic means, "Like an encyclopedia."
 * Because Wikipedia unavoidably transcends traditional encyclopedias, "encyclopedic" means "doing it the old way."
 * Sometimes the old way is good.
 * Sometimes the old way evolved as an answer to a limit Wikipedia doesn't face.


 * Wikipedia is more than a reference work, it is a repository of human knowledge.
 * While individual editors will think different things are important, we never know what will be valuable.
 * 100 years into the future, if a historian of fashion wanted to research turn of the century attitudes on female baldness, Wikipedia could help that research by giving references to reliable sources on something as banal as Brittney Spears shaving her head.


 * Wikipedia has an image problem
 * Wikipedia must be virtuous
 * Wikipedia must seem virtuous