User:Visviva/Opinionations/Are you reading that guideline upside-down?



In the glorious multi-dimensional continuum of the wiki, it's easy to lose track of which way is up. And sometimes, in this vast and confusing world, we end up reading Wikipedia's policies and guidelines upside-down. The policy may say "if A then B" but we may find ourselves reading it as "if not-A then not-B". Or we may misread permission of X as prohibition of not-X.



Once you get accustomed to reading policy upside-down, it's easy to lose sight of what the policy is intended to do in the first place. This is a serious problem, because in general, Wikipedia policies are valid only to the extent that they serve the purposes of the project. In other words, Wikipedia is not a set of rules that happened to give rise to an encyclopedia. Instead, it's a community of people who got together to write an encyclopedia and eventually worked out some ad-hoc rules that seemed to be helpful to that end.