User:Wolfkeeper/Wikipedia is

Naturally, when you see Wikipedia for the first time, it can be confusing. Many of the entries are stub entries, at present, are brief, and nearly all of them only cover nouns. So some people started an article, listing only the noun meaning and then stopped working on that article, as though they were interested only in that!

This is not a habit to be encouraged.

The goal of this project is to create the Wikipedia! Nearly everyone here agrees that brief, noun articles are to be encouraged. There are some differences of opinion as to whether just definitions of nouns are acceptable. If you want to make everybody happy, add a little usages of the term of some sort. Don't just give the meanings of the noun and talk about the thing. If you do just give the meaning of the noun, nobody is going to be mad at you (except maybe Larry Sanger, but then, he gets mad at everybody :-) since he cares about Wikipedia so much). They'll simply take the entry to be a "stub" article, which will be expanded later into a full article. That's probably OK, in most cases.

Actually, the Wikipedia's stub policy is, as of September 2010, being used as a justification to delete stub entries on nouns. The AFDs say that the articles are too long, and are not well designed. In fact articles can be almost as long as you want, it's not about length, it's what you do with it.

Moreover, there are plenty of senses of terms that aren't being covered in the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia is seriously lacking in adjectives, verbs, pronouns (we have some but there's over a hundred in English alone!), adverbs, prepositions, prefixes, postfixes.

While on the one hand we are all certainly delighted that Wikipedia is growing in depth on nouns, some (but not all) of us view depth at the expense of the very notion of what we are working on--as a bad idea.

The journey has barely begun!

Fundamental, unalterable principles of the Wikipedia
The fundamental unalterable principles by which Wikipedia operates have been summarized by editors in the form of five "pillars". Jimbo Wales also set down some similar principles. :

Policies and guidelines
Wikipedia policies and guidelines are developed by the community to describe best practice, clarify principles, resolve conflicts, and otherwise further our goal of creating a free, reliable encyclopedia. Although Wikipedia does not employ hard-and-fast rules, its policy and guideline pages describe its principles and best-known practices. Policies describe standards that (within the limits of common sense) all users should normally follow, and guidelines are meant to contain best practices for doing so.

Policies and guidelines can be edited like any other Wikipedia page, but edits that would imply a change to accepted practice, particularly such edits to a policy page, should usually be discussed in advance to ensure that the change reflects consensus, before being disallowed. Note that references to other organisations policies, guidelines and standards are forbidden.