User:Zappernapper/Gameguide

The terms "gameguide" and "cruft" get thrown around a lot in XFD discussions. These are in reference to two pages on Wikipedia. One is an official policy, another is (like this) merely an essay. Unfortunately, many debates have been waged over the interpretration of three sentences found at WP:NOT:
 * "While Wikipedia has descriptions of people, places, and things, Wikipedia articles should not include instructions, advice (legal, medical, or otherwise) or suggestions, or contain "how-to"s. This includes tutorials, walk-throughs, instruction manuals, game guides, and recipes. If you're interested in a how-to style manual, you may want to look at our sister project Wikibooks."

Just as unfortunate, people in XFD discussions love to cite WP:CRUFT, the page with a nice large banner at the top stating quite clearly that it "is not a policy or guideline; it merely reflects some opinions of its author(s)." Below follows a more in-depth look at WP:NOT and a superficial summation of WP:CRUFT (which already has a whole page devoted to it).

What Wikipedia is not...
Those words wield an awesome power in not only deletion discussions, but any discussion about whether even a sentence belongs in any given article. There is nothing inherently wrong with this - it keeps the project on track and ensures that it doesn't somehow evolve into something other than what is was intended. For example Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information ensures the encyclopedia does not become a directory of phone numbers, restaurants, and exit ramp numbers. Specifically though, WP:NOT does a poor job at adequately explaining what a guide actually is. At first glance, we see that specific thing like recipes, medical and legal advice, and outright instruction are obviously forbidden. Then we're left with phrases like how-to, tutorial, and of course game-guide. Obviously these terms are much more subjective and need to be considered carefully. Blanket arguments can have unwanted effects. For example, if we say that the Sears Tower is located in Chicago, is that telling people "how-to" find it?