Wikipedia:Virtuousity

What editorial practices distinguish the virtuous and truly excellent editor? Good faith, we must assume of everyone; competence, we do not assume; and acadmemic or professional credentials we do not recognize or require. Therefore, what virtue sets apart the aristocratic editor from the mere wikicrat? The junzi from the peasant? The tzaddik from the ben-oni? The righteous from the average commoner? The virtuous from the vulgar plebian? The brilliantly barnstarred from the merely well-enough behaved, and the basic new-comer from the topic-banned or blocked?

He or she must love wisdom, and seek knowledge. Possessing the virtue of philosophy, he will therefore naturally will fulfill the projects one and most important policy guideline to which all others must necessarily submit: WP:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

Is the wiki-bureaucracy's system of just and fair, in accord with our end purpose of the WP:Encyclopedia, in such a way as to encourage a meritocracy of editors, collaboratively improving a compendium of the humanity's knowledge as reference work and introductory study tool for all? Or is our system unfair in ways that encourage laziness and ignorance to prevail, in ways that ask virtuousity to resign? And if they are unfair, what proposals have come forward for change? Are we encouraging each other to actualize our potential as scholars, or are we reducing to the lowest-common denominator?

If can we all stipulate that our WP:Content policy and WP:Five Pillars constitute the Dao of editing, then what is the De? (C.f. Dao de jing)

Discouraged by the vast and unsurveyable wilderness of policy and guidelines, (Dao ko dao fei chang dao) the new editor may be inclined to simply cleave to our fifth pillar: WP:Ignore all rules, and this is what I did.

But As newbie during my first six months, I lost alot of winnable content disputes to revert-warriors and (IMHO) ignoramuses who happened to be senior editors and affiliates of the bureaucracy. Many of them liked to quote essays at me as if they were policy WP:WTF?, and misquote policy at me in order to mis-apply it in favor the status quo: basic laziness and negligence. Therefore I had to learn enough policy in order to WP:Obvert the revert-warriors, to give justification in the edit summary, avoid false-accusations of edit war, or survive abuses of process by my opponents, and eventual prevail in the content dispute, and this is what I did.

In the process of gaining Virtuousity I recorded my ethic, and now donate it to posterity. User:Jaredscribe/Encyclopedic Ethics

Let this essay be the "Jing".