Wikipedia talk:Don't hope the house will build itself

The dialog at the start looks somewhat contrived when compared to WP:INSPECTOR. Awyong Jeffrey Mordecai Salleh 06:01, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Admitedly, it is. It was meant to be a counterpoint to it; but it could stand some severe improvement.  Feel free to hack at it.  &mdash; Coren (talk) 06:11, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually you might try footnoting to it, as a credit. Otherwise it's really not clear who wrote it. --Lquilter (talk) 13:23, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Anyone can edit
Greetings! I stumbled across WP:INSPECTOR, and that led me to WP:BUILDER. While I do get the point of what you're trying to say, and I do think it's important, I worry that this essay is getting away from the spirit of Wikipedia, especially near the end. Vanity/spam/vandalism/tigers/etc, where the person has an agenda beyond contributing to an encyclopedia article, is one thing. But I think it's critical that Wikipedians never loose sight of "anyone can edit". That's where WP:BOLD comes from. Implying that newcomers have to read a long list of rules before contributing is a barrier to entry that was very consciously avoided (WP:IAR). I think that it's important that we encourage bold, good-faith attempts to create good pages, even if the creator only lays the first block, or builds a crooked stairwell. Even if they are unable to build a plumb stairwell. To continue the already strained analogy, as long as the contributor knows that the stairwell is supposed to be plumb, it's okay if they can't make it plumb themselves. • Thoughts? — DragonHawk (talk|hist) 18:52, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

analogy not really correct
With all due respect, I'd like to suggest that the house metaphor doesn't work with your proposed solution of demolition. You propose demolition because ill-planned or incorrectly built. In houses, of course, poor planning or construction can result in fatal flaws that cannot be corrected and must be built from ground up. However, even in housing, one can often salvage significantly from even poorly-planned or ill-built construction. And in Wikipedia there is actually no need to "destroy", because rebuilding can be done without article deletion. It's certainly fine to take out all bad content & reduce the article to a stub, for instance, which then has the original still in the article history. "Planning" and "building" (article structure?) are insufficient reasons for article deletion, and because they are issues that we deal with in wikipedia articles, they don't clearly map onto any of the sufficient reasons for article deletion. I can't think of any way to tweak it so it works better, but perhaps you can. (Although, perhaps in retrospect you will feel this was ill-conceived from the start.  ) --Lquilter (talk) 13:23, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * That's allright; this is an essay and inherently an opinion piece&mdash; it's neither expected nor necessary that everyone agrees with it. Indeed, WP:INSPECTOR makes exactly the opposite point.  &mdash; Coren [[User Talk:Coren|(talk)]|undefined 14:36, 5 November 2008 (UTC)