Wikipedia talk:Principles

Essays
How can a summary our principles be an "essay"? -- &oelig; &trade; 05:06, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
 * See current discussion at Wikipedia talk:Five pillars and the thread below that.
 * I do agree that 5P is not an essay – Whilst it might not fit in any of the other existing groupings perfectly, defaulting to calling it an "essay" seems like it will create more problems than it solves.
 * This being a wiki, you can rewrite this page if you can think of something more agreeable. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 06:06, 20 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I think maybe someone should write in WP:GLOSSARY a clear definition of what an "essay" is as we define it in the context of Wikipedia. -- &oelig; &trade; 20:24, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument. Frank ogieva (talk) 20:06, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

New proposal
Currently this page reads "The English Wikipedia does not have a single, definitive statement of the community's values and principles." Expectations and norms of the Wikipedia community is a new proposal that aspires to be just that. Hopefully if it becomes an official policy or guideline this page's introduction can be amended. -- &oelig; &trade; 21:00, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi there , I had a big problem just to send this because it's hard to find and my propose is wikipedia application on Android and iphone and blackberry its gona be so helpful for the users  Hamza Elfakir (talk) 23:14, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Unclear Purpose of this Page
As a newcomer, I am currently trying to get a general understanding of the overall "rules" of Wikipedia. So far I understand that at its core, we have the various policies and guidelines and that the Five pillars (even though they were created after the policies) can be understood to be a summary of the foundational principles.

What I am struggling with is how this current page is supposed to fit in. It is quite prominently linked to from many other "core" pages about policies and guidelines through the Policy List Template and the Wikipedia Principles Template. Those other pages are generally very clear, helpful, and well organised. By contrast this current page seems to be just a collection of links to other pages without much explanation about how they relate to one another or which ones are considered more important in terms of governance.

What's worse, the information on this page creates additional confusion for the new user by stating that none of the listed resources "are official policies or guidelines of the English Wikipedia community" or that "The English Wikipedia does not have a single, definitive statement of the community's values and principles."

I appreciate that this page may have started out as a collection of links somebody considered helpful, but for a page that is prominently linked to and has its own shortcuts entitled WP:PRINCIPLES and WP:Fundamentals, this is rather falling short of what a user might expect to find. It is especially confusing for a newcomer trying to get a quick grasp of how things are organised.

From my point of view, one of the following should happen:
 * 1) The page should be given a major overhaul in order to be more informative to the new user, be structured more clearly, and to be consistent and play well together with other core documentation, in particular the Five Pillars and the Policies and Guidelines. In such case the link from the mentioned templates can be kept.
 * 2) If the current page should be kept as is, a different page like the above should be created and linked to from the mentioned templates.
 * 3) If the above are not an option, or they would take too long to implement, the current link from the mentioned templates should be removed.

I would appreciate some feedback and in particular some guidance on where we can go from here. Many thanks. CSMProject (talk) 16:04, 6 September 2023 (UTC)