User:Andrewa/The senility of Wikipedia

This is very much a work in progress. Like all pages it belongs to the project, but before editing it, it would generally be best to discuss on its talk page.

What this page is not

This page is not doom and gloom. There may be solutions to the problems seen here. And even if Wikipedia turns out to be more mortal than we would like, there will be successors to it, and the free licence under which it is built makes this easy to do.

This page is not an attack page. That is a danger to be considered and resisted.

The other danger is tendentious editing. Much of what belongs in this page has been discussed before, to the point of annoying some editors.

What this page is

This is a reflection particularly inspired by a recent comment that wp:NPA is aspirational.

That comment is alarming enough in itself. But what is more alarming is that nobody else seemed to find it alarming.

It was in the context of a discussion on NPA of course. Another editor had suggested there that there is a tendency for admins to themselves disregard NPA, and IMO the discussion is itself littered with minor infringements of NPA, some of them by admins.

This followed much reflection on the failure of wp:NYRM2016, in which violations of NPA were rife.

The way forward

If editors are seeking ways to circumvent the rules, then the rules are not working, even if violations are rare and quickly corrected. The whole point of consensus is that editors should want to follow the rules, even if they disagree with them. The function of the policies and guidelines is to help editors to collaborate in the most productive way. They can only do this if they are followed, and the better they are followed, the better they will work.

IAR is one of our more subtle and radical policies. It doesn't mean we have no rules, wp:5P5 reads Wikipedia has no firm rules. Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. The principles and spirit matter more than literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making exceptions. Be bold but not reckless in updating articles. And do not agonize over making mistakes: every past version of a page is saved, so mistakes can be easily corrected.

Note that The principles and spirit matter... It doesn't read The principles and spirit do not matter..., does it now? And it would be a bit bizarre if it did.

See also User:Andrewa/Rules, rules, rules.

Reality check

Isn't the word senility a bit severe?

Hopefully it is. But there are signs of exactly that. Even senility does not mean death, and some individuals manage to be very gracious in senility (but few if any organisations, perhaps we can be the first).

Consensus

wp:consensus is one of the more important policies... I would even say it it the cornerstone of Wikipedia.

And it's becoming harder and harder to achieve, and one of the reasons for this is the tendency to game the system by playing for no consensus rather than building consensus.

Consensus-based decision making has some requirements. Respect for the other parties is high on the list of these, which ties in with the attacks on NPA. Perhaps even, you can't have one without the other.

NPA

As said above, this page was inspired by discussion at wt:ANI concerning wp:NPA.

Some red herrings

Enforcement

Some editors assume that if anyone raises NPA, they want sanctions. That is an obvious solution, but it is not the only one, and definitely not always the best one. A far better one is for editors to lead by example.

On the other hand, an increase in legalistic application of rules and sanctions is a symptom of organisational senility.

The vitality of common purpose and the mutual respect that this produces are the only antidote to this, and are supported by our radical policies of consensus and NPA. And when we abandon them, we lose that.

Civility

Some editors assume that NPA is just another name for civility. It is not. They are both policies and parts of wp:5P4, but significantly different each from the other.

The NPA policy has been quite deliberately written to be easily interpreted and applied, while the civility policy is very much in the eye of the beholder. There is obvious overlap, but neither can take the place of the other.

Causes for concern

As stated above, NYRM2016 was littered with minor to medium NPA violations. Two of these were referred to AN/I. One of these was agreed unanimously to be a personal attack, but by non-admins, and was auto-archived without any admin comment, let alone action. The other was auto-archived with no comment at all.

Talk page guidelines

The talk page guidelines are being increasingly ignored. This must be confusing and discouraging for editors, particularly new editors, who try to follow them. (It is for me.)

See User:Andrewa/Interleaving etc.

Other guidelines

Redirects

That advantage of redirects over piped links is an old hack for finding wanted articles. I don't think it is of much value any more. [1]