Bad ideas

I was ran­domly look­ing at “What Wikipedia is not” again, because it came up in some dis­cus­sion. For peo­ple not famil­iar with Wikipedia pol­icy and short­hand, this is a page that lists every­thing Wikipedia isn’t, obvi­ously enough. It might seem silly at first, but it’s actu­ally very use­ful. Many orga­ni­za­tions define them­selves as what they are, mis­sion state­ments, project char­ters etc, and Wikipedia does this also in the five pil­lars. From a pure usage stance though [[WP:NOT]] gets cited about 20 times more often than [[WP:5P]] accord­ing to google. It’s sim­ply more con­ve­nient and use­ful to send peo­ple to a page dis­cussing why wikipedia isn’t, say, a web host, than it it to make them infer that since we *are* an ency­clo­pe­dia we aren’t a web­host. (or any num­ber of other things)

A rel­a­tively new addi­tion is Phil Sandifer’s excel­lent addi­tion [[WP:NOT#STUPID]]. It really isn’t that new, but I haven’t noticed it since it stuck. I love it.

On the sur­face [[WP:NOT]] isn’t that amaz­ing, a list of things not to do, but this last addi­tion high­lights how the list comes about, which I think is impor­tant and new. Rather than hav­ing peo­ple in charge come up with a list that lim­its people’s lib­erty and abil­ity to inno­vate, the list is gen­er­ated after the fact, when there is con­sen­sus that things are a bad idea. Some com­mit­tee didn’t think up “wikipedia is not a pub­lisher of orig­i­nal thought” that got added because it was a prob­lem. Like­wise, “indis­crim­i­nate col­lec­tion of infor­ma­tion”. The men­tal­ity is flipped, you don’t have to worry about inno­va­tion, Wikipedia’s ideas are not lim­ited to the imag­i­na­tions of the few peo­ple in lead­er­ship posi­tions. Many new ideas are good, only the extreme edge cases end up in “What Wikipedia is not”.

This may seem like a lot of trust put into users, but I think even that con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion is based on a hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tem of thought. We don’t trust users, we are the users, hav­ing a list of things not to do before it even hap­pened would be impos­si­ble to gain con­sen­sus for, it wouldn’t even attract atten­tion. This is not, in my opin­ion, a sys­tem that can eas­ily be grafted onto a hier­ar­chi­cal com­mand struc­tures (com­pa­nies), although a sim­ple hes­i­tance to make rules up cer­tainly could be. [[WP:BEANS]]