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]]