[WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

Mon Jan 30 11:35:52 UTC 2006

It's best to define things in terms of what we are.

  Not least as suggesting things that we're not just gives people ideas.

  Let me give an example. You know what a blue door is. Well, don't think
  of a blue door. Think of anything other than a blue door, and wipe your
  mind of all thoughts about doors that are blue.

  Now tell me what you're thinking of, and whether you'd have been thinking
  of it had I not mentioned blue doors.

  Expressing things positively is important. It's very tempting to express things
  negatively, but that way tends often not to work well.

  Incidentally, I had seen [[WP:ENC]]. The shame is that [[WP:ENC]] is not
  the policy, and [[WP:NOT]] is not the joke.

  All the best
  Jon
  (jguk)

Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
  On 1/30/06, Jon wrote:
> [[WP:NOT]] is the worst policy we have, it doesn't need to be expanded!
>
> Why can't we express ourselves positively. The policy should be:
>
>
> Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia

You're obviously not aware of [[WP:ENC]]. *groan* But if you like,
there's always [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia in eight words]].

> well, Wikipedia is not anything you'd care to mention that isn't an encyclopaedia.

Well, Wikipedia is lots of things that no other encyclopaedia is
(including user-editable, unreliable, inconsistent, multilingual,
frequently up-to-the-minute etc etc).

To get really picky though, I thought the official line was that
Wikipedia is a *project* to *build* an encyclopedia. Or maybe
"Wikipedia" is the name of the encyclopaedia being built by "The
Wikipedia Project". In that case, half of the entries at WP:NOT refer
to the project (wikipedia is not therapy, a game, myspace, a chat
site) and half refer to the actual encyclopaedia (not an
indiscriminate collection of information, not a jargon file etc).

To answer your original point though, "why expand WP:NOT"? Basically
because the nature of Wiki means that people can endlessly expand the
project in new directions. Saying "WP is X and nothing but X" doesn't
really pose any limits on this expansion. Saying "WP is X, but
definitely not Y or Z" does.

Steve
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