Jimmy Wales wrote:
Joseph Hiegel wrote:
As [[WP:POLICY]] makes well clear, the nature of
the wiki is such
that nothing is immutable; were most frequent contributors, for
example, to determine that we should no longer require
[[WP:V|verifiability]], it's likely that Wikipedia would (d)evolve in
a fashion consistent with community consensus (surely Jimbo would
consider whether to jump in at this point, but I think even he would
concede that his capabilities to act unilaterally contrary to an
evident consensus are somewhat limited and that, in any case, the
community would look with strong disfavor on such unilateral action),
Actually, I consider WP:V to be so central to Wikipedia that if there
were ever a significant majority of contributors who wanted to do away
with it, we would have an internal war on our hands that would make the
userbox wars look simple by comparison.
There can be no serious argument against the concept of verifiability,
but verifiability standards can vary according to the subject matter.
To be sure the standards must be highest when we are dealing with the
biography of a living person. For the walk through of a video game or
the plot outline of a movie the game or the movie itself should be
adequate verification.
The important thing to remember
here is that merely existing and typing in a web form does not make one
a Wikipedian. The community is defined by the goal of the community,
and people... no matter how numerous or vocal... who do not accept that
goal are not a part of the Wikipedia community.
But on finer grained issues of editorial judgments, another core
principle of Wikipedia is a strong embrace of a diversity of opinion.
Some editors may consider human dignity to be an entirely pointless
factor, while other may give it a fairly high weight. We can live in
harmony with such differences of opinion, and we can have a healthy give
and take and rational discussion about specific cases.
Superficially "human dignity" is a fine standard, but like notability it
is a subjective standard. This makes it difficult to narrow the scope
of its application.
Ec