User:L33tminion/Policy

Wikipedia philosophy

Inclusionism

I believe that Wikipedia should be the "Encyclopedia of Everything," like a combination of all kinds of standard encyclopedias, but with no space constraints. I think that decisions to delete should be made only when doing so, in and of itself, improves Wikipedia. This should be evaluated by considering the effects on deletion on two groups, users looking for the deleted information and users looking for something else, and the relative sizes of these groups, not by some external ideal of how an encyclopedia "should" be. Wikipedia is not a standard encyclopedia. On that note, I am a member of the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians and a member of the Extreme Article Inclusion League.

Notability

The standard of notability is one of the more contentious points in the Inclusionist/Deletionist debate. While many Deletionist base this standard on aesthetic criteria of "worthiness", I feel that the standard for notability should be, at a minimum, some, which is to say the minimum amount required for a potentially useful and factually verifiable encyclopedia article (beyond a dictionary definition) could be written. Of course, having an article on every topic that meets this standard would create enough confusion to negate its usefulness. Because of this, I use three criterion to evaluate article viability under the standard of notability:

1. Some usefulness: The article has some useful information beyond a dicdef, or is likely to have such information within a reasonable amount of time.
2. Acceptable namespace confusion: The article will not cause confusion for a larger group of users looking for other information due to namespace conflicts.
3. Fairness: The article is more notable than similar articles that fail the above test.

The third standard, fairness, is worth further inspection. Obviously, by standard two, it would be unreasonable to have an article on every John Smith (or whatever the most common name is), because that would make it impossible to find the more sought information on more notable individuals of that name. Because of this, every article on a person should be at least as notable as a person would have to be for the benefit of having an article on them outweigh the confusion called if their name was John Smith. Many "vanity" articles are unfair by the standard of fairness, if not the other two.

With high schools, for example, the standard for notability is lower. There are far fewer high schools with the same name then people with the same name. Therefore an arbitrary high school needs less notability for its usefulness to outweigh the maximum posible confusion caused by namespace conflicts than a person does, thus meeting the standards of usefulness and fairness.

A few things I think are almost always notable:

1. Places (towns (and the like), states, counties, countries)
2. High Schools
3. Colleges and Universities

Incurable problems

Aside from the standard above, which provides a minimum standard for usefulness, there are a few other factors that can cause an article to be more trouble than it's usefulness is worth (and thus make it beneficial to delete it):

1. Not an encyclopedia article: Yes, it may be useful in this case, but Wikipedia attempts to be a maximally useful encyclopedia, not a maximally useful something else.
2. Incurably POV, misleading, or unverifiable: If an article is significantly POV or possibly misleading, it could be causing misinformation, which is the opposite of usefulness in the case of an encyclopedia article. Nonetheless, few such articles are totally lacking in useful information, so retaining and rewriting is better than deleting and recreating. If such a fix cannot be done within a reasonable amount of time (because of inherent falseness or POV in the article's premise (not just the title, as articles can be moved) or the entire article or because of a lack of independent sources on the topic), then deletion is warranted.

Fiction

An article on fiction should still be evaluated on the above standards. It is not inherently more valid to delete such articles. This is especially important, as Wikipedia is one of the only places that can hold such a broad category of articles. Calling an article "fancruft" is no reason for deletion, when essentially what is meant by that is "only a few people would care about this fictional topic". That has nothing to do with the fundamental question of "would deleting this article improve Wikipedia?"

Global inclusionism

Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia in all languages and for all cultures (or, more specifically, for the developing global culture). If an article is definitely notable in one language's Wikipedia, it is definitely notable in all languages' Wikipedias.

Collective creation

Wikipedia is collective collaboration, and all editors, save vandals, are teammates. Because of this, disputes should be settled through honest discourse, not name-calling or edit wars.

Reverts

I feel the three revert rule should really be a one revert rule. If you change something and another editor changes it back, little will be accomplished from repeating that process twice more in the same day. Rather, further changes that day should be settled by discussion on the talk page and the support from friendly editors. Often, if no other editors support you, that means that your viewpoint on the facts really lacks consensus, and that's how it goes sometimes. Furthermore, any time you make a revert, you should write about your reasoning for it on the article's talk page. In the case of vandalism, getting help from other editors or reporting on Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress is superior to making repeated reverts. After all, the answer to the question "what is vandalism?" can be somewhat subjective.

NPOV

While I think that having an article use a neutral point of view (or, rather, explore all points of view in a neutral manner), many articles have an inherent slight positive point of view, just in their existence and writing style. I feel that writing that is truly perfectly neutral would end up being very dry and hard to read. Because of this, I feel that NPOV writing, while important, is a relative standard, not an absolute, and that writing brilliant prose is more important than writing something that is perfectly NPOV.

Policy suggestions

These suggestions may or may not have been formally proposed.

Gender neutral pronouns

I would suggest using the singular "they" for someone in general or someone whose gender is unknown. I would suggest using Spivak pronouns (e, em, eir, eirs, emself) to refer to a specific person who identifies as neither male nor female.

One-revert rule

Per my reasoning above, I support some version of the one-revert rule.