Wikipedia:The role of policies in collaborative anarchy
This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Wikipedia is an
Role of community
In other words, it is not Wikipedia policies that have functioned to assure the quality of the information included in articles—it is our being a wiki community, in which everyone in the world (i.e. people having a wide range of knowledge) can add to the encyclopedia, and everyone in the world (including many people with good judgment) can delete things, that is meant to produce a quality encyclopedia ... this is the whole gamble of the project, the dare to be wiki and have faith that the result will be quality content, that distinguishes us from other encyclopedias.
Role of policies
Policies have never and should never police content quality; rather, they provide the framework and a safe environment for an anarchic wiki community to function.
Neutral point of view
This is why the core policy is
Reliable attribution
These views may be our own but must not be unique to ourselves or limited to a small group of which we are a part ... thus giving rise to our
Attributed versus attributable
It is the wiki nature of the project that makes the distinction between "attributed" and "attributable" important. Each article is a product of the community, not a single author—because we know that multiple strengths will outweigh multiple weaknesses. One will add what they know to an article but of course it is not everything; someone else adds more. You add one view, someone else adds another view. Similarly, you add an attributable claim, someone else
Open, collaborative project
In short, policies may help educate newbies as to how to collaborate most fruitfully with others on articles. And policies serve as important points of reference in
But it is our commitment to the open, collaborative nature of this project that distinguishes it: the gamble that a high-quality encyclopedia will be a wikipedia.
See also
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not an anarchy, an official policy of the English Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia:Administration
- Wikipedia:Product, process, policy
- Wikipedia:Reasonability Rule
- Wikipedia:The rules are principles
- Wikipedia:Content forking/Internal § Policy forks– on avoiding conflict between different policy pages