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Ignoring all rules

In a recent post, Kelly Martin called the “Ignore all rules” policy on Wikipedia the “Zen koan” of WP: those who understand it don’t need the words, and those who need the words cannot possibly understand it. It’s a great post, but I think it needs more elaboration.

First, it’s important to note that IAR is given space in the “policy trifecta” alongside the venerable Neutral Point of View policy and the slightly less formal “don’t be a dick” principle. The Trifecta regards all three of these concepts as fundamentally equal in their own light — NPOV in encyclopedic content, “don’t be a dick” in social interaction, and IAR in personal behavior — and does not set clear boundaries for where one policy ends and another begins. In this absence of “bright lines”, IAR serves as the safety valve, allowing cognizant users to work towards the overarching goal of Writing A Great Encyclopedia without having to worry about whether or not they’re running roughshod over some silly little guideline.

The “five pillars” approach, however, is much more subtle about the tao of IAR, stating that “Wikipedia does not have firm rules besides the five principles elucidated here”. IAR is buried at the bottom of the five pillars page, though, right after the user is given a list of very firm behavioral rules that they must follow (”don’t revert more than 3 times in a 24-hour period”, “don’t disrupt Wikipedia to make a point”, etc.). This is inconsistent, to say the least, and is one of the reasons I greatly prefer the Trifecta when determining how I’ll behave on-wiki.

Second, IMHO, Kelly fails to draw an adequate parallel between this tendency towards hard-and-fast rulesets and the “whack-a-mole” approach to wiki administration. Many users are drawn to the “easy” tasks in any collaboration, and Wikipedia is no different: witness the proliferation of semi-automated vandal-catching tools like Twinkle, and how many edits in the Recent Changes are made through one of these tools. The trouble with these tools isn’t their ease of use, though; it’s that their users tend to employ them in an attempt to rack up lots of edits very quickly, and in doing so they often fall into a habit of sweeping black-and-white generalizations (anon edits or edits by users I don’t recognize = bad; edits by my clique = good). A bot can do those sweeping generalizations (come to think of it, there are already several bots doing just that) because they reduce content analysis to a simple Boolean decision.

Writing good encyclopedic content, though, is hard. It’s really, really tough, moreso than blogging or writing news articles or papers or textbooks. (If you don’t believe me, then please try it; don’t forget to be neutral and cite your sources.) This difficulty forces users to apply reason and appreciate nuance when composing or evaluating content; in doing so, we are unable to be SUPER FAST RIGHT THIS SECOND editors like current RfAs seem to demand, but we are also able to admire the serene elegance of IAR.

(I’ll confess now, I passed my RfA because I had a reputation as a vandal-fighter. Admin actions currently form the bulk of my countable contributions: I’ve blocked people; I’ve rolled back edits; I’ve protected pages. And yes, I agree that many instances of vandalism have no redeeming value, and that in the short term many vandals are uninterested in constructive editing. However, whether I’m using the admin tools or just the regular-editor tools, I always try to work from a perspective close to IAR: “does this action make the encyclopedia better?” I think the project would be well-served if more people adopted this approach.)

Third… in some ways, it’s really more Tao than Zen, y’know? “The IAR that can be written is not the true IAR” and all that. I know, piddly distinction.

Fourth, and finally, the major challenge with IAR is getting newbies to grasp its nuances. There is an explanatory page that tries, valiantly, to do this, but it somehow falls short. (then again, this is true to the elusive nature of IAR.) I’m currently mulling notable edits, though at the moment I’m not sure where to begin making them.

I’ve altered the comment box to allow anonymous comments on this post. Please note, though, that I’ll still be reviewing comments before they appear here.

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2 comments

1 Gwern { 09.15.07 at 19:59:51 }

I think I’m going to take exception to a minor point here. I think writing encyclopedic articles - once you’ve gained the necessary expertise in how to write a specifically Wikipedia article (formatting, templates, categorization, phrasing, all that little stuff we don’t realize we’re absorbing and memorizing but whose lack we see painfully in Special:Newpages) - is easier than writing a textbook. I’ve done quite a bit of work on Wikipedia and written some serious, lengthy, well cited Encyclopedia-articles-with-a-capital-E,
and I’ve also worked on Wikibooks before, and I can ssure you that the latter is just as hard and usually harder. A single book is much longer than an article, is less amenable to division into convenient sections and chapters, has to be as readable as a Wikipedia article while still being useful for the student and not bothering the expert brushing up on something, has to provide exercises and that sort of thing, and proactively list mistakes and subtleties an article could afford to ignore.

2 llywrch { 09.17.07 at 12:46:08 }

In response to your third & fourth, I always thought St. Augsutine’s advice about writing– “Hold to the subject & the words will follow” — or the old saying “the spirit giveth life, but the letter killeth” explained the point of IAR quite well.

The problem is when someone annouces that they aren’t going to follow the rules (for whatever good or bad reason) that the policy starts to scare people. A number of people who don’t understand IAR (or are wikilawyers) think this means that the person is about to undertake a destructive Dadaesque romp thru Wikipedia, & fail to consider whether this is a case of Just Another Burnout over Yet Another Pointless Policy Revision.

Then again, I’ve been mulling over a couple of cases where I may have to rely on “ignore all rules” to actually improve material on Wikipedia. It’s not a pleasant prospect: one is a definite “bet-the-farm” case where success depends on how well I can defend my action, & I don’t think of myself as being that articulate to pull it off.

Geoff

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