Wikipedia talk:Don't overuse shortcuts to policy and guidelines to win your argument

message: As an inclusionist, I heartily agree with you that the tone of AfD discussions (at least the ones I've participated in) have been more uncivil than not. Especially in the AfD's of so-called "crufty" articles. This was exactly the kind of reasonable rebuttal that was needed in the recent Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Burger King menu items AfD, where the nominator User:Jaranda cited to WP:ILIKEIT with impunity.
That being said, I share User:ColourBurst's concern about headcounts. I would also ask you to clarify what you mean when you say "Being encyclopedic — encyclopedicity? — is a much more satisfactory label. Let's not pretend that these expectations are irrelevant." Are you saying that we should be aware of what those expectations are and therefore avoid its ad nauseam usage? Or are you saying that, because we have some idea of what "encyclopedic" means, it should be safe to use in AfD's? I would suggest the former, since in AfD's the charge of an article being "unencyclopedic" crops up much more often than support for an article being "encyclopedic." Wl219 01:19, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The AfD you show there really shows how it has gone wrong. That AfD links to WP:ILIKEIT, WP:IDONTLIKEIT, WP:INTERESTING, WP:USEFUL and WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS. Its makes perfectly clear that many people have misunderstood the original essay. --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 08:44, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: (mostly) sound counsel

message: Input is appreciated at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2007 February 6, where I nominated several redirects to WP:ILIKEIT for deletion. --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 15:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  RfD of redirects to [[WP:ILIKEIT]] 

message: I'm wondering if the name of this article is really fitting. A portion does refer to over quoting policy pages, but the majority appears to be a more-or-less direct rebuttal of WP:AADD. The only problem is, I'm not exactly sure what a good title would be. Anybody have any thoughts?--Fyre2387 (talk • contribs) 20:35, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm certainly open to suggestions.  Don't pre-emptively discount editors' opinions might cover half of it, and Avoid aggressive or dismissive rebuttals might be another. - Smerdis of Tlön 20:39, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Perhapes this essay should be renamed? 

message: I posted a number of critical comments to the WP:AADD talk page before coming across this essay, which puts across broadly the same points far more succinctly and eruditely than I ever could have. Excellent work. AdorableRuffian 16:30, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Superb 

message: *While many of this essay's criticisms of how editors are misusing WP:AADD are perfectly valid and appropriate, I feel that many parts of it show either a misunderstanding or disregard of WP's core principles.  For example: "consensus is, or ought to be, the source of most policies and guidelines."  No.  Wikipedia's founders and the Wikipedia Foundation created the core policies, and if a hundred or a thousand people swarm one discussion and claim a "consensus" to eliminate WP:V, for instance, that doesn't mean that Wikipedia must suddenly adopt "anybody can add anything and it's just as good as facts that can be verified through reliable sources."  If you don't like the core policies, you should instead go start your own encyclopedia project, like Larry Sanger has done with Citizendium.  Another example:  "if it pleases our editors to expatiate at obsessive length on comic books or 1970s TV shows, they should be encouraged to do so provided their contributions are verifiable, sourced, and original."  No.  The purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide a factual, unprejudiced overview of the most significant aspects of a topic, not to indulge obsessive fannishness nor to treat something that mildly entertained a few hundred people as more important than events that killed hundreds of thousands and changed how tens of millions of people lived.  I also feel that this is more a reaction to deletion debates that angered the author, and not so much a reasoned attempt to give clarifying and helpful advice.  Certainly it isn't disrupting Wikipedia to make a point, but it needs considerable revision before I would support it remaining in the space that editors can point to as the third level of "established policy > guideline > essay".  (The essay would be improved if it pointed out that people treat essays as policy even though the box on each essay says not to.)  As it now stands, anyone who uses this essay to support their keep/delete argument will be viewed as making the same sort of error that it complains about.  This is just my opinion but I think a substantial number of established editors and admins hold opinions closer to mine than to the author's.  I've noticed this trend in a number of deletion/undeletion debates where the author was involved, so it's not a completely unsupported assertion.  Barno 00:03, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: *Whoops, I see that WP:V has been "superseded", sort of, by WP:ATT.  However, that was a matter of merging two of the existing policies and improving phrasing; it claims not to include any "innovation" of policies, so my point stands: the core policies can't be reversed by a group claiming consensus.  If people tried, the Wikipedia Foundation would have the right to shut down the servers or to ban people from the project and reinstitute the policies which are the basis for the project.  Consensus rules only to a point.  Barno 02:15, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

text: *This isn't really about the core policies, the ones that reflect the founding principles of Wikipedia and can never be changed without an official edict. In my view, it's more about the way in which the the finer details of policy documents, and especially guideline documents, are given more weight in deletion debates than is actually warranted. You often see the phrase "end run around policy", when in fact the result of a deletion debate could help create consensus to amend a policy. I think we're reached a situation where, to the newcomer, the AfD pages resemble a game of Mornington Crescent or something - you get people saying "Delete per WP:WEB" and then answering back to all of the Keep comments saying "nah, your argument Does Not Count because of WP:RS and also, per..." In the worst case, this is just a form of filibustering, and it is completely unfriendly to less established users. AdorableRuffian 14:56, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Similarly, the Wikipedia admin who chooses to delete an article in the absence of clear consensus to delete it, on the grounds that in his opinion those who wanted it deleted argued more eloquently; or that their citations of policy, guidelines or essays were more convincing, is misconstruing the nature of consensus and the role of policy and guidelines.
Rather the author is misconstruing the nature of consensus.  Administrators who fail to weigh up the arguments in favour of a head count are not doing their job properly.  Consensus extends beyond the few people who participate in a discussion.  If someone is invoking our policies and guidelines (which are usually formed and enforced by consensus), they are suggesting that there already is a consensus on disposing of a certain article, and any admin who fails to do the weighing up of arguments is effectively ignoring the wider consensus that already exists in favour of the noisy minority.  Chris cheese whine 13:31, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

text: I believe that the proper course of action for administrators is to base their decisions neither on head count nor how well they personally feel the points were argued; but rather to base their decisions on what it appears that a broad consensus of the community would decide, based on the arguments presented. If that consensus is unclear, then either a default action needs to be taken (e.g. to keep an article which is up for deletion), or a request for comment should be filed to get broader input. DHowell 01:55, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uh, strongly mixed opinion 

message: When over 50 articles which have existed for several years get deleted in one fell swoop, something is wrong. I found a perfect example of what is wrong with our current deletion process, and what this essay is trying to curtail: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lists of ZIP Codes in the United States by state. Notice the closing admin's statement, "Votes to keep were not taken as seriously in closing judgment as many tended not to cite policy". So if you don't "cite policy", your opinion will "not be taken seriously". Never mind that policies are supposed to reflect consensus opinion, not dictate it. See also Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2007 April 22. Nearly all of the deletion votes, and endorse deletion votes, merely "cited policy", i.e. WP:NOT, yet failed to explain why every one of these 50-some articles violated that policy. "Wikipedia is not a directory" is a nice curt summary, but it doesn't define what a directory is, or what separates an encyclopedic list from an unencyclopedic directory. Nor does it address the portions of those articles which were clearly NOT a directory. When several keep votes presented fairly reasoned arguments as to why at least some of the pages should be kept, they were summarily dismissed with yet more citations to policy. Notice that in neither the AfD nor the DRV was there any actual attempt at achieving true consensus. DHowell 14:50, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "Policies are supposed to reflect consensus opinion, not dictate it" - this should be displayed in large text at the top of every AfD page. AdorableRuffian (talk) 00:05, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Perfect example

message: I like it :) EJF (talk) 21:05, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good essay 

message: Kim, I love ya to death, especially as as mediator, but this whole piece just comes across as sort of whiny.  It has an overwhelming feel of "I'm not getting my way, so I will criticize the system" about it.  We're not here to kiss the precious little booties of noobs.  WP is in many ways a survival of the fittest environment (and I mean that in the original Spencerian, not Darwinian, sense).  WP:AADD exists for solid reasons, and it isn't really reasonable [hmm, can I use rea- one more time in this sentence?] to expect everyone to actually type out the full names of longwindedly-titled policy/guideline/essay pages that have shortcuts. Shortcuts exist for a reason.  They are not particularly confusing to noobs, or to anyone for that matter, since just opening them in another tab self-explains what they are. They are mostly pretty mnemonic, too.  It drives me kinda nuts when people won't use shortcuts in XfD blather, because it simply wastes my time, as well as the author's, to write all that crap out and make me read it.  And running across an unfamiliar shortcut is certainly the #1 way that I end up reading new WP essays (in spelled-out form, I avoid reading most of them, honestly; the shortcut at least gets me thinking "what is this?" and actually looking at the page long enough to potentially get sucked into reading it.  Anyway, nothing personal, I just don't agree with this essay at all, other than in its most general possible sense, e.g. that a really excessive string of WP:whatevers can be very annoying. The real reason to me that it's annoying is not the acronyms/abbreviations, its the over-citation to too many policies/guidelines at once without being specific about what exactly at each page is being cited.  Completely different issue than the one you are addressing. PS: It strikes me as borderline hypocritical for this essay to have shortcuts any shorter than maybe WP:DONTOVERUSESHORTCUTS. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 11:19, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not-so-mixed opinion 

message: problem solved? From my experience, the majority of a policy article is irrelevant in arguments, so telling other editors to read whole policy articles is a dick move. XP Hell, if the argument is not about article deletion but say the inclusion/exclusion of certain information, a good chunk of this article is useless. MichaelExe (talk) 20:35, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have made some changes in that direction. I have toned down the implication of incivility as well, because that is seldom the intent, I think. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 00:10, 1 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Instead of Just Linking to Policies, Also Quote Relevant Information 

message: The section titled "Some issues specific to deletion debates" unfortunately does not discuss the overuse of policy links in such debates, but rather rehashes a subset of WP:ATA, so it should probably be moved over there. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 00:17, 1 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Large off-topic section 

message: The section on it seems to assert that "someone likes it = notability." Frankly, it should be removed. Firestar464 (talk) 04:08, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Firestar464 (talk) 08:53, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  ILIKEIT