User:Nihiltres/Principles over policy

Wikipedia has a complicated and extensive set of rules, and to complicate them further, one of the most prominent is permission to ignore the other rules. This is confusing to many people, because what is not well-written in our policies and guidelines is that what matters on Wikipedia is less rules and more principles.

Wikipedia's rules (what we usually call "policies and guidelines") descend from a few core principles, i.e. the five pillars: that Wikipedia's an encyclopedia, that it takes a neutral point of view, that it's free content, that its users ought to be mutually civil, and that the rules are not firm. The rules are expressions of how those broad, fundamental principles can be applied in practice. For example, to help apply the principles that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and that it takes a neutral point of view, there is the verifiability policy that requires articles to stick to citable facts.

The structure of Wikipedia's rules into "policies" and "guidelines" is a natural result of the diffuse nature of those rules and their basis in Wikipedia's core principles. Our "policies" reflect important, standard ways that we apply our principles, and our "guidelines" are lesser versions that recommend particular courses of action or decisions. These are important because when people disagree, applying existing "policies and guidelines" is far simpler and more standardized than resolving every argument from first principles and rallying for consensus. It also gives people the helpful expectation that they can avoid most disagreements in the first place by meeting the standards that those policies and guidelines set. A precise and—forgive the pun—encyclopedic knowledge of the rules should never be necessary so long as one sticks to the core principles, because actions consistent with the core principles should rarely conflict with the rules as written.

The risk is always that people will read our rules literally as "policies" and "guidelines" and assume that they are traditional "rules" implemented by fiat, and worry about the precise way they are worded, about the precise things they allow and disallow—a falsely legalistic interpretation that leads to annoyances like wikilawyering. When interpreting or applying rules on Wikipedia, care should be taken to understand the rules as paths that guide us to effective encyclopedia-building collaboration, rather than as barriers that narrowly circumscribe our actions.