 | 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. |
The primary rule I go by is Use Common Sense. Which is a meta-rule that goes hand-in-hand with meta:Don't be a dick and Wikipedia:Ignore all rules, and supersedes all others. It goes with Wikipedia:Assume good faith as it is written, which states that one should assume good faith "until bad faith makes itself known". It goes with Wikipedia:Wikiquette and Wikipedia:Civility, because common sense states that working with people will get better results than working against them. It balances Wikipedia:No original research with Wikipedia:Common knowledge. It tempers the Wikipedia:Three-revert rule with discretion and good judgment. Use Common Sense governs all of these.
Written policy is good, particularly when it clarifies unwritten rules, making the actual workings of Wikipedia more transparent. But the increasingly legalistic letter-of-the-law interpretations are doing more harm than good. We are a community that exists to build an encyclopedia. Our primary purpose is to build that encyclopedia, and we cannot do it if the community is continually too busy sniping at each other and testing the rules to actually write articles. We cannot do it if we are so worried about possibly offending someone that contributors of proven good quality are driven off by trolls and POV-pushers. We cannot do it if new contributors are driven off by a Byzantine system of rules and made to feel like outsiders for not being intimately familiar with everything that has gone before. Use common sense.