Has anyone else noticed how spammers and other conflict of interest editors think the guidelines are for the other guy and what they are doing is "useful" and shouldn't be questioned? And they are completely sincere about that.
... and it took me more than a year to learn that the arrow in a section edit summary in a Wikipedia page history is actually a live link to that section ... • Athaenara 06:14, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming.
If we are to remain true to our encyclopedic mission this kind of nonsense cannot be tolerated. We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes. This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy.
I am issuing a call to arms to the community to act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate self-editing and vanity page creation. This is simply out of hand, and we need your help. • BradPatrick09:53, September 29 2006 (UTC)
We have dialogues here in two languages. Let's for the purposes of discussion call them Wonkish and Arbish.
In Wonkish, discretion stands for certain vague and disreputable areas of policy where what should happen is not yet properly regulated. In Arbish, you have always to look behind applications of policy to see intention and the application to the mission of writing an encyclopedia.