User:Visviva/Opinionations/Are you reading that guideline upside-down?

It can happen to anyone... It can happen to you.

In the glorious multi-dimensional continuum of the wiki, it's easy to lose track of which way is up. And sometimes, in this vast and confusing world, we end up reading Wikipedia's policies and guidelines upside-down. The policy may say "if A then B" but we may find ourselves reading it as "if not-A then not-B". Or we may misread permission of X as prohibition of not-X.

OK, now I'm lost

Once you get accustomed to reading policy upside-down, it's easy to lose sight of what the policy is intended to do in the first place. This is a serious problem, because in general, Wikipedia policies are valid only to the extent that they serve the purposes of the project. In other words, Wikipedia is not a set of rules that happened to give rise to an encyclopedia. Instead, it's a community of people who got together to write an encyclopedia and eventually worked out some ad-hoc rules that seemed to be helpful to that end.

Messages that were intended to be helpful can become quite hostile when read upside-down.

As a corollary, inverted policy gives free rein for trolling