The "rules" of Wikipedia (e.g. Wikipedia is not a dictionary) should not be used as reasons to violently delete other people's work. Rather, if you believe in the rules, you should attempt to convert those people to your view. Use words, not force.
As happens in any community, there is definitely a conflict between purity and diversity going on here. I think (almost) everyone is aware that this project is about knowledge. However, maybe not everyone agrees on what constitutes (useful) knowledge and what does not. Larry has proposed that what we want is adequately important synthetic human knowledge, both declarative and procedural (see Larry Sanger/What is an encyclopedia[?]). A key issue is on what basis must one judge.
A related issue concerns the fact that we're building an encyclopedia, but a different kind of encyclopedia. What do we want to keep from traditional encyclopedias? What should we do without? What do we want to add, and why? (hypertext links, for instance, are extremely valuable). In my opinion, the answers to these questions cannot be found solely by looking at how traditional encyclopedias do their thing. --Seb
"The 'rules' of Wikipedia ... should not be used as reasons to violently delete other people's work."
- However, we also shouldn't accept a defense of patent nonsense or other non-encyclopedic material with
"Well, it's my idea of 'work'."
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