In the coming months we'll be highlighting and reprinting some of the more interesting/useful/original/pointless/helpful/tasteless essays written by Wikipedians from among the thousands listed in the Essay directory. We thought that this one about essays themselves, "Ignore all essays", short and sweet, written in 2011 by Tom Morris, would be an appropriate lead into the new feature. Thank you Tom.
It is already established that one should ignore all rules. Some essayists believe we should ignore all dramas, others think we should ignore all uses of "ignore all rules". Other things we should ignore all of include rules, except for the one about consensus, or maybe ignore credentials or even more radically ignore all users.
There is a much simpler and easier thing to do: just ignore all essays! This is much easier to follow: you just don't read essays and ignore appeals to them. It won't affect editing articles or fighting vandals or any of the other things you do on the site.
But this may present something of a paradox. If you ignore all essays, you are following the advice given in this essay, and are therefore not ignoring all essays. Wikipedians, you have your own liar paradox! Enjoy it until some mathematician or philosopher makes it disappear in a puff of logic.
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