Editing Encyclopedia:Make omissions explicit (section)

== Always leave something undone ==
The following rule was historically used to help challenge people's preconceptions of what an encyclopedia should be. While in practice it's not something we recommend, it makes for an interesting [[Wikipedia talk:Make omissions explicit|debating point]]:
: Whenever you write a page, never finish it. Always leave something obvious to do: an uncompleted sentence, a question in the text (with a not-too-obscure answer someone can supply), wikied links that are of interest, requests for help from specific other Wikipedians, the beginning of a provocative argument that someone simply ''must'' fill in, etc. The purpose of this rule is to encourage ''others'' to keep working on the wiki.
The counter-argument is that people need no encouragement to edit articles.  They should even think more before editing.  Leaving things so that they deliberately seem unfinished just makes the project look amateurish.  Articles should, as much as possible, be usable and coherent as a whole despite the fact that they will later be expanded. New To-do lists should be used to point people in the right direction regarding future edits.

In the early days of Wikipedia's formation, when there were far fewer articles (~<20,000) it was (and to some degree still is) considered beneficial to establish for new editors the ''mindset of incompleteness;'' to think of Wikipedia as continuously-changing entity rather than a static volume that needs to be made perfect. While now, this seems unnecessary, at the time, it was an important guideline at a time when the concept of wiki was new, and the concept of making an encyclopedia collaboratively was still somewhat in doubt, even by its founders. At that time [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent changes]] was quite slow by today's standards; it was more common to use Recent Changes as a window into current activity on the Wikipedia, viewing most of the day's edits on a single page. Today, RC goes by impossibly fast, and hence other ways of monitoring article development (Watchlists, Various meta-pages, Community pages, kind notes to other editors, etc.) have taken its place.  At that time, making deliberate and obvious errors invited (teased or taunted) others monitoring the RC to make corrections, while today such actions are highly discouraged by [[WP:HOAX]].

See also: [[Wikipedia:Contribute what you know or are willing to learn more about|Contribute what you know or are willing to learn more about]] &mdash; the two suggestions complement each other