Wikipedia:Allow time to melt and look again

This essay, WP:Allow time to melt and look again explains the need to use more time to make some decisions. More often than might be expected, a procedure requires far more time (not less), to fully process, and consider, all aspects of a situation. Perhaps some cases might require twice as long to process, compared to typical cases. It might, at first, seem obvious what a user could accomplish, but upon further inspection, a different view might emerge of the user's true potential.

As an analogy, on the surface, some snowballs might appear to be solid snow, but instead, a snowball can contain a large rock or stone, inside, which is revealed only when it melts.

Halley's Comet in 1910. Some comets have been described as "large snowballs with rocks inside". Some snow melts (and vaporizes) as a comet curves around the sun, but it survives the hellish heat of the solar wind and orbits around again. It takes centuries for some comets to fully "melt" and reveal the interior.

Depending on how cold the surrounding environment, a snowball might require much longer to melt, even years longer in permafrost conditions. Scientists, when digging into glaciers in Antarctica, have reported finding many prehistoric fossils, lying on top of glacial snow, for the first time in 10,000 years, when the upper snow melted, revealing the fossilized rock fragments underneath.

Sometimes, when judging a decision, the general environment is cold to new ideas, or alternate interpretations, and it can require more time to melt their attitudes. For that reason, a final judgment can require far more time to be fully processed, depending on how cold the reception has been. A quick decision (a "knee-jerk" reaction) might be a big mistake. Compare the process to an appellate trial, as needing extra time to melt through layers of misunderstandings, to reach a better, final judgment.

Not until a snowball melts, does the truth inside become revealed. Melting can require more time than typically allotted for an activity. Hence, be prepared to slow down now, to determine a better decision, and better results, later. The Hare seemed faster than the Tortoise, but recall who won the race.

Related pages

WP:Advanced article editing WP:Advanced footnote formatting WP:Advanced table formatting WP:Advanced template coding WP:Advanced text formatting WP:Advanced Convert coding WP:Thinking outside the infobox WP:Pruning article revisions WP:Overlink crisis

WP:Authors of Wikipedia WP:Blanking sections violates many policies WP:Add wikilinked sections to balance NPOV WP:Avoiding Wikipedia quirks WP:Avoiding difficult users WP:Accepting other users WP:Wikimedia Foundation error WP:98 percent table width anomaly

Notes

[ The following are footnotes for the text above.]