It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.
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. Hence, it is common practice to follow the advice in this essay, thus ignoring most essays, but not this one. Wikipedians, you have your own
liar paradox! Enjoy it until some mathematician or philosopher makes it disappear in a puff of logic.
Rules are more formal than essays, and represent the opinions of more users (sometimes, however, that doesn't matter; see
Wikipedia:Ignore all users, which is, admittedly, an essay)
Wikipedia:EPD: encourages an obsession with edit counts which could lead to dehydration, poor eye health, and would be detrimental to social relationships.