George Herbert wrote: > On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee <arrom...@rahul.net> wrote: > >> On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote: >> >>> Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the >>> sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a >>> closing admin would make of it... :-) >>> >> You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of debate just to keep a page >> around when the notability rules could be fixed instead. Otherwise we're >> no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that >> anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit. >> > > > <snip> > Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an encyclopedia > should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website > directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or > services. If we fail to enforce "...The Encyclopedia..." part of our > mission statement, we're failing, too. > > Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them > is, "this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and > review this article and ones like it". > > <snip> > So - posting the question - are we better off as the encyclopedia that > is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but > not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite? > Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum > do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over > time? > In this context, I was interested to get an outside view of how knols are doing (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc20100218_199388.htm occurring in the Signpost story on the Google donation). As we know, knols take inclusionism to one limit, and have wiki-like low barriers to entry, but dispense really with "the community" and "notability". I happen to have had a knol turn up in a Google search for the first time in the past few days, too. It was written by a Wikipedian, was useful to me, was not on a topic Wikipedia would have included (it was a link farm and had little scope for being anything else) - and (as it turned out) was not really as good as another non-knol page I had more trouble finding.
Several conclusions: - knols are inclusionist in so simple-minded a way that no one (not even Google) thinks they do the same job as Wikipedia; - the 99% figure for knols might be harsh, but it might not, and instead our intensive processes to upgrade content, there is only a very severe "survival of the fittest" that applies (most of the postings are simply going to be entirely ignored); - it is quite a good thing that our baroque model was launched well before knols. It would be trivial to adapt anything good in the knol model, clearly (just redefine the User: namespace slightly). Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what <s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s> contentious process". Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
