I get this feeling sometimes that some people are more interested in building a "community" on Wikipedia rather than helping to construct an encyclopedia. I tend to think that there is a notion which existed upon Wikipedia's founding:
"Always leave something undone. 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." I say this is not readily followed anymore, and I personally disagree with that tenet, because of the sheer volume of the English Wikipedia (almost 3.5 million articles) that will always have some sort of positive article creation rate due to developing and new events that occur worldwide all the time. Anyways, I think the reason why we had something like that in there is so that we could preserve or expand this "community" of editors. However, that implies that a certain level of drama should always exist, not to mention that perfection is near-impossible to achieve (though I'm sure many of us strive to do the best we can to improve the encyclopedia), and that one's interpretation of an article or topic being "complete" varies. That comes to my question regarding whether or not we are here to build an online community or an online encyclopedia. Should we focus outwards toward the reading/viewing audience, or should we focus inwards towards the editors? -MuZemike _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
