On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Thomas Morton >> Wikipedia seems to get a lot of hits when it keeps up with the news. I >> think it reflects well on the project and has a bit of a "wow!" >> factor. It also gets us press coverage. So I'm all for news in >> Wikipedia. > > > It's not *news* though - it's supposed to be a historical record. There is a > lot more content that a news article could/should cover (with a different > tense & style for starters). > > We consolidate news into historical record; and people find that useful.
The old canard, but quite a lovely one I feel, is that "journalism is the first draft of history". Wikipedia is sometimes that. Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says "Wikipedia does not record events until they are x days/months old"? I'm sure there are hundreds of examples of edits made about current events that are regrettable and I'm sure BLPs are often plastered with something that happened yesterday out of all proportion to that person's life taken in toto. But I think we're capable of dealing with that. If the lifecycle of an article that involves current news is: Stable article -> [news event happens] -> article chaos -> heavily edited/recentist -> calms down but still recentist -> stable and due weight accorded to event. I think that's fine. In fact I think the chaos is what gets people fired up and drives them to make something really good. Bodnotbod _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l