On 11/01/2009, White Cat <[email protected]> wrote: > Even so there exits people who mass remove (redirectify/merge/delete - take > your pick) content. Mass creation isn't that big of a deal. Junk can always > be dealt with. Junk has never been a serious issue as the definition of junk > has been rock solid all along.
I do not believe this to be the case. And as you say yourself: > A problem has emerged when people decided to > expand the definition of junk to include entire categories of articles > without securing a consensus for it. In other words, others definition of junk differs from yours, presumably because their value system varies. > An elite group of self righteous users does not add up to such a consensus. > If such people truly cared about the well being of the encyclopedia they > would have spent the time to secure the consensus before taking action. Thinking laterally, just an idea: Slashdot has an interesting thing where they have ratings for postings, with different categories. They then permit you to consider certain categories to be more or less important to you (e.g. funny postings may be raised up in the rating meaning you're more likely to see them). In principle a similar thing could apply to the wikipedia, if we don't do a hard delete to articles (or only for the truly nasty vandalism stuff), but simply rate them along multiple axes then it could be possible for a user to indicate to the wikipedia what he or she values, and only articles that are highly enough rated for their own set of values would appear, (with a default set of values used for anonymous users.) Doing it that sort of way potentially avoids the either it's suitable for our glorious wikipedia; or it isn't dichotomy, and permits poor quality articles a chance to improve below the waterline before becoming full-fledged articles. I'm not saying it would be a perfect system, but it would probably be better than what we have right now; in other words we would have far less deletionism, because we would have far fewer deletes. > -- White Cat -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
