On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Cathy Edwards<[email protected]> wrote: > I think I have a good idea why BLP are a hot topic of debate in this > area, but why do you think fiction is contentious - because it's in > danger of unbalancing the encyclopedia?
I'll offer two reasons: 1) Because editors are unable, in general, to distinguish between the desirability of including a topic, and the desirability of including the current article written on that topic. They see a crappy article and think "crappy topic". 2) Because editors react rather viscerally and unhelpfully to certain topics. I don't like Pokémon, but I begrudingly accept the wisdom of articles on Pokémon characters. I find the difficult struggle to define the borders of the encyclopaedia very interesting, but dubbing it the "deletionism/inclusionism debate" is really oversimplifying it. It implies that there is some group that wants the encyclopaedia to have a certain number of articles (say, 2 million) and another group that wants it to have a larger number (say, 10 million). In practice, it's not like that, there are individual struggles in every area. These struggles have to take place because different people's instincts tell them different things, and there are no clear universal principles to define what's in and out. Nor, other than extreme positions like "include everything about which there is at least one source", could there be. Personally, I'm much more convinced by arguments about the cost of maintaining articles in certain areas versus their value to end users - a cost/benefit analysis. But the debate is rarely framed in these terms. As an example, I wrote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_deal_a_day in 2007. It attracts a fair bit of spam, and a reasonable amount of effort from editors to keep it clean. Is it worth it? By contrast, dozens of other stubs that I've written require very little maintenance effort, other than occasional recategorising, interwiki linking, geo coord linking etc. People seem very unwilling or uninterested in engaging in this kind of analysis. Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
