Charles Matthews wrote: > Downmarket, in my terms, is slanting content > policy to favour in any way pages because they would be read often, > rather than serve the purpose of being a reference site. > Not sure I can understand the difference between being read often and being referred too. But I think what's happened here is that assumptions are being made. You go on to say: > We are committed to the idea that the same sort of survey writing should > be applied to say, "Star Wars" and astronomy, though. In the sense of > "being a good place to look up" either. That is the "utility" of > reference material. This is the same axis in another guise, I feel. The > goal of a generalist encyclopedia is surely to become a reputed source > largely independent of topic. (And we can perfectly well aim to > assimilate the results of academic research; in fact over a wide range > of topics this is exactly what we should do.) > And I don't find anything in this to disagree with, and yet we disagree, so obviously one of us or both of us are making assumptions. I don't see reader input into what we do as a bad thing, for starters. In fact, I thought the very ethos of Wikipedia was that reader input was welcome. I'm only here because the article I wanted to look up didn't exist, so I created it. I sourced it, I followed all the style guidance I could find, still made mistakes, but I added information to Wikipedia, moving from a reader to an editor. So there's reader input. If I wanted to do that now, I couldn't. So we've lost that reader input, and so we've lost a vital check on ensuring we are "a reputed source largely independent of topic". I don't see a reader survey suddenly causing us to stop writing in an encyclopedic manner, by which I mean citing sources and the like, because I don't think there will ever be a strong enough consensus to overturn the notion that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. If there is, it will be an interesting moment that might encourage a fork or two. I also agree that we can assimilate the results of academic research. Fortunately, that wasn't the point I was arguing against. The point I was making was that we were not the high-ground; we don't exist to publish academic research. Kind of like the distinction between Science and New Scientist, we're closer to the latter than the former, and the latter is a mid-market publication while the former is aimed at the high-end.
> A recent grief of mine at CfD, though, might be good for a role play > session. I found an advocate for "pre-emptive disambiguation for > category titles"; I argued against this. For article titles, as we know, > you don't pre-empt: [[Arthur Atkinson (architect)]] gets moved to > [[Arthur Atkinson]] if there are no other articles of that personal > name, even though there might be in the future. But the discussion was > whether a category name that _might_ be construed as ambiguous should be > made into a more verbose form that is less likely to be ambiguous. Is > this some rule that someone has come up with and wants to impose, > against common sense? Or was I just defending the status quo against an > idea that should be adopted to improve the 'pedia? Not so clear on the > ground. > I think you just had a difference of opinion based on your respective viewpoints. Did the debate generate a consensus? _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
