On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Carcharoth <[email protected]> wrote: > And why would you think that > inclusionism/deletionism debates are intractable? I thought the idea > that such terms should be avoided (as they are divisive) was taking > hold and gaining ground?
We're getting a bit far afield (I was just hoping for some citations to academic research I could look up), but since you asked... My own impression was that the debates were never resolved so much as the inclusionists driven out. Just look at the editor population numbers from the last 9 years, since 2006, or look at the article growth rates. Has the Foundation succeeded in keeping the editor population from dropping (never mind growing, or growing as fast as the Internet)? I've tracked some of the public goals and they've failed entirely. If you hear silence, it may be the silence of the content, happily cooperating as they beaver away at their particular articles - or it may be the silence of the grave. Why do you never hear complaints from inclusionists about Star Wars articles being deleted? Because so many were deleted that the involved editors finally bit the bullet and escaped to Wikia, and the only ones that are left are either ones onboard with rigid constrictive policies or have seen their efforts fail and learned to comply with the current regime. What happened with Star Wars could be said of many of the Wikias. (One of the more amusing Wikipedia conspiracy theories I've seen is that Wales & Angela deliberately encouraged or let En slide towards deletionism because it provided a demand for his Wikia startup. I doubt they intended any such thing, but the effect was the same.) And after a while, people have enough run-ins with Wikipedians or hear about such run-ins that they learn Wikipedia is no longer friendly to a wide variety of topics and to not even try, so one then cannot even point to content-generating communities migrating off Wikipedia because the communities have learned to not use Wikipedia in the first place but use Wikia or any of the many other options available. Hence, an 'evaporative cooling' of participants (http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/) as editors leave. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
