George Herbert wrote:
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee
<arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
Interesting comparison with historical
antecedants! This is more the
sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a
closing admin would make of it... :-)
You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of debate just to keep a
page
around when the notability rules could be fixed instead. Otherwise we're
no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that
anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit.
<snip>
Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an
encyclopedia
should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website
directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or
services. If we fail to enforce "...The Encyclopedia..." part of our
mission statement, we're failing, too.
Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them
is, "this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and
review this article and ones like it".
<snip>
So - posting the question - are we better off as the
encyclopedia that
is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but
not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite?
Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum
do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over
time?
In this context, I was interested to get an outside view of how knols
are doing
(
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc20100218_199388.htm
occurring in the Signpost story on the Google donation). As we know,
knols take inclusionism to one limit, and have wiki-like low barriers to
entry, but dispense really with "the community" and "notability". I
happen to have had a knol turn up in a Google search for the first time
in the past few days, too. It was written by a Wikipedian, was useful to
me, was not on a topic Wikipedia would have included (it was a link farm
and had little scope for being anything else) - and (as it turned out)
was not really as good as another non-knol page I had more trouble finding.
Several conclusions:
- knols are inclusionist in so simple-minded a way that no one (not even
Google) thinks they do the same job as Wikipedia;
- the 99% figure for knols might be harsh, but it might not, and instead
our intensive processes to upgrade content, there is only a very severe
"survival of the fittest" that applies (most of the postings are simply
going to be entirely ignored);
- it is quite a good thing that our baroque model was launched well
before knols.
It would be trivial to adapt anything good in the knol model, clearly
(just redefine the User: namespace slightly). Perhaps this contains the
germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating
unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what
<s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s>
contentious process".
Charles