[WikiEN-l] How did this happen (comixpedia??)

[Brown, Darin]

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:39:55 +0000
> From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<fbad4e140511140939sb9e3631od43e79d42bb18d18 at mail.gmail.com>
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> 
> geni wrote:
> >On 11/14/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >> That's absolutely and incredibly not true. They write a verifiable
> >> article about something they know, get abusive comments on AFD (for
> >> some reason, civility and assume good faith don't work there ... the
> >> reason AFD is so damn poisonous to the community is that it blatantly
> >> encourages participants to assume *bad* faith) and *leave*.
> 
> >That would be unusal. More likely they will simply be ignored. Most
> >stuff that lands on afd is not implicetly verifiable.
> 
> 
> Case where this happened really badly: webcomics. We now have a
> project fork, Comixpedia, entirely caused by AFD. You may recall
> extensive discussion surrounding this on this list a few weeks ago.

Wow, I was totally unaware of this happening. After browsing around
"comixpedia" for an hour or so, I have to admit I'm totally mystified and
agree with David. There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the
articles at this "comixpedia" site to differentiate them from any number of
articles at other places, except that certain people seemed to think certain
articles weren't "notable". But really, come on, less than 1,000 articles,
yeah that's *real* threatening. It's *1/10th of 1%* of wikipedia articles.
And a large number of these are copies of Wikipedia articles, and a large
number of the remaining are actually far from stubs, and many contain some
interesting information. What next, every time some people get in their head
that there are too many stubs on a subject, we'll just banish them to a
fork? Moreover, the move to the fork sets up an artificial barrier to
linking to other topics on wikipedia.  One of the joys I have found about
the project is the ability to begin at one article, and gradually move on to
interesting articles in other areas simply by clicking on interesting links
3 or 4 times. It gives a sense of connection and inter-relatedness. The
impression given here is that "comics" are somehow beyond the pale of
acknowledgement and have to be banished in exile.

Am I just really missing something?? How did this happen? I have a Jonathan
Swift suggestion: Why don't we just create 1,000 different forks -- let's
have a math fork, a physics fork, a chess fork, a baseball fork. We'll call
them "mathpedia", "physicspedia", "chessipedia", and "baseballpedia", they
can all have different webpages, different admins, different statistics,
different everything. And they can all link to each other via external
links. That's a great idea.

BTW, I wonder how many people feel the way I do, but never registered their
opinion simply because they weren't even *aware* a debate was going on.  (I
do remember some posts about webcomics, but I never caught on that an entire
fork was being created. And besides, what about people who don't keep up
with this discussion list??

darin