[WikiEN-l] What en:wp would look like printed out

[William Pietri]

Adrian wrote:
> [...] Take a look at the SA link, in case you don't know it yet. 
> It's an old story, but the examples of article pairs, although many of 
> them are chosen tongue-in-cheek, speak for themselves.
>
> http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php
>   

This is funny and/or embarrassing depending on your outlook, but is it a 
problem? I agree that the serious articles should be better, but in 
these comparisons there seems to be an implicit theory that the fan 
topics are somehow sucking the life out of the serious ones.

But really, do we want somebody obsessed about [[Optimus Prime]] to 
spend a lot of time on [[Prime number]]? And even if we wanted them to, 
would they do it and do it well? I don't think so.

 From what I've seen, the fan stuff is not a particularly big 
maintenance burden. Maybe I've missed it, but I don't see a lot of 
vandalism, a lot of dispute resolution, or a lot of AN/I requests over 
the stuff. So it seems like the net cost of keeping it is relatively 
small. And I see two big benefits that come from it.

First is that the more editors we have involved in Wikipedia, the 
better. People identify with things they've contributed to. That gives 
us all sorts of positive effects, including less vandalism, more 
donations, more person-to-person promotion, and more public support.

And second, people look this stuff up. Your average Joe's impression of 
the value of Wikipedia is going to depend directly on how frequently and 
how well we answer the questions they are wondering about. Maybe they 
*should* be wondering about tau neutrinos, but a lot of people are going 
to start out wondering about Scrappy Doo, and will be delighted to learn 
that the character was based on the chickenhawk in the Foghorn Leghorn 
cartoons. Maybe that's not as good as them learning about neutrinos, but 
I think each little success like that is still a win for Wikipedia.

William

-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri