On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
T P wrote:
I think many people fail to realize that Wikipedia
is and always will be
a
work-in-progress. We really don't know what
our notability policy is,
and
there are no easy answers. Stan Shebs was quite
right when he pointed
out
that there are no known solutions to this
problem.
That being the case editors and admins should stop pretending that there
is a solution.
I should have said there are no good solutions. This problem requires a
working solution, and we do have one.
Keeping those avenues open is scary business because it means accepting
that a technique that you were long convinced was the
only solution may
suddenly be found wrong. Validation does not come in the form of the
immediate intangible reward of having your idea accepted and written in
stone. In a truly collaborative environment every policy or idea is
permanently open to change. It doesn't matter that at some point there
was a vote to adopt a policy. If someone disagrees at any time in the
future he should have the right to add his negative vote, or change his
previous vote. If enough people do that the policy could be reversed.
I think we are agreeing here.
People think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia, but
that's just an
analogy. The truth is Wikipedia is something new
and different and what
it
is is a matter of negotiation within the Wikipedia
community.
I don't think that this line of reasoning gets us anywhere. It just
gets us into a lot of semantic debate about the nature of an
encyclopedia, a debate for which there is no firm answer. This debate
was largely superceded with the founding of the sister projects as
spin-offs for ideas that did not really fit into the definition of an
encyclopedia. What is new and different then is Wikimedia.
Wikipedia is still different in substantial ways from a traditional
encyclopedia, and people who try to make it "more like an encyclopedia" are
going to be disappointed.
Pesonally I don't care whether webcomics are included or not. I think it's
a shame that we have no articles on [[Dance in China]] or [[Media of
China]], and [[Military of China]] and [[Tourism in China]] are just stubs.
Adam