I agree with Bryan, not Todd. The content of WP is a compromise among
the things different people think important.
I joined primarily to increase the traditional academic content. I
soon saw it was equally a matter of radically improving it, such
content as there was especially in history and the humanities tending
to come unaltered from century-old reference books. And I saw that
many WPedians tried to delete content for academics--even members of
the US National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society -- on the
sometimes stated grounds that nobody who did not win a Nobel prize was
important. I gradually learned how to help others defend such
material--though there is still the astounding situation that less
than half the current members of these bodies have articles, cf.
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciā¦]
and compare [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fellows_of_the_Royal_Society]
with [
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/fellowsindex2.cfm].
And I was properly scandalized not as much by the excessive detail of
the popular culture sections, but by the policies for complete
coverage of numbered highways and the like.
So I have realized that the practical way of building an encyclopedia
is mutual tolerance. If there is enough content to write articles, and
if the subjects of of any recognizable importance within their area,
let the people who want to write articles do so. It's the only way to
get what I consider the serious stuff included.
And with respect to popular culture, the current problem seems to be
that the current proponents of these deletions do not recognize the
significance of creative works on each other, or the importance of
themes and setting in books and moviesThis is as much a subject of
literary criticism as the description of the plot and the characters,
and academic sources and popular reviews are available for many of the
genres. So in a sense it comes down to anti-intellectualism, in a
way. And again the problem is the quality of the articles--in almost
no cases has anyone bothered to source this content, even when the
sources can readily be found online. It's the same amateurish
superficial approach as with the historical subjects: write down what
comes immediately to hand and stop there..
Adding this content is not made easier by the current rash of
deletions. it takes many hours of work with print and electronic
library resources to source one of these articles properly, often with
material not available except in large academic libraries. An article
can be nominated for deletion in about 2 minutes, less if one uses the
same deletion rationale for all.
it is also not made easier by the opinion of some of the deletion
proponents that whatever articles are found are not relevant, the
opinion of some that list formats are inherently suspicious, and the
opinion of a few that the content would not be encyclopedic even if
sourced. The typical rationale given is loosely associated items--if
for movies to have a common theme is a loose association, I don't know
what would count as a tight one.
The name of "trivia" doesn't help of course. But popular culture is a
serious field of study, and about half the people at WP will not
believe it--and, even here, make fun of the name. Even were it only a
field of popular interest, it would equally deserve treatment.
And then there is the expressed preference of war rather than reason
for making decisions, and the general unwillingness to compromise,
both characteristic of WP process.
On 8/30/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
In any event, when one finds a situation where
one topic has lots of
coverage and another topic has less but one feels should have more, I
don't believe the appropriate solution is to delete stuff from the first
topic until they're even. The solution should be to _add_ stuff to the
second topic.
That depends if the second topic is a valid one in the first place.
Deletion, cutting, and merging are excellent ways to deal with articles
which aren't covered significantly in secondary, independent sources.
Editors edit. Part of that is to cut. That's not a bad thing.
If you feel something isn't a "valid" topic for an article at all, just
put it up for deletion and let the deletionism/inclusionism war set up a
battlefront there for a while to hash things out.
I don't see how that affects my criticism of wikigroaning, though, since
I say it's based on a fallacious underestimation of our coverage of the
topic that's generally considered more "serious" rather than based on
the large size of the culture-related one. If a Wikigroaner went to
[[Lightsabre]] and found it to be 72 kilobytes long (exactly as it is
right now) but then went to [[Light]] and found it to be 250 kilobytes
long (a wild guess at how big the contents of [[Category:Light]] would
be if mashed together in one page) there'd be no basis for his complaint.
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