[WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Cathy Edwards<Cathy.Edwards at bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> I think I have a good idea why BLP are a hot topic of debate in this
> area, but why do you think fiction is contentious - because it's in
> danger of unbalancing the encyclopedia?

I'll offer two reasons:
1) Because editors are unable, in general, to distinguish between the
desirability of including a topic, and the desirability of including
the current article written on that topic. They see a crappy article
and think "crappy topic".
2) Because editors react rather viscerally and unhelpfully to certain
topics. I don't like Pokémon, but I begrudingly accept the wisdom of
articles on Pokémon characters.

I find the difficult struggle to define the borders of the
encyclopaedia very interesting, but dubbing it the
"deletionism/inclusionism debate" is really oversimplifying it. It
implies that there is some group that wants the encyclopaedia to have
a certain number of articles (say, 2 million) and another group that
wants it to have a larger number (say, 10 million).

In practice, it's not like that, there are individual struggles in
every area. These struggles have to take place because different
people's instincts tell them different things, and there are no clear
universal principles to define what's in and out. Nor, other than
extreme positions like "include everything about which there is at
least one source", could there be.

Personally, I'm much more convinced by arguments about the cost of
maintaining articles in certain areas versus their value to end users
- a cost/benefit analysis. But the debate is rarely framed in these
terms. As an example, I wrote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_deal_a_day in 2007. It attracts a
fair bit of spam, and a reasonable amount of effort from editors to
keep it clean. Is it worth it? By contrast, dozens of other stubs that
I've written require very little maintenance effort, other than
occasional recategorising, interwiki linking, geo coord linking etc.
People seem very unwilling or uninterested in engaging in this kind of
analysis.

Steve