[WikiEN-l] Nationality on the lead of articles

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 8:19 PM, Fences&Windows
<fences_and_windows at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> "I dread to think how many megabytes of discussion are spent on discussing
> nationalities."
>
> So why are you discussing it?

Oh, I didn't really think anyone would discuss it... (the thread has
gone off-topic already!).

And to be fair, you should say what you think your view is and where
it falls between the two extremes below.

Is it:

(1) Ignore the more trivial of such discussions, only paying attention
to the ones where reliable sources have actually bothered to have an
extensive discussion about the matter;

(2) Encourage any and all such discussions as they are productive and useful.

The real point I'm making is that it is important to limit any
disruption that arises from such discussions. That means accepting
that some such discussions are started for trivial reasons, and it is
those discussions that waste time. Too often the attitude is "Hmm,
that looks like an interesting debate, I'll join in", when the first
though should be "do reliable sources cover this in any depth or do
they just make a decision and get on with the real business of writing
and editing, and if not, then we are likely wasting our time here".

The analogy I like to draw is how such decisions are made in a print
encyclopedia with more focused editorial control. Obviously it is
asking too much for Wikipedia to attain that level of efficiency, and
you will always have some inherent inefficiency in the processes by
which Wikipedia works (due to the way things are done), but that is
not to say that it is not acceptable to speak up against processes you
perceive as inefficient and wasteful.

The above is real meta-discussion, of the sort you don't often see on
Wikipedia. Rather than coming up with over-arching conventions for
particular areas, the idea is to question the extent of such
discussions in the first place. That is not to say I don't think
specific conventions are good (they can be very good), but there
should be some hurdle to reach before starting a discussion in the
first place. That is done to a certain extent at RFC, but not anywhere
else, I don't think.

Carcharoth