[WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.

[Charles Matthews]

On 08/04/2011 11:09, WereSpielChequers wrote:

<snip>
> Other options would be for a site that ended the
> inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and
> concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That
> seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to
> specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is
> one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold
> somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea
> pigs.
Hmmm yes. It is interesting to me that Google Knol is nowhere on your 
list of viable competitors (you did make some good points in favour of 
those you mentioned).

"Notability" has always been a broken and widely-misunderstood aspect of 
enWP. My impression is that deWP, for example, sets the bar higher, and 
has fewer "problems": in a word, deletionism can work well enough. 
Comprehensiveness is of course about total content, while notability is 
about topics you recognise. "Salience" is the neglected concept, which 
is relative to topic.

To get back to knols: this sort of "factual blogging" isn't really 
likely to produce much interesting content, absent incentives. And no 
serious "publishing process" is likely to produce anything that is way 
better, unless it is quite complicated. I feel that's the correct 
conclusion from (en)WP. There may be an improved model, but please don't 
tell me that a few tweaks will eliminate the complexities entirely. 
There are choices that can be made about where to place the tricky parts.

Charles