I for one think it's pathetic that Wikipedia is giving up on the mission of being a complete encyclopedia because there exist specialty sites on particular areas of knowledge.
On 11/29/06, Laurence Parry greenreaper@hotmail.com wrote:
Should Wikipedia accept original research or use less-than-ideal
sources
in cases where there is little or no existing literature? Nope: the reader would have no way to establish whether they could trust an article's
contents.
It might work if you had those articles controlled by verifiable experts, but again, Wikipedia's not that encyclopedia.
I feel that if I go to Wikipedia to look up something relatively notable, and Wikipedia's response is "We don't have an article on that", then Wikipedia has failed me. If Wikipedia's response is "GNAA's website is X, and we couldn't verify any information beyond that, but here are some blogs", then it has performed much better.
On a similar note . . . a fortnight ago there was a spate of AfDs for furry fandom articles, including a few furry conventions. Many of these articles were little more than "X is a furry convention in Y occuring at Z, it has 1000 people attend each year here's their website". Nobody was actually disagreeing that this was the case, but there was a lot of "Furrycruft!", "Wikipedia isn't a dictionary!" and "if you can't find a reliable 3rd party published source, you must convict!" flying around.
What I ended up doing was creating [[furry convention]], which is essentially "[here's all the stuff we know in general about furry conventions from the reliable sources], if you want to know more about PafCon in particular, you want to go look at their website and at WikiFur, which is an encyclopedia that can contain original research and unverifiable material".
Of course, PafCon doesn't have a website because it's a fictional convention, but you get the idea. If Wikipedia doesn't want to write about topics, a good alternative is to do some kind of portal to direct people to those who *do* want to write about it, as long as they are doing so competently. That's helpful for the user because they get the information they're looking for, and it's helpful for Wikipedia because it avoids repeated creation of pages about "non-notable" topics (which inevitably result in a certain proportion of angst-filled AfDs that burn some of our most dedicated contributors out).
Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry http://greenreaper.co.uk - http://wikifur.com
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