On 7/20/06, Sam Pointon free.condiments@gmail.com wrote:
No group of valid editors and contributors should be treated as any less worthy than any other group. Just because you are young Caucasian
That's probably right if you're only referring to demographic or racial groups. But in general, 15 year olds aren't "less worthy" just because they're 15, they're "less worthy" because their interests are less useful to us, and their powers of copywriting and collaborative editing are less good. On average.
techie doesn't mean you're less of an editor than a wizened African. Every single person who wants to contribute should be welcomed with open arms, whether they intend to improve our coverage of Star Trek or the fine nuances of Bose-Einstein condensates at higher temperatures.
Sure. Some should be welcomed more than others :)
Perhaps not. The current situation is that we are making editorial calls on what popular culture is worthy of an article. I would rather
With very little success.
have enough popular culture contributors and articles (note - that's -good- popular culture articles, not bad ones) to be able to say "yes, that's too obscure, trans-delemerge it," than to be begging for contributors in this field.
Is that a choice we have to make?
Now, the question is, how do we make Wikipedia just as attractive for other demographic groups, so that we can also be saying "that nuance of Bose-Einstein condensate is too obscure, trans-delemerge it." Positive solutions (attracting new users) are preferable to negative ones (taking a hard line on 15-year old Star Trek fans).
Are there still 15 year old star trek fans? I thought they were all in their 30s by now. Seriously though, are you rejecting the basic premise that there ought to be limits to how much fictional universe stuff we want? I was hoping we could at least get consensus on that.
I notice that every time I try to formalise the status quo, people think I'm trying to change it. This is interesting.
Steve