On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
T P wrote:
I think many people fail to realize that Wikipedia is and always will be
a
work-in-progress. We really don't know what our notability policy is,
and
there are no easy answers. Stan Shebs was quite right when he pointed
out
that there are no known solutions to this problem.
That being the case editors and admins should stop pretending that there is a solution.
I should have said there are no good solutions. This problem requires a working solution, and we do have one.
Keeping those avenues open is scary business because it means accepting
that a technique that you were long convinced was the only solution may suddenly be found wrong. Validation does not come in the form of the immediate intangible reward of having your idea accepted and written in stone. In a truly collaborative environment every policy or idea is permanently open to change. It doesn't matter that at some point there was a vote to adopt a policy. If someone disagrees at any time in the future he should have the right to add his negative vote, or change his previous vote. If enough people do that the policy could be reversed.
I think we are agreeing here.
People think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia, but that's just an
analogy. The truth is Wikipedia is something new and different and what
it
is is a matter of negotiation within the Wikipedia community.
I don't think that this line of reasoning gets us anywhere. It just gets us into a lot of semantic debate about the nature of an encyclopedia, a debate for which there is no firm answer. This debate was largely superceded with the founding of the sister projects as spin-offs for ideas that did not really fit into the definition of an encyclopedia. What is new and different then is Wikimedia.
Wikipedia is still different in substantial ways from a traditional encyclopedia, and people who try to make it "more like an encyclopedia" are going to be disappointed.
Pesonally I don't care whether webcomics are included or not. I think it's a shame that we have no articles on [[Dance in China]] or [[Media of China]], and [[Military of China]] and [[Tourism in China]] are just stubs.
Adam