Surreptitiousness wrote:
Charles Matthews wrote:
Yes it is sui generis, but WP:NOT is part of
that, not an add-on. I'm
somewhat concerned that a reliance on "reader survey" will indeed
tend to blur all tried-and-tested criteria for inclusion, for the
sake of other stuff that is not too useful (e.g. "I wish you'd
include more movie rumors because I really like to read about them").
Downmarket beckons.
Not sure why down-market has to beckon. We're committed to sourcing to
the point I can't see a reader survey overturning that, in fact I
would expect a reader survey to call for even better sourcing.
Therefore, I can't really see how we could include unsourced movie
rumors. Of course, I should imagine we'd all also agree that facts
about upcoming movies are an area open to debate, but I'm not sure we
should prejudge that debate by casting anything as a down-market move.
To the point that I'd like a cite on why that would be a down-market
move. I'm not suggesting Wikipedia be all things to all people,
although I'd like us to make a better stab than we currently are, but
I've always thought Wikipedia was a broad church, and I've always
thought it was widely assumed on Wikipedia that we look to the
middle-ground. Now I suppose if you see us on a high-ground, then
yes, we would be shifting down-market, but realistically any
encyclopedia is going to be aimed lower than the high ground, because
an encyclopedia is a tertiary source, rather than a secondary source.
I typically
think of this in terms of a pedia-media axis. We are not
going to be at either extreme (Britannica-style pedia, or
reader-maximising media). We are definitely now judged as media, and if
you look at what the most popular pages are that is a reasonable fit, I
suppose - we just have a bit more of a medium-term memory than print and
broadcast media. But most pages are _not_ popular. They are reference
material, in other words. Downmarket, in my terms, is slanting content
policy to favour in any way pages because they would be read often,
rather than serve the purpose of being a reference site.
The high ground is held by academia, something we
aren't looking to
replicate because of the policy on original research. I think utility
is also in the eye of the beholder. Depending on which industry you
work in, the utility of articles on entertainment and those on higher
maths are subjective qualities.
We are committed to the idea that the same sort
of survey writing should
be applied to say, "Star Wars" and astronomy, though. In the sense of
"being a good place to look up" either. That is the "utility" of
reference material. This is the same axis in another guise, I feel. The
goal of a generalist encyclopedia is surely to become a reputed source
largely independent of topic. (And we can perfectly well aim to
assimilate the results of academic research; in fact over a wide range
of topics this is exactly what we should do.)
And surely blurring our still in beta stage inclusion
guidance is a
good idea, because life does not tend to happen in an absolute
manner. The lack of adaptability in the minds of some of our
contributors can sometimes harm us. I've never worked out a way of
promoting the idea of an open mind and a case by case approach. I
can't help but feel an encyclopedia built by the masses through
consensus editing might help rather than hinder that goal. If that
means moving to meet the audience, so be it. I believe it worked for
Mohammed.
The site is dynamic, and should remain so. Plenty of codification has
gone on, and I agree that it shouldn't be regarded as an "absolute" just
because it has happened that way. I find the generally tendency to have
"rules" predominate a bit depressing, if said rules don't arise from a
simple point which ought to command general assent.
A recent grief of mine at CfD, though, might be good for a role play
session. I found an advocate for "pre-emptive disambiguation for
category titles"; I argued against this. For article titles, as we know,
you don't pre-empt: [[Arthur Atkinson (architect)]] gets moved to
[[Arthur Atkinson]] if there are no other articles of that personal
name, even though there might be in the future. But the discussion was
whether a category name that _might_ be construed as ambiguous should be
made into a more verbose form that is less likely to be ambiguous. Is
this some rule that someone has come up with and wants to impose,
against common sense? Or was I just defending the status quo against an
idea that should be adopted to improve the 'pedia? Not so clear on the
ground.
Charles