On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 8:31 PM, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way,
as well:
though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees,
it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative
writer/editors who could really make our content sing --
and in more areas than just a more-readable writing style.
Here's another thing to watch out for: nowhere is it written that
Wikipedia must be as stodgy and officious as a Real Encyclopedia.
Yet the way some people denounce and carry on about anything that
smells remotely like fun, you'd think this was up there as a
fourth pillar of the triangle.
One should always have fun at work, it's what makes the job livable!
Certainly volunteer work should be no exception.
On the contrary, it is Okay to Have Fun. It's okay for us as
editors, and it's okay for our readers, too. In fact, it's more
than okay, it's downright better, if it motivates us as editors,
and if it makes our product easier to read and more enjoyable for
our readers.
It certainly is okay for us, as editors, to have a bit of fun. I've
wished more than once I could just sit down and have a beer with
someone who disagrees with me, and I'm sure we'd see our positions are
near the same. It is also alright to have "entertaining" articles,
like [[Ima Hogg]], so long as they are still presented factually and
neutrally, and if of acceptable quality, to have these on the Main
Page on April Fool's.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't have Trivia sections --
isn't that a good enough reason for us *to* have them? :-)
But you were doing so WELL up to this point! :) There are plenty of
reasons not to have trivia sections. "Britannica doesn't have them"
and "We should not have fun" are certainly at the bottom of that list.
They are an attractive nuisance, encouraging the writing of unsourced
garbage (99% of trivia sections I've found are entirely unsourced).
They are poor for flow and organization. And realistically, if a fact
is significant enough to go in the article, well then, it is
significant enough to go -in the article-. If a factoid is so
insignificant that it can't even be integrated into the prose, it
should stay out altogether. And if it can be integrated into the
prose, well then, why aren't we doing that rather than dumping it in a
random junkpile? The same for "In popular culture"-let's leave "Hehheh
it got mentioned 24 times on Family Guy" to IMDB.
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Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.