T P wrote:
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.
And a working solution need not be a panacea. If it helps to solve some problems it becomes a stepping stone to further solutions.
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 This debate was largely superceded with the founding of the sister projects as spin-offs for ideas that did not really fit into the definition of an encyclopedia.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.
If they start with preconceived notions about the nature of an encyclopedia, certainly. These are the people who are likely to try to shape Wikipedia to those notions. With a more open vision and fewer expectations we are less likely 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.
Those people who are doing a good job with webcomics, by whatever standard that sub-community sets, do so partly because the subject interests them. If we ban webcomics articles outright they are more likely to go away than to start writing scholarly articles about China.. Very few of them would know anything about the subject.
Ec