George Herbert wrote:
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a closing admin would make of it... :-)
You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of debate just to keep a page around when the notability rules could be fixed instead. Otherwise we're no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit.
<snip>
Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an encyclopedia should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or services. If we fail to enforce "...The Encyclopedia..." part of our mission statement, we're failing, too.
Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them is, "this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and review this article and ones like it".
<snip>
So - posting the question - are we better off as the encyclopedia that is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite? Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over time?
In this context, I was interested to get an outside view of how knols are doing (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc20100218_199388.htm occurring in the Signpost story on the Google donation). As we know, knols take inclusionism to one limit, and have wiki-like low barriers to entry, but dispense really with "the community" and "notability". I happen to have had a knol turn up in a Google search for the first time in the past few days, too. It was written by a Wikipedian, was useful to me, was not on a topic Wikipedia would have included (it was a link farm and had little scope for being anything else) - and (as it turned out) was not really as good as another non-knol page I had more trouble finding.
Several conclusions:
- knols are inclusionist in so simple-minded a way that no one (not even Google) thinks they do the same job as Wikipedia; - the 99% figure for knols might be harsh, but it might not, and instead our intensive processes to upgrade content, there is only a very severe "survival of the fittest" that applies (most of the postings are simply going to be entirely ignored); - it is quite a good thing that our baroque model was launched well before knols.
It would be trivial to adapt anything good in the knol model, clearly (just redefine the User: namespace slightly). Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what <s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s> contentious process".
Charles