Jimmy Wales wrote:
For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the
least
controversial rule is confirmability.
That policy doesn't help the project much.
Is it that it doesn't help much, or that you don't like the answer
that it gives? Do you see what I'm asking, here?
It seems to me that most objections to confirmability is that it
doesn't encourage us to delete stuff that the objector would like to
see deleted.
I gave up on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia long ago. It's not; it's
merely an aggregation of articles. As a consequence of giving up the
vision of an encyclopedia, I no longer have any interest in having
things deleted. So, no, I myself don't seek out the deletion of anything.
We write articles reasonably well, with many excellent examples;
further, the work of many have made for some excellent topic areas,
particularly in the sciences.
Perhaps someday there will be interest in editing these articles into an
encyclopedia.
Encyclopedias are unique works that share certain characteristics beyond
topical breadth and NPOV:
- They are secondary source works;
- They are comprehensible to a lay person;
- They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across
articles;
- They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and
researched further in any undergraduate college library
- They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere aggregations
of data such as sports scores or stock prices
- They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other
publications having related roles.
At present, Wikipedia is a repository and means for consensus editing
for a wide variety of articles, perhaps putting it somewhere next to
UseNet and GeoCities in 'netspace.
Also, we need not make policy for imagined problems
that don't really
exist. If lots and lots of people start adding confirmable but
allegedly pointless information, *to the point where it looks likely
to cause some actual problem* (like excessive namespace collisions, or
a cluttered search engine), then we will have a problem.
If someone asks "Can I make a bot to upload the Census tapes?" we will
just say no, but this has little to do with the current discussion, I
think.
The main problem, as I have stated in earlier posts, is that the effort
involved on the part of others to verify such trivia is high enough that
it doesn't get done, so the trivial articles remain, unchecked and in
most cases, inaccurate. Do you think that is benign? Moreover, this
sort of policy issue is at the root of most of the ongoing friction at
VfD. Imagined problems, indeed.
(If someone wants to start making a point by entering
a bunch of
information about their ancestors, I'll remind them that I am all in
favor of social pressure to not do such a thing, and not absolutely
opposed to deletion in specific cases designed specifically to troll
us!)
Is it really too much work to try to agree on some sort of policy rather
than have to start the conversation from the beginning for each and
every case?
Louis