On 02/02/2008, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
If this trend doesn't stop I think it might be better to start fragmenting Wikipedia into more special-interest subgroups, as was done with Comixpedia, Wookieepedia, and so forth. If we can at least keep them with the same licensing and wiki code then perhaps someday it can all be brought back into the same fold again by some other aggregator.
I think that this is a good idea. That way the people that make the decisions on notability are more likely to have a firm handle on what is notable in the particular area they are using. One of the problems in the wikipedia and the *world* is that people tend to deny the importance of things they are not familiar with; and the wikipedia tends to reflect that, and that tends to cause deletionism.
The key problem for me is the "third party" requirement. I can write an accurate article on an episode of a TV series by using the DVD and its commentary track as a source, for example, and anyone else with a few dollars to spare can get their own copy and verify my work, but for some reason even if I'm perfectly willing to spend hours and hours crafting this article to whatever standards of quality are desired it's just not acceptable to have it on Wikipedia.
That's a subtle form of OR though. It's OR that the TV series is important enough to be in the encyclopedia in the first place. How could anyone ever remove anything? How could anyone ever prove or disprove that an untraceable editor had nothing to do with the TV series in the first place? At least if it's we trace the notability to a reliable source then self-interested articles are much less likely, and it's fairly unambiguous whether we can add it or not. There needs to be some rules, and the rules need to more or less work.
These rules more or less do work.
There's _baby_ in that bathwater.
Mmm. But is it a beautiful baby? If there's not even any 3rd party information on it, probably not, except to its parents.
Aren't we mostly trying to collect the shiny stones that are lying on the beach that is this world, the ones that people are interested in, not just the dull rocks?