On 10/4/05, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Oct 4, 2005, at 4:32 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
These are excellent observations. My son's Social Studies teacher is an info geek who is familiar with Wikipedia. I should ask him if he would be willing to run a survey of his class asking: "What belongs in an encyclopedia?" and "What should not be in an encyclopedia?"
I think it would be important to specify "Wikipedia" not "an encyclopedia," so as to avoid treating Wikipedia like paper.
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I was thinking the same thing. It might be interesting to hear what school children have as a conception of what an encyclopedia is, but I don't think it's very useful in determining what Wikipedia should or shouldn't include.
Personally I do believe that Wikipedia needs to stay focussed on being an encyclopedia, and not something else, but that's an issue of form more than an issue of inclusion/exclusion. It's also not a very good argument for outright deletion, as even if one can come up with facts which have no place in an encyclopedia I feel they still should one day be handled by one of the Wikimedia projects. One of the problems there is that a Wikimedia project can't be started unless there is consensus that the information doesn't belong in Wikipedia, and a higher standard of what constitutes consensus is generally used. Personally I'd be content if the foundation simply started a sister project for everything which doesn't belong in one of the other projects, and transwikied all the non-speedy (and non-copyvio) deletions there.
Barring that, I'd be content if Wikipedia just gave me access to the deleted files table, or mailed me a copy of everything that went through VFD, or something similar.
Anthony