On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, JAY JG wrote:
From: Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com
On Sep 14, 2005, at 12:09 PM, Phroziac wrote:
On 9/14/05, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I would rather have an encyclopedia that has a truly staggering amount of information but that some people dismiss because it has some silly articles than a well-respected but heavily incomplete encyclopedia. If I wanted that, I'd just go to Britannica.
Isn't that exactly why we exist?
I always thought so.
We exist to create a great encyclopedia. I don't see how an encyclopedia filled with, as you put it, "silly articles", can ever be considered "great".
I agree with Jay here (& I hope that doesn't surprise him too much ;).
Consider Wikipedia is a form of publication: currently we have the lowest threshold I can imagine for acceptance of any publication. All you have to do is submit an article that contains information that is somehow useful. (Please ignore any need to define "useful" for the moment.)
By establishing a threshold, we end up rejecting material -- for good or bad reasons -- which will inevitably result in hurt feelings. (That is why in the publishing world rejection slips are so impersonal.) Hurt feelings -- & the fact a certain percentage of submissions are simply dreadful, unusable or submitted as a joke -- result in the "toxic atmosphere" of the deletion process.
And we can't rely on only a "Speedy Delete" process: there will always be cases that fall into the grey area, if for no other reason than the need for a second opinion. And, as Tony Sideway pointed out above, some items are incorrectly placed into CSD -- for whatever reason.
The only solution to this is to COMPLETELY ABOLISH this threshold: either we have one or we don't have one. However, if we have no threshold, then we have to deal with unuseful articles full of gibberish, unfixable POV rants, hoaxes, & biographical entries that contain nothing more than a date of birth, details of education, & details of personality. Perhaps because we can somehow hide them in Wikipedia, we can argue that they aren't a problem -- but left unchecked, these unuseful articles will accumulate & grow into a problem.
Although I believe we need a threshold for Wikipedia, we also should acknowledge that in most cases an article was submitted with the best of intentions: since we are knifing someone's baby, there is no need to express glee while doing so. It appears to me that there is a consensus that the words "cruft" & "notable" should not be used in AfD: would anyone object if I edit the opening page & explain that use of either of these words will result with the nomination being immediately closed as a Speedy Keep?
Geoff