Hi, Adrian. Thanks for the detailed reply.
Adrian wrote:
William Pietri schrieb:
I agree that the serious articles should be better, but in these comparisons there seems to be an implicit theory that the fan topics are somehow sucking the life out of the serious ones.
That's not my reading of it. Pop culture articles should be just as well-referenced and consistently written as all other articles. Why not compare pop culture articles with *better* pop culture articles? There's always room for improvement, and maybe a bit more of that for some specimen of the pop culture article.
Ok. Then I misunderstood your point. Sorry.
Normally when I see the "compare serious vs pop article" thing, what people are pointing out is that the pop culture articles are longer and more detailed. The SomethingAwful article, for example, says:
The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created.
I see their point, but think their groaning is based on a misunderstanding. So if you're just saying instead that pop culture articles should be better, I'm not arguing that.
all sorts of positive effects, including less vandalism, more donations, more person-to-person promotion, and more public support.
I wouldn't necessarily agree on any of that.
Ok. It's pretty standard community behavior though. People like what they're involved in, and are more likely to do good things for what they like. Even with difficult people it is, as they say, better to have them inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
And you don't get that by simply letting everything slide because it's "just" (not my opinion!) pop culture articles.
No, I agree. I don't have any feeling of "it's just pop culture". I think the only place where I consciously relax my standards is on length and depth. And that's mainly because my default mental yardstick for article length is where I stop caring, so it's hard for me to tell the difference between an overlong article and a long one I just don't care much about.
We shouldn't shy away from raising a well-meaning educational finger where it's necessary and potentially useful. Much better than either using said finger to klick the block button or living with lesser articles.
The assumpton that the majority of editors are mature people and willing to go out of their way to improve Wikipedia not according to their own private ideas and preconceptons, but according to Wikipedia's standards is, well, possibly true but I wouldn't take a bet.
I spend a fair bit of professional time giving people advice. I have the most luck when I tell them in their terms how to advance their goals. To the extent their goals appear to be different, I think the trick is to reframe the conversation in terms of some shared higher-order goal.
For example, every writer wants to be read. So if we can help them see that Wikipedia's standards are ones that maximize readability, then we've found common ground. They won't (and probably shouldn't) follow Wikipedia standards just because they're Wikipedia standards. But they will follow them because (or at least, to the extent which) they make for better articles and a better encyclopedia.
William