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
--
William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri