Charles Matthews wrote:
Amory Meltzer wrote:
I wouldn't exactly call that post "nice." It reads to me like just another person complaining.
Actually this is not so much an example on bullying, but on _precisely_ why we have WP:COI.
The hill has "five rope tows and seven ski runs". Is this an encyclopedic topic? Not really.
It depends on your definition, doesn't it. We've never really got to an accepted definition, [[WP:N]] is the closest we've come but that's widely ignored by a vast number of contributors whose voice we have somehow managed to disenfranchise. There are also two schools of thought on what to do with this sort of content, we can either delete it or present it as best we can. Are we looking to be Britannica for the web, or are we looking to do a little bit more. Early on there was a consensus that Wikipedia wasn't paper, but that's been reined in by people who point to things and say, you wouldn't find that in Britannica. I can't help but feel we wouldn't have come as far as we have if the mission statement had been something like "replicating the stuff you get in Britannica but just being a little more timely in updating". I'd really like some decent surveys conducted which let us know exactly what our users and readers want us to be, because without that, we're just blowing hot-air. We've lost the idea that our readers can let us know what is missing by starting new articles, because we enforce standards that don't reflect that given reader's concerns. Yes, there's the obvious argument that if we adopted the standards of the most edits, we'd allow vandalism, but that's not the real debate, it's just a snappy sound bite. The real issue is what sort of resource we really are. I think the writer of the essay has a real point when they say "Wikipedia is dead – the Britannica staff has taken over."