On 11/15/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/15/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Why does Wikipedia need subject-specific spinoffs?
Because certian people will be able to work better if they don't keep running into people who don't know anything about the subject. Secondly they are in a much better position to detect hoaxes.
This doesn't seem very satisfactory to me. I'm always bumping into people who know nothing about lisp except that they don't like the language's ubiquitous brackets and they consider this to be such a grave failing in a programming language that it renders lisp almost useless, and that lisp is an interpretive language that must always be slow in execution. Should the articles about programming languages then be exiled to a specialist wiki?
It is certainly true that a specialist is better able to detect hoaxes, but I don't see how this can be used as an argument for moving all articles about programming languages, web comics, pokemon or whatever to a specialist wiki, which would almost inevitably have fewer editors competent in the subject than the much larger and more popular English language Wikipedia. It is also the case that I'm competent in rather more subjects than programming languages, so it would be very inconvenient to deal with a number of fragmented wikis. Hoaxes aren't common enough to justify splitting the wikipedia, nor is the presence of the odd blithering ignoramus a problem.