After NY Book review & Economist articles I have been thinking...
The debate I vs D became so prominent after Wikipedia decided to focus not on quantity, but rather on quality (when it dawned to people that in 2M+ articles we don't even have 2k featured articles) and require citations for everything. It's not a bad thing in itself... but then it turned into "instead of improving articles, let me delete the worst kind of articles - Pokemon characters, TV episodes, bands, etc. That way I will improve Wikipedia's quality not by adding something better, but by subtracting something worse than the average (or the desired standard)."
Isn't this what's happening now?
[For those who think in math: you can increase the average of [-3; 0; 4; 5; 9] to 6 by either adding 1 to each number (i.e. expanding/cleaning up each article) of by deleting -3 and 0... so which set would be better [-2; 1; 5; 6; 10] or [4; 5; 9]? the questions is not which one is easier...]
Sincerely, Renata3 (a deletionist going through a faith crisis)
On 07/03/2008, Renata St renatawiki@gmail.com wrote:
After NY Book review & Economist articles I have been thinking...
The debate I vs D became so prominent after Wikipedia decided to focus not on quantity, but rather on quality (when it dawned to people that in 2M+ articles we don't even have 2k featured articles) and require citations for everything. It's not a bad thing in itself... but then it turned into "instead of improving articles, let me delete the worst kind of articles - Pokemon characters, TV episodes, bands, etc. That way I will improve Wikipedia's quality not by adding something better, but by subtracting something worse than the average (or the desired standard)."
Isn't this what's happening now?
[For those who think in math: you can increase the average of [-3; 0; 4; 5; 9] to 6 by either adding 1 to each number (i.e. expanding/cleaning up each article) of by deleting -3 and 0... so which set would be better [-2; 1; 5; 6; 10] or [4; 5; 9]? the questions is not which one is easier...]
Sincerely, Renata3 (a deletionist going through a faith crisis)
If we are going to label ourselves, I would call myself an "Inclusionist with reservations". The problem with all out inclusionism is that if you are going to defend an article in Afd is that to prove its worth keeping one has to get out and source and rewrite sections.
Most articles are never going to become featured articles or for that matter Good Articles. Keeping articles on every High School (or this weeks small Afd purge on British University Students' Unions) means that in order to keep them from the cull they have to be sourced and updated.
Surely this distracts "all-rounder" editors from articles that have a better chance of gaining FA or GA standard?
I have sympathy witha lot of new editors who think that there articles should be included. Many of them provide sources from local newspapers but its hard to defend them at Afd. During the past year, I've started explaining that its much easier to get something up on Wikia (particulary Arts or Music), working on good copy and sources and reviewing every once in a while whether or not an article will meet the critera for Wikipedia.
All articles have merits, but if the loss of some articles which need so much work and sourcing to make them even passable certainly distracts editors.
Mike - (inclusionist with reservations)
michael west wrote:
If we are going to label ourselves, I would call myself an "Inclusionist with reservations". The problem with all out inclusionism is that if you are going to defend an article in Afd is that to prove its worth keeping one has to get out and source and rewrite sections.
There is no such thing as an "all out inclusionism", but it serves demonization better to put forth the myth that there is such a thing. It makes attacking inclusionism much easier. I think that most of us who identify with inclusionism have the kind of reservations that you express, built on respect for those who work in subject areas that we know nothing about.
Most articles are never going to become featured articles or for that matter Good Articles. Keeping articles on every High School (or this weeks small Afd purge on British University Students' Unions) means that in order to keep them from the cull they have to be sourced and updated.
And that takes time and careful research. The sources are there, but nobody will ever be able to do a good job at it when a large number of articles are under the deletionist gun at the same time.
I have sympathy witha lot of new editors who think that there articles should be included. Many of them provide sources from local newspapers but its hard to defend them at Afd.
Not everyone accepts local newspapers as valid sources, but when the importance of an article is primarily local they may be the only valid source.
Ec
On 3/7/08, Renata St renatawiki@gmail.com wrote:
The debate I vs D became so prominent after Wikipedia decided to focus not on quantity, but rather on quality (when it dawned to people that in 2M+ articles we don't even have 2k featured articles) and require citations for everything. It's not a bad thing in itself... but then it turned into "instead of improving articles, let me delete the worst kind of articles - Pokemon characters, TV episodes, bands, etc. That way I will improve Wikipedia's quality not by adding something better, but by subtracting something worse than the average (or the desired standard)."
You're confusing two kinds of "quality".
1) There is the inherent "quality" that a subject brings to an encyclopaedia. An encyclopaedia full of articles on subjects like Morocco, Ghandi, and the West Coast Eagles, is supposedly "better" than an encyclopaedia full of articles on minor TV characters etc. 2) There is the actual "quality" of a given article, regardless of its subject. An FA is "better" than a stub.
Deleting articles on Pokémon characters might "improve" the encyclopaedia by definition 1, but would actually make it worse by definition 2, since all the Pokémon character articles are pretty good.
Steve
I consider the following a reasonable read on the topic. Well you can listen too...
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/wikipedia_is_ju.html
*Wikipedia 1.0 team* had drafted the following metric of quality for articles on wikipedia. This is merely a quality standard, it was never meant to be a notability/inclusion/deletion standard.
- Articles start as stubs meaning they contain very little information (one or two sentences) on the topic. - Over time articles become "start class" articles meaning there is something like a paragraph in the article. - Over time articles are promoted to a "b-class" article - several paragraphs of information - Over time articles become "good articles" meaning they now comply with the good article standard. - Over time articles become "a-class" meaning articles have a quality better that Good article standard but less than "featured" standard - Over time articles become "featured" meaning they comply with the highest written standard on wikipedia.
Is this "featured" standard an upper limit? No it is not. It is a dynamic lower limit. Featured standard was raised over time. Hence why articles are demoted.
All non-featured articles have some sort of problem with them. They violate many guidelines and unless someone fixes such violations of guidelines such articles never become of featured standard. Of course it is possible to fix such violations by deleting articles in violation, but that is not a desired solution. Shooting the patient will cure all symptoms. But the objective is saving the patient not curing the disease.
All non-featured articles will not be included in the Wikipedia 1.0 edition. In other words out of the two million plus articles currently there are only about two thousand that will be on 1.0. This is regardless of the deletionist or inclusionist efforts.
Also the problem was never restricted on pop-culture related articles. Townships, highways, and other real-world topics are also undergoing the same issues pop-culture related articles are facing. Such articles are also mercilessly redirectified. There are undeveloped articles on former US vice presidents for example. No one is redirectifying them right now but in the near future such a thing would not surprise me.
Should we have an article on every high school, highway and township? I cannot say. What I know is something we should avoid like plague: non-discussion mass removal of all such articles which is what is happening. There is a reason why non-consensus is a default keep.
Instead of trying to delete 20,000 poorly written articles, people should try fixing one problematic article. That would be a novelty.
I think the problem is not much of a inclusionism versus deletionism but more of a few "deletionists" that are not acting based on consensus.
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 7:52 AM, Renata St renatawiki@gmail.com wrote:
After NY Book review & Economist articles I have been thinking...
The debate I vs D became so prominent after Wikipedia decided to focus not on quantity, but rather on quality (when it dawned to people that in 2M+ articles we don't even have 2k featured articles) and require citations for everything. It's not a bad thing in itself... but then it turned into "instead of improving articles, let me delete the worst kind of articles - Pokemon characters, TV episodes, bands, etc. That way I will improve Wikipedia's quality not by adding something better, but by subtracting something worse than the average (or the desired standard)."
Isn't this what's happening now?
[For those who think in math: you can increase the average of [-3; 0; 4; 5; 9] to 6 by either adding 1 to each number (i.e. expanding/cleaning up each article) of by deleting -3 and 0... so which set would be better [-2; 1; 5; 6; 10] or [4; 5; 9]? the questions is not which one is easier...]
Sincerely, Renata3 (a deletionist going through a faith crisis) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l