Somewhat related to this, I have to say I question the value of quite a few of the portals that have been created. I imagined that portals were supposed to be pretty high level and aimed at general readers, but a lot now seem to be aimed mainly at fans of games and TV programs, or are so narrow that I can't see what a portal provides that an article doesn't. Examples of the former are portals for Doctor Who, Final Fantasy, James Bond, Oz, Stargate, the Simpsons and Warcraft, while for the latter there's Ancient Germanic culture, Eastern Christianity, Scientific Method, Utah and Bucharest.
Personally I think portals as fan areas such as the ones above are a bad idea. Just wondered what anyone else though?
WT
-----Original Message----- From: Daniel P. B. Smith [mailto:dpbsmith@verizon.net] Sent: 16 September 2005 11:09 AM To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Topic warriors
We all know about "POV warriors." I'm fortunate or wimpy enough not to have been involved in articles with serious long-standing POV wars, but my impression is that _for the most part_ these things seem to stay under reasonable control.
On the other hand, I think we are developing "topic warriors" who feel that a specific subject area deserves very detailed coverage, systematically watch VfD for any cases where articles on their pet topic are nominated for deletion, and oppose deletion of _any_ article on their topic on principle, regardless of the quality of the article.
Unlike POV, a relatively small number of topic warriors CAN effectively achieve their goal. (And, of course, they are assisted by Wikipedians who do _not_ accept the premise that "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.")
NOTE NOTE NOTE ---> topic wars are FAR, FAR less damaging to Wikipedia and FAR less of a concern than POV wars.
Some Wikipedians undoubtedly feel that topic wars do not damage Wikipedia at all. My feeling is that they do, because they deliberately _create_ systemic bias, and create an area in which the average quality of the articles is lower than the rest of Wikipedia.
They certainly damage the Wikipedia community by factionalizing it, creating an "us versus them" mentality, and, in some cases, publicly gloating over their "success."
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
On 9/20/05, Worldtraveller wikipedia@world-traveller.org wrote:
Somewhat related to this, I have to say I question the value of quite a few of the portals that have been created. I imagined that portals were supposed to be pretty high level and aimed at general readers, but a lot now seem to be aimed mainly at fans of games and TV programs, or are so narrow that I can't see what a portal provides that an article doesn't. Examples of the former are portals for Doctor Who, Final Fantasy, James Bond, Oz, Stargate, the Simpsons and Warcraft, while for the latter there's Ancient Germanic culture, Eastern Christianity, Scientific Method, Utah and Bucharest.
Personally I think portals as fan areas such as the ones above are a bad idea. Just wondered what anyone else though?
True. We should have portals for television shows, video game and culture, instead of the portals you mentioned. That's what WikiProjects were made for. Maybe we should have such portals moved to a subpage of their respective projects?
--Mgm
On 9/20/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
True. We should have portals for television shows, video game and culture, instead of the portals you mentioned. That's what WikiProjects were made for. Maybe we should have such portals moved to a subpage of their respective projects?
I think portals should be the "public face" of WikiProjects. A portal should only exist if there is a formal set of users dedicated to keeping it maintained. If this is not happening, it should be archived or deleted (preferably archived). Pages like [[Portal:Cricket]], while potentially just fan pages, actually provide an excellent method of navigating appropriate content. If they are kept up, they do no harm. If they are not kept up, they look messy and a messy portal seems worse than an incomplete article.
Sam