On Sep 25, 2005, at 3:09 AM, wikien-l-request@Wikipedia.org wrote:
Why is this an emergency? Why not just email the guy and let the issue sit until tomorrow? Wikipedia will not fall because a couple school stubs didn't get undeleted for 24 hours.
Because the debate over schools has had very little to do with anything relating to actual articles for a long time. It is just an arena for an unpleasant sports event between two factions.
(Note: carefully chosen metaphor. No metaphorical human beings were killed or injured in the making of this metaphor).
The Wikipedian community seems to me to be the sort of community that really does rely on common goals and shared values.
It is unlike organizational structures that _assume_ that factionalism is the _norm_, and consequently are designed to measure the relative strength of factions with precision. Such structures rely on hierarchies, constitutions, parliamentary procedure, and voting.
Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important issues?
-- 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/
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote
Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important issues?
Hmmm ... from a cynic's point of view it is a fairly harmless outlet for negative vibes.
Look at it this way: how important is a school page _as reference information_? Not that important, in that it will matter to few people who will have no other way of getting information. (Information about a school might matter greatly to a parent, but WP can hardly expect to satisfy parental requirements on that.)
To take another example, also marginal, postcodes: WP might actually be helpful to those who want reference information about a specific postcode, and who didn't have another easy source. And to be able to satisfy someone's immediate need, by giving the geography.
In short, WP can't do a particularly good job as a reference on a particular school - education is more complex than (say) public transport. For an average school, the pages we can have typically do not add or detract much from the encyclopedia. People who want to make a point of principle are looking at an unpromising issue there.
Charles
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Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important issues?
I'd like to jump in here and say that it's merely one of the unfortunate side effects of our community not scaling perfectly in all directions at once, but I don't think that I really count as an "oldtimer" - I've only been here AFAICT for 9 months or so longer than yours, and my account is barely 6 months the elder. :-)
However, on the topic at hand... well, we've always (that I've seen) had divisions over what exactly our purpose and scope should be. Nowadays it is more pronounced because people are feeling less in touch, and perhaps a bit more alienated, with their fellow editors.
As to disputes in general, though, I'd say 'twas e'er thus, sadly.
Yours sincerely, - -- James D. Forrester Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] E-Mail : james@jdforrester.org IM (MSN) : jamesdforrester@hotmail.com
On Sun, 25 Sep 2005, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important issues?
Well, about the only people who still post here when I started at Wikipedia (October, 2002) are Ed Poor & Maverick, so I'll take the heat & offer my opinion on the matter.
I think the "school struggle" is a result of three or four principles present in Wikipedia, & that have been interpreted in numerous ways by various partisans:
* Wikipedia is a collection of knowledge. This ideal has been expressed in a number of ways, & Jimbo is not the only one who gets quoted about this, but in its most sucinct phrasing, the Wikipedia community does not want to exclude any information that might be reasonably useful to someone.
* Do not datadump. In the old days, the immediate goal of Wikipedia was to attract enough contributions to reach the tipping point where the non-Wikipedians might actually bother to use what we created. (At some point before I landed here, the joke was that Wikipedia was the site that was mostly about Ayn Rand.) But when that tipping point was reached -- & passed -- & people actually considered Wikipedia useful, we started to get picky about what was in Wikipedia. (I suspect that is part of the ongoing controversy with the contributions of Daniel C. Boyer.) To repeat what I wrote in another email, many Wikipedians beleive that there is some kind of threshold beneath which we should not accept articles.
* Notability is a subjective measure, & often faddish. I happen to own a one-volume encyclopedia that was published in 1920, & I find it interesting to see which authors from the 19th century they have listed as notable. I consider myself informed about the period, yet this book both mentions authors I have not heard of (e.g. Margaret Fuller Ossoli & Stephen Collins Foster), while omitting authors I believe any current work of reference would include (e.g. Emily Dickinson & Theodore Dreiser). My point is that far too often something people assume one day that is not not notable, tomorrow another generation wishes we had taken the time to document more fully.
* With all honesty, few high schools are worth a Wikipedia article. As I write this, I have to wonder if this is just another version of David Gerard's observation about Geogre & alternative rock bands: because they are familiar, we depreciate their value. However, the high school I attended is in no way notable: none of the faculty has done anything worthy of especial attention; few of the former students went on to do world-changing activities (with one exception -- who is not me); even the building is, architecturally speaking, nondescript. The fact that it has a Wikipedia article I find embarassing.
Having an article about any person or place endows it with a certain amount of fame. And there will always be a certain number of subjects which people will think does not deserve the attention a Wikipedia article gives it -- even if that fame or attention is "not that big of a matter" (to paraphrase Jimbo out of context).
Geoff
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important issues?
Not only is this sort of thing par for the course, but this *specific* issue---whether we should have Wikipedia articles on all schools or just the famous ones---has been debated ad nauseum for probably at least two years now.
-Mark