2009/1/3 Phil Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com>om>: We've know this for over a year. The counter is the question of if it holds true for new articles where most deletion actually takes place.

Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.

Steve Summit wrote: I think that is "could be", not "ought to be". The mission is not to maximise readership: as of early 2009, it still to "write the encyclopedia". You know, the old Wikipedia some of us have thought we are writing for a few years now. As usual, there is the argument that if this other version of the mission was interesting enough to enough editors, they could fork. Not likely to happen, but it's a clarifying thought: really, how different would it be? Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

...The article is fundamentally flawed - you can see it contradicts itself with no other knowledge or figures to hand. They say that "The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site", but then go on to say that "The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders...

Phil wrote: You're right, but it's a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, there's nothing *necessarily* wrong with having policy set by a relatively small number of insiders -- a consistent policy, like a consistent look and feel or editorial tone or categorization scheme, is something better realized by the dedicated few than the madding crowd. The problem, of course, is that we confront the second of Wikipedia's great contradictions, the first being that anyone can edit, including people (namely vandals) we don't like. Vandals we can deal with pretty well, but the the second contradiction, which I'm not at all sure we've figured out a way to cope with, is that anyone can set policy, including people (like narrow-visioned tiny-minded wonks) who do it spectacularly badly. (And this is not at all a new observation, of course; it's at the core of Clay Shirky's classic essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", which should also be required reading.) Another complication is that it's not just "people who write articles" versus "people who delete them". What really matters -- or ought to -- is the people who *read* them. Like the Lorax who speaks for the trees, Wikipedia desperately needs some verifiable, NPOV channel through which we could learn the wants and needs of our readers. Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l