T P wrote:
On 2/26/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia? Either now or fifteen years from now?
It means there's no hurry.
Funny, that's not at all the message I get from that essay. It looks to me to be all about making sure you're not in a fit of "edit rage" or otherwise lashing out at people. It's not a piece about eventualism.
To tie it back to the theme that started this, if we cover webcomics or other forms of "cruft", whatever their merits otherwise the articles probably aren't "trampling" anybody. And as several people have pointed out, there are significant future benefits in recording information from the present that will be the subject of later synthesis and study. So I don't understand why we should hold off on documenting subjects of interest now. While the field of interest may not be fully coherent, and we should not declare it so prematurely, it's not wise to reject the pieces needed for it to ultimately come together.
--Michael Snow
On 2/27/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
... as several people have pointed out, there are significant future benefits in recording information from the present that will be the subject of later synthesis and study. So I don't understand why we should hold off on documenting subjects of interest now. While the field of interest may not be fully coherent, and we should not declare it so prematurely, it's not wise to reject the pieces needed for it to ultimately come together.
Well, you may have noticed that I decided to agree with those people.
Nevertheless, my point was that whether something is "significant enough" to be included in Wikipedia may not be apparent for some time.
Adam
T P wrote:
Nevertheless, my point was that whether something is "significant enough" to be included in Wikipedia may not be apparent for some time.
I've always been a proponent of the view that Wikipedia is not and never should be a "finished" encyclopedia, but rather is a massive freely-licensed resource from which one can _create_ a "finished" encyclopedia. IMO our main product is database dumps, and our main target user is entities like Answers.com who take those dumps and republish them in some way. In an ideal world people who just wanted to find information and weren't going to do any sort of editing would go to them rather than coming to wikipedia.org, it'd save us bandwidth and server resources.
This is why I'm often mentioning and hoping for some form of the long-promised "article validation" feature in these contexts. Something like that could make it much easier for users to cull out the material they want while at the same time not hindering the continuing work we're doing on the "unfinished" stuff back here at the sausage factory.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
T P wrote:
Nevertheless, my point was that whether something is "significant enough" to be included in Wikipedia may not be apparent for some time.
I've always been a proponent of the view that Wikipedia is not and never should be a "finished" encyclopedia, but rather is a massive freely-licensed resource from which one can _create_ a "finished" encyclopedia. IMO our main product is database dumps...
Yeah, I think this is one of the more exciting features of Wikipedia. If the goal was just to produce a really good encyclopedia at wikipedia.org, Free licensing would be unnecessary... but if the goal is to put out into the open a huge body of information that opens up thousands of possible uses, then it's of course indispensible.
-Mark