Message: 9 Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:20:59 -0600 From: Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation... To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org Message-ID: bd4c411e0511130920l16ce374dk30a584fd7b43d67f@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On 11/12/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
It'd be a fine thing if all the authors of waaaaaay too many Pokemon articles turned their attention to more "serious" endeavors, but there's no way to make that happen.
Well, we can hope that when they grow up and go to college and eventually move into the real world, they will continue to edit Wikipedia, and hopefully not simply to keep the Pokemon articles up to date with the latest release. Even if only a few percent of them move onto real articles, some good will come of it.
And if not, well, we'll have the best encyclopedia of anime and computer games in the world. There's something to be said for that. [[Exploding sheep]] is a fascinating article, for example.
Kelly
Good lord, can we listen to ourselves?? Since when does any one person have the moral authority over deciding what topics are "serious" or not? The articles stand as they are, many are written pretty well, and that's that. Prompting people that they should spend their time on more "serious" endeavors seems to serve no practical purpose. Most likely, they might take it as an insult and just decide to leave or become vandals. Myself, I've read a few of the Pokemon articles, and having no previous knowledge or interest in them really, found them really quite fascinating and enlightening. Clearly, Pokemon is enormously popular, and any cartoon that is in a position to advertise on a Boeing 747 is culturally relevant. The same arguments leveled against Pokemon could easily be leveled against, say [[baseball]]. After all, what purpose does it serve?? It's not really "serious", and as friends have informed me, large segments of the population find baseball as boring as dust and dry as a desert. Should we tell the baseball people (which includes myself) to do more "serious" things?
darin
Brown, Darin wrote:
Good lord, can we listen to ourselves?? Since when does any one person have the moral authority over deciding what topics are "serious" or not? The articles stand as they are, many are written pretty well, and that's that. Prompting people that they should spend their time on more "serious" endeavors seems to serve no practical purpose.
Hear hear! There was a wonderful little article in the Onion a while back (that I can't find online via Google any more, alas) titled something along the lines of "Walking Star Trek Encyclopedia Made Fun of by Walking Sports Encyclopedia" in which a stereotypical sports-obsessed guy made fun of a stereotypical Trekkie for not "having a life". But there was clearly a one-to-one correspondence between their obsessions; the sports guy memorized endless pointless statistics about players while the Trekkie memorized pointless statistics about fictional characters, the sports guy dressed up in his favourite team's jersey while the Trekkie wore a Star Fleet insignia, sports guy went to playoffs while Trekkie went to conventions, etc.
Practically _every_ topic can have "-cruft" appended to the end if you ask the right person. I once saw a VfD for a transuranic element's article with the justification given that the subject was "sciencecruft". :)
On 15/11/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Practically _every_ topic can have "-cruft" appended to the end if you ask the right person. I once saw a VfD for a transuranic element's article with the justification given that the subject was "sciencecruft". :)
There were about six of those, all with exactly the same "rationale" - 'doesn't exist yet, fictional", or something along those lines. As all bar one had actually been synthesized, and the only rationale behind selecting them seemed to be picking the ones that IUPAC hadn't named yet (the one given a formal name in the previous year was left alone), it did seem to be one of those "My pet topic has been nominated for deletion so I will nominate lots of junk" spats VfD had occasionally. I did smile at "sciencecruft", though, once I'd yelled a bit at the nominator :-)
Incidentally, today's rather demoralising AfD: [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Surviving veterans of the First World War]]. Nominated on _Sunday the 13th of November_. Oh, the timing.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:
Incidentally, today's rather demoralising AfD: [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Surviving veterans of the First World War]]. Nominated on _Sunday the 13th of November_. Oh, the timing.
That beats my latest encounter with the AfD Zone: consider a group of articles cut-n-pasted from man pages that are part of the Debian distro of Linux, nominated for deletion. While some of the reasons offered for deletion were plausible, the nominator also added that these articles were suitable candidates because they were "copyright violations".
Maybe I'm just dense, but at least 2 other people agreed that they were copyright violations, and not one bothered to explain how they came to this counterintuitive conclusion. When I pressed for an explanation, a terse reply pointed me to a section of a Wikipedia article where it was stated that GPL was incompatible with GFDL. (No explanation, just a bare statement.)
Last summer when I was at OSCON, I met the guy at the Free Software Foundation who handles the legal questions about the GPL & GFDL. If I ever find his business card, I will email him to see if the hairs were split correctly in this case.
Geoff
Geoff Burling wrote:
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:
Incidentally, today's rather demoralising AfD: [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Surviving veterans of the First World War]]. Nominated on _Sunday the 13th of November_. Oh, the timing.
That beats my latest encounter with the AfD Zone: consider a group of articles cut-n-pasted from man pages that are part of the Debian distro of Linux, nominated for deletion. While some of the reasons offered for deletion were plausible, the nominator also added that these articles were suitable candidates because they were "copyright violations".
Maybe I'm just dense, but at least 2 other people agreed that they were copyright violations, and not one bothered to explain how they came to this counterintuitive conclusion. When I pressed for an explanation, a terse reply pointed me to a section of a Wikipedia article where it was stated that GPL was incompatible with GFDL. (No explanation, just a bare statement.)
Last summer when I was at OSCON, I met the guy at the Free Software Foundation who handles the legal questions about the GPL & GFDL. If I ever find his business card, I will email him to see if the hairs were split correctly in this case.
That is the most bizzare form of copyright paranoia I've ever heard of...
Andrew Gray wrote:
Incidentally, today's rather demoralising AfD: [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Surviving veterans of the First World War]]. Nominated on _Sunday the 13th of November_. Oh, the timing.
As a dark aside to that one needs to admit that the contents will diminish over time until there is no-one left to list in the article. :-)
Ec