----- Original Message ----- From: "Wjhonson" wjhonson@aol.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:25 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
Can you give an example of what "appeal to the popular" means in the
context of our project and how those "appeals" as you say are not educational? For example just today, at work, a question came up about exactly what a certain divorce proceeding said about a certain politician and why that ruined his chances of getting elected. I looked it up in Wikipedia and everyone thought I was very resourceful for being able to find the answer and now they know a lot more about sex clubs and ex-wives. Now that's popular, tabloid if you will, but it's also knowledge and it's in the project where it should be.
A good reference work should be 'accessible'. It shouldn't be written in a style of an academic work, i.e. dry, dusty, difficult to read. So it should 'appeal'.
On whether 'tabloid' material should be in an encyclopedia, well, so long as it is not absurdly biased towards the trivial. The whole point of education is to give something they wouldn't have easily got in a newspaper, say.