of reasons:
1. It promotes elitism, by tending to say that some articles are more equal
than others.
2. Wikipedia is, by nature, a work in progress. Every article can be changed,
developed, reassessed, and rewritten. The Sifter idea creates an illusion of
finality about particular articles--they are "good enough," so to speak.
3. Most articles will be ignored. We are now close to 150 thousand articles
on Wikipedia. I doubt anyone has read them all, and some have been long
forgotten. In many cases this is because they deal with some arcane subject matter
that doesn' t really foster mass interest or debate (more often debate). As the
intro to the BP page itself states: "we couldn't possibly keep track of all of
the brilliant prose here!" In other words, more potential Brilliant Prose
candidates will be left out than will be added.
4. It can promote factionalism. Some people might have an inordinate number
of articles in BP, so that when they write new articles, their supporters (and
yes, there are people here who think that every word typed in by some of their
Wiki-colleagues is divinely inspired) will immediately nominate it for BP.
Once the flame wars die down, it will be there and it will be even more
difficult to eliminate POV and other issues--after all, it is "brilliant prose," isn't
it?
5. There is so much left to be done yet. Maybe at a later date we can
consider this, but right now there are countless stubs, even more articles taken
directly from EB, and entire areas that are not covered. As an extreme example, if
we rise above the debate over America-centric vs. Euro-centric articles, we
will see how little there really is about Africa. Maybe we should be filling in
the gaps first, before we start patting ourselves on the back about how smart
we are.
6. Who are these so-called experts who will qualify material? From what I've
seen so far, being an academic expert in a particular field hardly protects
one from edit wars--Julie and 172 are two primary examples of this. Meanwhile,
the only qualification I have seen so far is that they have a B.A. Gimme a
friggin' break! (and before I get accused of academic elitism, I make it known
that I dropped out of college and spend an inordinate amount of time at work
correcting the BS from the BAs, MAs, and PhDs).
7. Maybe the question isn't so much "why shouldn't we?" but "why should we?"
Especially at this particular stage.
Okay, I've had my say. Flame away.
Danny
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