[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Peter Damian]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wjhonson" <wjhonson at aol.com>
To: <foundation-l at 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.