Message: 1 Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:39:55 +0000 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation... To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org Message-ID: fbad4e140511140939sb9e3631od43e79d42bb18d18@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
geni wrote:
On 11/14/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
That's absolutely and incredibly not true. They write a verifiable article about something they know, get abusive comments on AFD (for some reason, civility and assume good faith don't work there ... the reason AFD is so damn poisonous to the community is that it blatantly encourages participants to assume *bad* faith) and *leave*.
That would be unusal. More likely they will simply be ignored. Most stuff that lands on afd is not implicetly verifiable.
Case where this happened really badly: webcomics. We now have a project fork, Comixpedia, entirely caused by AFD. You may recall extensive discussion surrounding this on this list a few weeks ago.
Wow, I was totally unaware of this happening. After browsing around "comixpedia" for an hour or so, I have to admit I'm totally mystified and agree with David. There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the articles at this "comixpedia" site to differentiate them from any number of articles at other places, except that certain people seemed to think certain articles weren't "notable". But really, come on, less than 1,000 articles, yeah that's *real* threatening. It's *1/10th of 1%* of wikipedia articles. And a large number of these are copies of Wikipedia articles, and a large number of the remaining are actually far from stubs, and many contain some interesting information. What next, every time some people get in their head that there are too many stubs on a subject, we'll just banish them to a fork? Moreover, the move to the fork sets up an artificial barrier to linking to other topics on wikipedia. One of the joys I have found about the project is the ability to begin at one article, and gradually move on to interesting articles in other areas simply by clicking on interesting links 3 or 4 times. It gives a sense of connection and inter-relatedness. The impression given here is that "comics" are somehow beyond the pale of acknowledgement and have to be banished in exile.
Am I just really missing something?? How did this happen? I have a Jonathan Swift suggestion: Why don't we just create 1,000 different forks -- let's have a math fork, a physics fork, a chess fork, a baseball fork. We'll call them "mathpedia", "physicspedia", "chessipedia", and "baseballpedia", they can all have different webpages, different admins, different statistics, different everything. And they can all link to each other via external links. That's a great idea.
BTW, I wonder how many people feel the way I do, but never registered their opinion simply because they weren't even *aware* a debate was going on. (I do remember some posts about webcomics, but I never caught on that an entire fork was being created. And besides, what about people who don't keep up with this discussion list??
darin