[WikiEN-l] What Readers Say on Inclusion

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/4/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Oct 4, 2005, at 4:32 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >
> > These are excellent observations. My son's Social Studies teacher
> > is an info geek who is familiar with Wikipedia. I should ask him
> > if he would be willing to run a survey of his class asking: "What
> > belongs in an encyclopedia?" and "What should not be in an
> > encyclopedia?"
>
> I think it would be important to specify "Wikipedia" not "an
> encyclopedia," so as to avoid treating Wikipedia like paper.
>
> -Snowspinner
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I was thinking the same thing. It might be interesting to hear what school
children have as a conception of what an encyclopedia is, but I don't think
it's very useful in determining what Wikipedia should or shouldn't include.

Personally I do believe that Wikipedia needs to stay focussed on being an
encyclopedia, and not something else, but that's an issue of form more than
an issue of inclusion/exclusion. It's also not a very good argument for
outright deletion, as even if one can come up with facts which have no place
in an encyclopedia I feel they still should one day be handled by one of the
Wikimedia projects. One of the problems there is that a Wikimedia project
can't be started unless there is consensus that the information doesn't
belong in Wikipedia, and a higher standard of what constitutes consensus is
generally used. Personally I'd be content if the foundation simply started a
sister project for everything which doesn't belong in one of the other
projects, and transwikied all the non-speedy (and non-copyvio) deletions
there.

Barring that, I'd be content if Wikipedia just gave me access to the deleted
files table, or mailed me a copy of everything that went through VFD, or
something similar.

Anthony