[WikiEN-l] Does openness dull the bleeding edge?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/31/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Does the fact that Wikipedia is 1/10 Pokemon and sex/porn articles chase
> away scientists? What would WP look like if NOR was lifted for certain science
> articles?

Eek, please separate these questions.. they are very different.

On the first part... I don't think the existence of articles is a
problem. A more interesting subject is the escape of pop-culture
content, often too trivial for the pop-culture articles into other
pages. I believe this is a phenomena made more frequent due our bias
towards pop-culture, especially in terms of what articles we select
for the main page... which seem to be roughly half pop-culture, in
some kind of misguided attempt to show the world what we have but
Britannica doesn't..


How would you feel about adding beautiful and insightful prose to an
article on a university, only to find that someone has later added:
"In a 1999 episode ("Lovers' Walk," Season 3, Episode 8) of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, Joyce (Buffy's mother) says to Buffy, "[[Carnegie
Mellon]]has a wonderful design curriculum.""
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carnegie_Mellon_University&oldid=42368976#Carnegie_Mellon_in_fiction]
... Delighted, no doubt!

What historian wouldn't want admit to his peers that he had
involvement in an article on [[John Wilkes Booth]] that tells the
reader more about Bart Simpson's schooling than John Wilkes Booth's?

... and could a serious nuclear physicist allow their audience to walk
away without letting them know that the character "J. Frank Parnell"
in the 1984 film Repo Man mentions the [[neutron bomb]]in the course
of justifying voluntary lobotomies?

Surely an expert in matters of yesterdays culture can understand our
reader's burning need to discover that in the HBO film Something The
Lord Made a comment was made by Alan Rickman as Dr. Alfred Blalock
when a comment was made by his assistant (Vivien Thomas, played by Mos
Def) about the amount of coffee he was drinking, "[[Honoré de
Balzac|Balzac]] once drank 300 cups of coffee in one day...then again,
he died of a perforated ulcer..."

... and what linguist would be disappointed with an article on
[[pejorative]] whos only in context example is a quote from The
Simpsons?

And I'm sure that chefs everywhere will feel honored when they find
that they add their wisdom along side Marge Simpson's in our article
on [[Pressure cooking]].

Please note the linked words above are the articles the content came from.
If you liked these examples hundreds more are only a "what links here"
click away from your favorite pop-culture subject.


As far as relaxing NPOV... You must be kidding. In the absence of an
authority structure to make decisions over disagreement NPOV is the
only mechanism we have to reach a stable position in our articles.