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

[ScottL]

niht-hræfn wrote:
> On Aug 31, 2006, at 4:17, Erik Moeller wrote:
>> I don't think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia that connects
>> everything to The Simpsons somehow. Do we need a "Wikitrivia" project
>> (or perhaps this idea can be abstracted in a more useful fashion) to
>> collect all the meaningless pop cultural crap, or is existing policy
>> sufficient to remove it?
> 
> There's definitely a Simpsons wikia (http://simpsons.wikia.com/ -  
> needs a good kick in the pants though), but I'm not sure what the  
> community feels about linking to Wikia, etc. As far as I know/knew,  
> Wikia is/was sort of meant to be a place for more... specialist...  
> "encyclopedias", although it focuses more on communities, etc. It's  
> also an entirely different can of worms, and often article quality  
> is... less than good. But it's a thought. Maybe.
> 
> Keitei
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keitei

   Wikia is a totally empty suggestion to the people adding this sort of 
content.  It is basically saying "why don't you go put this somewhere 
(unassociated with wikipedia) where there will never be any Internet 
traffic to it."  Wikipedia had passed some sort of tipping point and 
that draws editors who want to be involved.  The original suggestion 
that when we needed it we created wikiquotes and wikisource etc was that 
if we could make a place with the same prestige as wikipedia where we 
could put the pop culture (And link to it form within wikipedia for 
those who want to see it (and trust me some people want to read the pop 
culture articles)) then we could solve this problem.

   That said if you call it wikitrivia not a single one of your Buffy 
editors will touch it.  If the goal is to move some of the lower 
notability, lower interest content somewhere then, you have to attract 
those editors there.  It cannot sound ... well ... trivial, even if you 
think it is.  I think it is a good idea, even though wikipopculture 
sounds dumb and wikiculture is misleading so I am not sure what you 
would call it.  Either way the key is that it has to on some something 
that you can link to with one of those cute little boxes that we get for 
wikiquote, and it has to still basically be wikimedia in stile only with 
notability rules, and styling that are a bit different.

SKL