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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/31/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> > 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]].
>
> Nice examples.

Wikipedia makes it easy. :(

> But what's the best way to deal with this? In the past,
> when people created encyclopedia entries that were really dictionary
> definitions, we set up Wiktionary. When they started pasting the text
> of national constitutions, "Project Sourceberg" was set up. As
> quotations accumulated at the end of articles, Wikiquote was created.
>
> 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?

I'm not sure about that..  Triva where the reader expects it is no problem.

Sub-trivia spread into random places, however, hurts our
professionalism (it's about self respect, as I've argued a lot
recently!), and is an easy target for vandalism (hard to cite
subtrivia except as references to difficult to check primary sources).

If you buy my argument (mostly unsubstantiated) that our systemic bias
towards popculture (and the trivia that goes along with it) is
encouraging people to spread subtrivia about the project... then yes,
a Wiki trivia *might* help.   But I'd argue that wiki-trivia would
best be served as a non-wikimedia project, and that wikimedia would
best be served by not hosting such a project.

Further, the creation of a trivia project would still leave us with a
hard situation... if it were easy to decide what belongs there (and
thus not in Wikipedia) and if it were easy to actually move this
content...    Then we wouldn't have the problem we have on enwiki
today.