[WikiEN-l] More AfD toxicity

[Greg Sabino Mullane]

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> In other words, I feel that people keep trying to raise the bar on
> notability because it bugs them that people are willing to expend so
> much effort on what they consider "trivia" when there's so much work
> to be done on "worthy" subjects.

There are three problems with this:

1) One person's trivia is another person's worthy subject.

2) It doesn't necessarily transfer. People who are feverishly working on
editing one of the Pokemon articles are not likely to edit something more
"worthy" like nuclear physics if the Pokemon article was not found or not
allowed. Instead, they'd be off playing with their Pokemon cards, or
writing for a site that *did* have Pokemon articles. We just lost an editor.

3) We should welcome all people, regardless of their article preferences or
their choice of what to spend their time on. A great way to do this it to
have an amazing breadth of articles. The trivial articles can often be a
"gateway drug" - they find us when searching Google for a particular Simpsons
episode, find out they can edit it, make a small correction, follow a few
links, create an account, do some more editing, and the next thing you know
they are vandal fighting, improving random articles, and posting their two
cents to the Peppers controversy. :)

> To be fair, it's only one reason, another being that some feel (don't
> you love weasel terms?) that large amounts of information on "trivial"
> subjects detracts from our image.

If by large amounts if information they mean the size and detail of some of
our articles on "trivial" things, then the solution is to increase the depth
of non-trivial articles, not to curb the creation of "large-yet-trivial" ones.

If by large amounts they mean the number of articles on trivial things versus
non-trivial things, setting a higher bar to limit the number of trivial articles
created is not the answer. What needs to happen is draw in more editors. Even if
most only edit "trivial" articles, some will also contribute to "non-trivial" ones.
I'd rather see non-trivial articles improved by 20% at the cost of keeping the
same same trivial/non-trivial ratio, rather than see the ratio decrease for a 5%
improvement.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg at turnstep.com
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http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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