On 1/11/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
There's a specialist topic that's about to create its own wiki. In discussion on a board, one person said "Why not just use Wikipedia? What you're describing is identical." Another responded with: "No, some 15 year old moron will mark it for deletion just because they know nothing about it."
So that's part of our public image now. Well done alienating webcomics authors, i.e. creators of memes and popular culture on the net.
Not to mention the way the webcomics AC case ended: AFD trolls now have the all-clear to work actively to alienate actual experts, because the self-professed ignorant are now *officially* to be considered equal to those who have an actual bloody clue.
I was amazed knowledge of it had spread so far. Jimbo, you heard about this example at the recent UK Wikimedia meet (the doll collectors) - this was actually an independent example from the same field.
Experts from fields that actually haven't been alienated literally don't think it's worth bothering to try writing in Wikipedia any more. Is there anything we can do to rehabilitate Wikipedia's image in the outside world?
(yes, geni, I know you're happy to be rid of annoying specialist experts)
This is really a process question more than an image question; all the PR in the world won't help us if the fifteen-year-olds are still deleting articles.
On that note, why not give more authority to WikiProjects? We'd need some sort of community sanity-checking process to limit it to "legitimate" projects; but certainly some of the larger and more organized ones (particularly those that deal with areas where "notability" isn't a very contentious issue) could handle their own deletion/guidelines/etc. with minimal supervision. We already have this for stubs, but is there some reason it wouldn't work for at least some subject areas?
Kirill Lokshin