[WikiEN-l] Frustrated

[Ray Saintonge]

Bryan Derksen wrote:

>Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>  
>
>>On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 Eugene van der Pijll wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>The problem here is that AfD is working as designed. In my opinion,
>>>there is certainly room for a list of really tall men on wikipedia. It
>>>should however be limited to those who are notable for being tall; which
>>>would mean a lower limit of around 2.40 m, and a smaller list of
>>>"legendary" tall men, whose names are almost synonymous with "giant",
>>>such as Goliath.
>>>      
>>>
>>And 2.4m comes from?...  This is the problem.  
>>    
>>
>It's not like we don't have lots of other arbitrary criteria for
>inclusion already, both in lists and in article retention. But in this
>case as long as the list's criteria can be evaluated reasonably
>objectively I see nothing inherently wrong with it. Perhaps the list
>could be divided into a number of sublists with different cutoffs,
>allowing the reader to pick his own preference for what "tall" means?
>It'd be a crude emulation of allowing people's articles to be tagged and
>sorted by height.
>
This is one of those so-what articles.  I would have no interest to go 
there in search of information; it's fundamentally useless.  Still, I'm 
not about to complain about it, and there are ways of dealing with the 
how-tall-is-tall criterion.  There are people who love to play with this 
kind of list, and I am glad to see these eager little minds diverted 
into harmlessly useless endeavours.  What we end up with is a handful of 
old-fashioned school principals who have forgotten their principles and 
a bunch of kindergartners who are learning through play.  The rest of us 
are learning or teaching somewhere else in the school; we don't directly 
give a damn about what's happening in the kindergarten.  For us, 
Wikipedia's reputation does not depend on self-righteous principals 
suppressing kindergarten activity.  We mostly don't get involved in 
specific deletion arguments; that would be too time-consuming.  But we 
do resent being assumed to belong to some imagined consensus.

We had a recent thread about Wikipedia's fame as expressed in 
webcomics.  I had not taken the time before to view these so I looked at 
a sampling of them.  One thing struck me.  The common thread had nothing 
to do with the accuracy or reliability of Wikipedia.  Instead, it had 
more to do with people making jokes about being blocked or having 
material deleted.  It makes me wonder about our priorities.

Ec