[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Michael Snow]

T P wrote:

> There's nothing stupid about a prestigious reference work (as 
> Wikipedia has
> become) waiting for a field to become significant before writing about 
> it.
> If it becomes significant in fifteen years, we can write about it in 
> fifteen
> years.  [[WP:MASTODON]]

Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with 
whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia? 
Either now or fifteen years from now?

As a sidenote, I would add that for any field due to become significant 
fifteen years in the future, we should already be covering, right now, 
the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example, 
there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain 
recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like 
about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe 
that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what 
Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would 
have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the 
articles we have might look better for it today.

--Michael Snow