[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Robth]

On 2/26/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> If Scott McCloud were making the Encyclopedia of Sequential Art,
> wouldn't we want an entry on every single topic he thought important
> enough to include?

Well...maybe.  If he had already written said encyclopedia, thus
creating a very solid (printed, even!) source, then sure.  Otherwise,
it would depend on the degree to which we could do so while
maintaining some sort of across the board standards.  I know there are
some folks here who don't like the notion of across the board
standards, but as I've explained before on this list I think there are
good reasons to limit ourselves to subjects on which something has
been independently published, with some kind of editorial process or
at least some sort of putting-a-reputation-on-the-line-ness to it.
Wikipedia is a general project, and I think this means that we will
inevitably leave some degree of envelope-pushing in specific areas to
specialist projects; this is the niche that the countless specialist
wikis around the web look to fill, and that works well, I think; there
is a forum for forms of content that are problematic to fit into a big
general system, but its differentiated to mitigate spillover issues.
We can't be all things to all people

The above is an argument for some form of reliable sources guideline,
obviously, and not a notability guideline.  The latter I'm more up in
the air on; in the long run, I see no real need for one, but in the
short run there is something to be said for limiting our size sheerly
for reasons of manageability (although realistically we crossed the
borders of where we had any really effective quality control long
ago); some sort of rolling notability guideline that we could
progressively loosen over the years as our ability to cope with more
and more content developed would be an interesting possibility.

-- 
Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)