[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's a job?

[Bryan Derksen]

William Pietri wrote:
> When I saw in my watchlist yesterday that somebody had XfD'd 
> [[WP:BJAODN]], I honestly thought it was a bad joke until just now, when 
> I bothered to look at the actual details.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bad_Jokes_and_Other_Deleted_Nonsense
> 
> Turns out that somebody just went and deleted most of it, and the XfD is 
> just for cleaning up the last bits:
> 
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AN#BJAODN_Deleted

Crap. And the worst part is that it's not even a result of conventional
stick-in-the-muddiness, it's a result of _copyright paranoia_
stick-in-the-muddiness. As if the current bot-driven fair use image
deletion spree wasn't annoying enough to keep on top of on its own.

Considering all the other more significant ways Wikipedia violates the
letter of the GFDL with article merges and splits and even the
occasional perversion of a "merge-and-delete" AfD result, does anyone
honestly think we'd ever get in trouble for having hard-to-follow
attribution for stuff stashed away on BJAODN?

> Leaving the merits of this particular action aside, I saw more than one 
> person suggest that our job was to write an encyclopedia, and that 
> anything else was a waste of time. That troubles me.

Indeed. I recall once upon a time supporting the deletion of some pages
where Wikipedians were playing chess with each other, and I still think
that was a good example of the sort of frivolous side-activity that is
not remotely encyclopedia-related. But things like BJAODN are frivolous
side-activities that _are_ encyclopedia-related, and so provide a useful
way to blow off steam without straying too far from Wikipedia's main
mission.

I rarely ever contributed to BJAON but even so I still find myself quite
disheartened by this development. It was nice just knowing it was there.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 250 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20070601/2828e4da/attachment.pgp