[WikiEN-l] Attack Site Wars, Episode VII... The Return of the Essjay

[Gwern Branwen]

On  0, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> scribbled:
> Headline on CNN right now is "Poll: War support at new low" do we have an
> article of this poll? We write articles on events unless they are notable
> enough for the entire year rather than day.
>
> A notable event would be Jimbo deciding to shut down the site (wikipedia)
> for example which would IMHO only be notable enough to be mentioned on the
> article on [[Wikipedia]]. Probably the coverage would be one or two lines,
> max a paragraph. Not a full article, that can be on wikinews (maybe). Essjay
> incident however isn't even worth a single line mention on article
> namespace.

Only in [[Wikipedia]]? I don't normally descend to personal attacks, but either you are making a rhetorical point here or are ignorant of the subject matter.

(Note that in the following rant, you can generally replace 'big' or 'large' with 'popular' or 'useful' and it will still be true.)

Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia *in history*. As in, since the encyclopedia form was invented some 2 or 3 millennia ago, and of the hundreds and thousands of monumental projects culminating in multiple thick volumes, not one is the size of Wikipedia; at best they are perhaps 3/4s the size of Wikipedia (in October 2006, en WP had 609 million words to the Yongle Encyclopedia's 370 million characters). And I'm not even counting the foreign language non-English editions, which increase the size several-fold, and not counting Commons and any of the other ancillary projects. En's bigger than the Diderot Encyclopedia, bigger than any version of Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta, bigger than Cyclopedia, bigger than the Yongle Encyclopedia, bigger than that 100-volume-Spanish-one-whose-name-escapes-me-at-the-moment. It is not inconceivable that within 5-20 years, just the English *encyclopedia* will be larger than the [[Siku Quanshu]], which isn't even an encyclopedia! And the factor by which En is bigger than even the nearest competitors is not a constant, but ever increasing (and the derivative of this increase may even be accelerating). So even at the most pessimistic, the failure of Wikipedia would merit a line in [[Encyclopedia]].

Further, Wikipedia is the largest [[wiki]] ever, the largest agglomeration of [[Free content]] ever, the largest example of public participation in a scholarly project (I'm sure we must have an article on this phenomenon somewhere, but I can't figure out the right name to search for), etc.

I realize avoiding self-reference is a useful guideline since it's so easy to be biased towards including Wikipedia-related trivia, but in this case (and others, such as the Essjay article) I think peoples' urge to be NPOV have led them to disregard manifest facts and to be biased in entirely the opposite direction.

....
>     - White Cat

--
gwern
GPMG Speakeasy humint GEODSS SORO M5 BROMURE ANC zone SBI DSS S.A.I.C. Minox
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