I agree with Bryan, not Todd. The content of WP is a compromise among the things different people think important.
I joined primarily to increase the traditional academic content. I soon saw it was equally a matter of radically improving it, such content as there was especially in history and the humanities tending to come unaltered from century-old reference books. And I saw that many WPedians tried to delete content for academics--even members of the US National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society -- on the sometimes stated grounds that nobody who did not win a Nobel prize was important. I gradually learned how to help others defend such material--though there is still the astounding situation that less than half the current members of these bodies have articles, cf. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_National_Academy_of_Scie...] and compare [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fellows_of_the_Royal_Society] with [http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/fellowsindex2.cfm].
And I was properly scandalized not as much by the excessive detail of the popular culture sections, but by the policies for complete coverage of numbered highways and the like.
So I have realized that the practical way of building an encyclopedia is mutual tolerance. If there is enough content to write articles, and if the subjects of of any recognizable importance within their area, let the people who want to write articles do so. It's the only way to get what I consider the serious stuff included.
And with respect to popular culture, the current problem seems to be that the current proponents of these deletions do not recognize the significance of creative works on each other, or the importance of themes and setting in books and moviesThis is as much a subject of literary criticism as the description of the plot and the characters, and academic sources and popular reviews are available for many of the genres. So in a sense it comes down to anti-intellectualism, in a way. And again the problem is the quality of the articles--in almost no cases has anyone bothered to source this content, even when the sources can readily be found online. It's the same amateurish superficial approach as with the historical subjects: write down what comes immediately to hand and stop there..
Adding this content is not made easier by the current rash of deletions. it takes many hours of work with print and electronic library resources to source one of these articles properly, often with material not available except in large academic libraries. An article can be nominated for deletion in about 2 minutes, less if one uses the same deletion rationale for all.
it is also not made easier by the opinion of some of the deletion proponents that whatever articles are found are not relevant, the opinion of some that list formats are inherently suspicious, and the opinion of a few that the content would not be encyclopedic even if sourced. The typical rationale given is loosely associated items--if for movies to have a common theme is a loose association, I don't know what would count as a tight one.
The name of "trivia" doesn't help of course. But popular culture is a serious field of study, and about half the people at WP will not believe it--and, even here, make fun of the name. Even were it only a field of popular interest, it would equally deserve treatment.
And then there is the expressed preference of war rather than reason for making decisions, and the general unwillingness to compromise, both characteristic of WP process.
On 8/30/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
In any event, when one finds a situation where one topic has lots of coverage and another topic has less but one feels should have more, I don't believe the appropriate solution is to delete stuff from the first topic until they're even. The solution should be to _add_ stuff to the second topic.
That depends if the second topic is a valid one in the first place. Deletion, cutting, and merging are excellent ways to deal with articles which aren't covered significantly in secondary, independent sources. Editors edit. Part of that is to cut. That's not a bad thing.
If you feel something isn't a "valid" topic for an article at all, just put it up for deletion and let the deletionism/inclusionism war set up a battlefront there for a while to hash things out.
I don't see how that affects my criticism of wikigroaning, though, since I say it's based on a fallacious underestimation of our coverage of the topic that's generally considered more "serious" rather than based on the large size of the culture-related one. If a Wikigroaner went to [[Lightsabre]] and found it to be 72 kilobytes long (exactly as it is right now) but then went to [[Light]] and found it to be 250 kilobytes long (a wild guess at how big the contents of [[Category:Light]] would be if mashed together in one page) there'd be no basis for his complaint.
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