On 9/2/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
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.
I doubt I could agree more with David - we have a serious problem with people tagging articles of valid encyclopedic value for deletion. I'm no rabid inclusionist - I'm still a nominal member of ADW, just for kicks - but it really ticks me off whenever I burrow through [[C:CSD]] and find people tagging perfectly fine stubs with deletion reasons such as "inadequate context". (And 9 times out of 10, this is done by one of those funny scripts people install so they can more efficiently tag valid articles for deletion.)
I mean, what on earth is wrong with an article like "X was mayor of New York City from so-and-so to so-and-so?" What is wrong with a poorly formatted but perfectly readable list of bishops for a particular diocese? It seems to me that people tag articles for deletion because it's now a crime to write an article that's any less than [[WP:GA]] standard that isn't about a Pokemon or movie character.
There's a fair bit of intellectual snobbishness going on, but I would say as much if not more anti-intellectual snobbishness, just because people don't understand certain things and/or don't tolerate wikin00bery. The appropriate thing to do with these articles is to tag them with {{stub}} or {{cleanup}} (and let someone else come along to change the tag to something more specific), rather than tag them for deletion. We're not out to build the perfect encyclopaedia in one day.
Johnleemk