On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 8:31 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative writer/editors who could really make our content sing -- and in more areas than just a more-readable writing style.
Here's another thing to watch out for: nowhere is it written that Wikipedia must be as stodgy and officious as a Real Encyclopedia. Yet the way some people denounce and carry on about anything that smells remotely like fun, you'd think this was up there as a fourth pillar of the triangle.
One should always have fun at work, it's what makes the job livable! Certainly volunteer work should be no exception.
On the contrary, it is Okay to Have Fun. It's okay for us as editors, and it's okay for our readers, too. In fact, it's more than okay, it's downright better, if it motivates us as editors, and if it makes our product easier to read and more enjoyable for our readers.
It certainly is okay for us, as editors, to have a bit of fun. I've wished more than once I could just sit down and have a beer with someone who disagrees with me, and I'm sure we'd see our positions are near the same. It is also alright to have "entertaining" articles, like [[Ima Hogg]], so long as they are still presented factually and neutrally, and if of acceptable quality, to have these on the Main Page on April Fool's.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't have Trivia sections -- isn't that a good enough reason for us *to* have them? :-)
But you were doing so WELL up to this point! :) There are plenty of reasons not to have trivia sections. "Britannica doesn't have them" and "We should not have fun" are certainly at the bottom of that list. They are an attractive nuisance, encouraging the writing of unsourced garbage (99% of trivia sections I've found are entirely unsourced). They are poor for flow and organization. And realistically, if a fact is significant enough to go in the article, well then, it is significant enough to go -in the article-. If a factoid is so insignificant that it can't even be integrated into the prose, it should stay out altogether. And if it can be integrated into the prose, well then, why aren't we doing that rather than dumping it in a random junkpile? The same for "In popular culture"-let's leave "Hehheh it got mentioned 24 times on Family Guy" to IMDB.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l