2008/9/24 Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com:
On 9/24/08, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
We could start featuring two articles a day. One from a traditional encyclopaedic topic and one from a pop-culture topic, perhaps.
That's a false division of content. Wikipedia merely has more space for pop-culture topics than traditional paper encyclopedias. Anyway, pop culture on Wikipedia is one of our greatest assets - it attracts a lot of new users who would not otherwise read encyclopedia articles.
It also attracts deletionists who would otherwise have nothing to bitch about, or would they find something else? *shrug*
I don't think deletionists come to Wikipedia to delete. Perhaps they have a strict idea of what should be in an encyclopedia (based on print encyclopedias), and since pop culture does not fit into this model, they wage war against these articles?
What ever it is, they do great damage to Wikipedia and make the project look very hostile - particularly to non-Wikipedians and new users. Where we could allow these articles in the knowledge that they bring people to the project who would otherwise not be here, at the minimal cost of disc space. Instead we scare these users away. This particularly affects young users, who might go onto edit other parts of the project and become respected Wikipedians.