[WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[Surreptitiousness]

WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
> It's a question of the amount of coverage we want to give to fiction  
> details.
> Let's say we have an article on Superman, and also on each of the various  
> Superman comic runs that have appeared in the past 50 years.
> Now make an article on *each* comic issue, and then in that article  
> describe the plot, characters, moral, date, number of issues, etc.
> *Now* for each character make an article for them, describing each issue  
> they were in, with the plot details, and link them all together.
> You'd have something like three to twenty thousand articles on  Superman.
> Many people would see that as overwhelming in scope and most relevant for a 
>  specialist work.
>   
I've always found it to be a question of how hard people are prepared to 
look the other way, or perhaps look hard enough to find a problem.  We 
seem to have lost sight of the fact that notability guidance was pretty 
much drawn up and widely accepted to prevent advertising, spam and 
original research.  It's now being pushed places it doesn't need to go, 
by people who don't really understand what we're about. Some devoted 
souls seem to treat these policy pages as "The Word", almost sacrosanct, 
which is starting to create real tension with the notion that they are 
descriptive and that consensus can change.  I think the current battle 
is not between "inclusionists" and "deletionists", but between those who 
believe rules should be followed and those who believe rules can be 
broken. That we have a rule which says we can break rules makes for the 
most perplexing conversations. I can't help but wonder, in amusement, if 
it isn't possible to fork the encyclopedia from the rules in some way.