[WikiEN-l] To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 5:03 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

> What harms  the public view of Wikipedia is not articles on minor
> subjects, or on matters i anyone will understand are of significance
> only to fans. What really harms the perceived quality of  Wikipedia is
> promotional and inaccurate articles. almost everyone can realize that
> the content of a reference work may  include things they do not
> themselves want--but they do expect it to be both honest and accurate.
>
> We could decide either for or against the detailed coverage of popular
> culture, but what we cannot tolerate  is the diversion of effort in
> dealing with this. There is of course an obvious solution, which is to
> silence everyone who does not agree with me, but that's not going to
> fly. What we need is some way of not just forming a compromise but
> having it persist--otherwise any solution will be back to the same
> point in a few months. Arb com apparently does not think it is capable
> of this, but I don't see how else it can be done--they should try a
> little more boldness. Since they'll be criticised whatever they choose
> to do or not to do, they might as well decide.
>

Arbcom isn't supposed to be there to make policy.

The diversion of effort dealing with this has been part of a long drawn out
war over inclusionism or deletionism.  Which has never settled to a
consensus.

Your belief that we cannot tolerate the diversion of effort is common, but
also *extremely* dangerous...  This is a community, the community is
divided, has some fairly fundamental disagreements over what it wants to be,
and the politics and dynamics and discussion over those fundamental
disagreements are how we stay one community and avoid forking or driving
away a large part of the community.

Part of the problem here is that we have two sets of idealists (purist
exclusionists, who think that non-serious topics should not be considered,
and purist inclusionists, who think that everything must be), who naturally
talk past each other as they have fundamental goals disagreements, combined
with two sets of realists (realist inclusionists who are deleting primarily
over quality and RS issues, and realist inclusionists who favor the
gradualist approach on article quality and prefer to work on article
quantity for the time being) who are talking past each other when they could
engage more productively.

Along with many in the middle who wish no part in duking it out.

Perhaps there is fruitful discussion to be had in getting the two realist
camps to cooperate.  There is nothing gained among either realist camp by
denying that a number of the popular culture articles have been woefully
badly sourced and unencyclopedic, or in denying that popular culture
articles are popular and desired by a lot of article editors (and presumably
readers, assuming that readership follows editorship interest trends).

Coming to a cooperative resolution of the "Delete vs Improve" problem would
get us enough of the way there that setting both the purist camps on fire
and hearing the lament of their women would become a credible and possibly
legitimate way to solve the problem.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com