[WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting

[Surreptitiousness]

Charles Matthews wrote:
> Amory Meltzer wrote:
>   
>> I wouldn't exactly call that post "nice."  It reads to me like just
>> another person complaining.
>>     
> Actually this is not so much an example on bullying, but on _precisely_ 
> why we have WP:COI.
>
> The hill has "five rope tows and seven ski runs". Is this an 
> encyclopedic topic? Not really.
>   
It depends on your definition, doesn't it. We've never really got to an 
accepted definition, [[WP:N]] is the closest we've come but that's 
widely ignored by a vast number of contributors whose voice we have 
somehow managed to disenfranchise. There are also two schools of thought 
on what to do with this sort of content, we can either delete it or 
present it as best we can. Are we looking to be Britannica for the web, 
or are we looking to do a little bit more. Early on there was a 
consensus that Wikipedia wasn't paper, but that's been reined in by 
people who point to things and say, you wouldn't find that in 
Britannica. I can't help but feel we wouldn't have come as far as we 
have if the mission statement had been something like "replicating the 
stuff you get in Britannica but just being a little more timely in 
updating". I'd really like some decent surveys conducted which let us 
know exactly what our users and readers want us to be, because without 
that, we're just blowing hot-air. We've lost the idea that our readers 
can let us know what is missing by starting new articles, because we 
enforce standards that don't reflect that given reader's concerns. Yes, 
there's the obvious argument that if we adopted the standards of the 
most edits, we'd allow vandalism, but that's not the real debate, it's 
just a snappy sound bite. The real issue is what sort of resource we 
really are. I think the writer of the essay has a real point when they 
say "Wikipedia is dead – the Britannica staff has taken over."