[WikiEN-l] Notability and ski resorts (was: Newbie and not-so-newbie biting)

[Surreptitiousness]

Charles Matthews wrote:
> Downmarket, in my terms, is slanting content 
> policy to favour in any way pages because they would be read often, 
> rather than serve the purpose of being a reference site.
>   
Not sure I can understand the difference between being read often and 
being referred too. But I think what's happened here is that assumptions 
are being made. You go on to say:
> We are committed to the idea that the same sort of survey writing should 
> be applied to say, "Star Wars" and astronomy, though. In the sense of 
> "being a good place to look up" either. That is the "utility" of 
> reference material. This is the same axis in another guise, I feel. The 
> goal of a generalist encyclopedia is surely to become a reputed source 
> largely independent of topic. (And we can perfectly well aim to 
> assimilate the results of academic research; in fact over a wide range 
> of topics this is exactly what we should do.)
>   
And I don't find anything in this to disagree with, and yet we disagree, 
so obviously one of us or both of us are making assumptions.  I don't 
see reader input into what we do as a bad thing, for starters.  In fact, 
I thought the very ethos of Wikipedia was that reader input was 
welcome.  I'm only here because the article I wanted to look up didn't 
exist, so I created it. I sourced it, I followed all the style guidance 
I could find, still made mistakes, but I added information to Wikipedia, 
moving from a reader to an editor. So there's reader input.  If I wanted 
to do that now, I couldn't. So we've lost that reader input, and so 
we've lost a vital check on ensuring we are "a reputed source largely 
independent of topic". I don't see a reader survey suddenly causing us 
to stop writing in an encyclopedic manner, by which I mean citing 
sources and the like, because I don't think there will ever be a strong 
enough consensus to overturn the notion that Wikipedia is an 
encyclopedia.  If there is, it will be an interesting moment that might 
encourage a fork or two. I also agree that we can assimilate the results 
of academic research. Fortunately, that wasn't the point I was arguing 
against.  The point I was making was that we were not the high-ground; 
we don't exist to publish academic research.  Kind of like the 
distinction between Science and New Scientist, we're closer to the 
latter than the former, and the latter is a mid-market publication while 
the former is aimed at the high-end.

> A recent grief of mine at CfD, though, might be good for a role play 
> session. I found an advocate for "pre-emptive disambiguation for 
> category titles"; I argued against this. For article titles, as we know, 
> you don't pre-empt: [[Arthur Atkinson (architect)]] gets moved to 
> [[Arthur Atkinson]] if there are no other articles of that personal 
> name, even though there might be in the future. But the discussion was 
> whether a category name that _might_ be construed as ambiguous should be 
> made into a more verbose form that is less likely to be ambiguous. Is 
> this some rule that someone has come up with and wants to impose, 
> against common sense? Or was I just defending the status quo against an 
> idea that should be adopted to improve the 'pedia? Not so clear on the 
> ground.
>   
I think you just had a difference of opinion based on your respective 
viewpoints. Did the debate generate a consensus?