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

[Charles Matthews]

Surreptitiousness wrote:
> 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.  
It is welcome in the form of participation, certainly. The question is 
more whether lurkers should be stakeholders. Traditionally what is 
respected is showing the better way, rather than compiling a wishlist.
> 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. 
Why? You would be better advised to draft in userspace rather than just 
type straight into the box, but I don't understand why you think it 
doesn't still work in principle.
> 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.  
No, we exist to regurgitate it.
> 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.
>
I'm glad we haven't gone the way of New Scientist, then (yet).
>> 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?
>
>
The closure was a compromise, rather than a consensus emerging. 
([[Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 September 11#Deans of 
Lincoln]], for mavens.) While "Dean" and "Lincoln" were both deemed 
individually ambiguous, one side only was disambiguated. But not for a 
specific clash. So in a sense I lost the argument, it seems. But it 
could have been worse.

Charles