[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Charles Matthews]

George Herbert wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>>     
>>> Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the
>>> sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a
>>> closing admin would make of it... :-)
>>>       
>> You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of debate just to keep a page
>> around when the notability rules could be fixed instead.  Otherwise we're
>> no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that
>> anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit.
>>     
>
>
>   
<snip>
> Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an encyclopedia
> should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website
> directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or
> services.  If we fail to enforce "...The Encyclopedia..." part of our
> mission statement, we're failing, too.
>
> Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them
> is, "this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and
> review this article and ones like it".
>
>   
<snip>
> So - posting the question - are we better off as the encyclopedia that
> is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but
> not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite?
> Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum
> do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over
> time?
>   
In this context, I was interested to get an outside view of how knols 
are doing 
(http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc20100218_199388.htm 
occurring in the Signpost story on the Google donation). As we know, 
knols take inclusionism to one limit, and have wiki-like low barriers to 
entry, but dispense really with "the community" and "notability". I 
happen to have had a knol turn up in a Google search for the first time 
in the past few days, too. It was written by a Wikipedian, was useful to 
me, was not on a topic Wikipedia would have included (it was a link farm 
and had little scope for being anything else) - and (as it turned out) 
was not really as good as another non-knol page I had more trouble finding.

Several conclusions:

- knols are inclusionist in so simple-minded a way that no one (not even 
Google) thinks they do the same job as Wikipedia;
- the 99% figure for knols might be harsh, but it might not, and instead 
our intensive processes to upgrade content, there is only a very severe 
"survival of the fittest" that applies (most of the postings are simply 
going to be entirely ignored);
- it is quite a good thing that our baroque model was launched well 
before knols.

It would be trivial to adapt anything good in the knol model, clearly 
(just redefine the User: namespace slightly). Perhaps this contains the 
germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating 
unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what 
<s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s> 
contentious process".

Charles