[WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.

[Tom Morris]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Other options would be for a site that ended the
> inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and
> concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That
> seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to
> specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is
> one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold
> somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea
> pigs.
>

One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast
notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on
Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not
explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism,
propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current
community of editors.

It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for
inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A
rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article
and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would
the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep
over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one
would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But
what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in
England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability
policy gets you.

The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles
don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton
is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor
and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable
presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has
an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the
evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to
be too drastic.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>

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