[Wikipedia-l] A few comments about Wikipedia

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Timothy Shell wrote:

> 
> I was playing with Wikipedia this evening and became aware of the
> following issues:
> 
> 1.  If Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, then it probably is not
> appropriate to have threaded discussions on a subject page.  See for
> example AlTruism, where one person gives a flame bait description of the
> concept, and numerous people then argue back about that description.  If a
> discussion is approptiate, perhaps there should be a standard discussion
> page, as AltruismDiscussion or AltruismDebate, that is linked to from the
> subject page.

I disagree; in fact I think it is healthy that there is discussion on
subject pages, and a normal thing that will arise naturally when a
subject is written with inappropriate amounts of bias.  Once the
discussion has achieved concensus (this can take a non-trivial amount of
time), someone will be compelled to go back and summarize up the
discussion.  The resulting subject, IMHO, will be much the stronger for
the discussion, because it will account for multiple viewpoints.

If it helps, imagine a bunch of old professors sitting around a library
table discussing one of the esteemed fella's submissions to the
encyclopedia.  If you've ever heard professors discuss their areas of
passion with one another, you'll know that it can be anything but
gentlemanly at times.  ;-)

Anyway, I believe it will be self-correcting.  This is part of the
reason wiki's work so well.  I don't think any rules need to be made.
If you think too much discussion has gone on, perhaps consider appending
a note exhorting the participants to wrap it up and summarize?  Or if
you feel ambitious go ahead and summarize it for them.

> 2.  Often the wiki links for noun and adjective forms of a word should
> point to the same subject page.  For example, SkI and SkiinG are
> essentially overlapping concepts.  We could say, on the SkI page, "To
> engage in SkiinG".  This is not elegant, but it works, I suppose.  I see
> on the WhichWikiShouldWeUse page that there are different versions of wiki
> that might allow for different ways of linking.  Do one of these
> alternative ways offer a solution to this problem, allowing for different 
> links to point to the same subject page?

I've had similar concerns wrt ist and ism.  E.g., Communist and
Communism.  I don't have a good solution for within this particular
wiki. 

And yes, other wiki's have capabilities that help here, but there's
usually a trade-off in the form of having to construct the links a tad
more deliberately than you'd like...  I would wager there is in fact
some way to kludge around it in this one...

Bryce