[Wikipedia-l] A quick thought about 1.0

[Andre Engels]

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Cunc has argued, correctly I think, that the idea of 1.0 may be
> causing people to delete things that really need not be deleted.  For
> this reason, he thinks it best to pursue 1.0 under a non-Wikipedia
> brand name, possibly Nupedia.

Any evidence for that, or is this just the so-manieth attack against
deletionism?

> But I have this counter-thought -- while I do agree that the idea of
> 1.0 has been causing people to do some things that I don't really
> think are best, I think the solution to this is to hurry up and
> actually implement a plan/software/whatever to permit those who have
> deletionist tendencies (no insult meant by the term!) to work on that.

In other words, I should just let Wikipedia rot because I want to remove
some things, and instead go to another project where a lot more deletion
is necessary.

> The idea is that Wikipedia can be *more* expansive once we have a 1.0
> "certification" process to keep people happy.  No one can argue "that
> doesn't belong in an encyclopedia" after that, because the simple
> response is "well, it may not belong in 1.0, but it's o.k. for
> wikipedia raw".

Well, I disagree with that. I want Wikipedia to be an encyclopedia. The
encyclopedia that 1.0 could have been had it had more space. I don't
want Wikipedia to be just a dumping place for information that someone
happens to want to write about.

> It's really the confusion between
> Wikipedia-the-always-in-process-website and
> Wikipedia-the-final-product-encyclopedia that causes the tension,
> isn't it?  Well, maybe not completely, but I think that a formalized
> 1.0 process would tend to prevent people from thinking of
> wikipedia-the-website as the sort of place where we need to limit
> ourselves to some finite number of topics.

Get lost!

Andre Engels