Peter Jaros wrote:
The war is
between two competing visions of Wikipedia. One side, the
"deletionists", believes in deleting material which they consider to
be diminishing the reputation and authoritative quality of
Wikipedia. The other side, the "inclusionists", believes that the
purposes of Wikipedia are better served by having articles in an ever
expanding sphere of knowledge defined in the broadest terms, even if
it is in subjects that others may find trivial. I am clearly in the
latter camp.
I suppose I am in my own camp, or perhaps a deletionist sympathizer in
the inclusionist camp. To stretch the word "sympathizer" a bit.
I am in favor "an ever expanding sphere of knowledge defined in the
broadest terms". What I am wary of is becoming the Unedited Guide at
h2g2. This is the body of entries not in the Edited Guide,
encompassing works-in-progress, community pages, and random junk.
Random junk is fine in a system with an Edited distinction, but here
everything is in the main product.
One of the difficulties is that not everyone has the same definition of
"random junk". I can understand your apprehensions, but the way that
things are removed is just as important as what is removed. If things
are removed in the "wrong" way many otherwise valuable contributors can
see this as a disrespect of their efforts.
I support the hosting of recipes, but I support the
encyclopedic "look
and feel" first and foremost. If that means removing some recipes,
they ought to be moved to Wikibooks and not blindly deleted, but I
think many recipes have a home in the encyclopedic format. It make
take a bit of moving, but it shouldn't require *re*moving.
If a duplicate of a recipe remains o Wikipedia,
no harm is done, and
perhaps when the cookbook in Wikibooks is recognized as a serious
project people won't mind replacing the chocolate cake recipe in
Wikipedia with a statement like, "For a chocolate cake recipe see
[[Wikibooks:Chocolate cake]]", but until then attempts to remove them
will only cause arguments.
Sounds good to me. Then this is one of the next steps.
Yes that would be making the Wikibooks cookbook a respected project
where contributors will see that as a site of choice when they want to
add a recipe.
Ec