T P wrote:
On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
T P wrote:
I think many people fail to realize that Wikipedia
is and always will be a
work-in-progress. We really don't know what our notability policy is, and
there are no easy answers. Stan Shebs was quite right when he pointed out
that there are no known solutions to this problem.
That being the case editors and admins should stop pretending that there
is a solution.
I should have said there are no good solutions. This problem requires a
working solution, and we do have one.
And a working solution need not be a panacea. If it helps to solve some
problems it becomes a stepping stone to further solutions.
People think
Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia, but that's just an
analogy. The truth is Wikipedia is something new
and different and what it
is is a matter of negotiation within the Wikipedia community.
I don't think that this line of reasoning gets us anywhere. It just
gets us into a lot of semantic debate about the nature of an
encyclopedia, a debate for which there is no firm answer. This debate
was largely superceded with the founding of the sister projects as
spin-offs for ideas that did not really fit into the definition of an
encyclopedia. What is new and different then is Wikimedia.
Wikipedia is still different in substantial ways from a traditional
encyclopedia, and people who try to make it "more like an encyclopedia" are
going to be disappointed.
If they start with preconceived notions about the nature of an
encyclopedia, certainly. These are the people who are likely to try to
shape Wikipedia to those notions. With a more open vision and fewer
expectations we are less likely to be disappointed
Pesonally I don't care whether webcomics are
included or not. I think it's
a shame that we have no articles on [[Dance in China]] or [[Media of
China]], and [[Military of China]] and [[Tourism in China]] are just stubs.
Those people who are doing a good job with webcomics, by whatever
standard that sub-community sets, do so partly because the subject
interests them. If we ban webcomics articles outright they are more
likely to go away than to start writing scholarly articles about
China.. Very few of them would know anything about the subject.
Ec