2008/9/24 Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com>om>:
On 9/24/08, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
We could
start featuring two articles a day. One from a traditional
encyclopaedic topic and one from a pop-culture topic, perhaps.
That's a false division of content. Wikipedia merely has more space
for pop-culture topics than traditional paper encyclopedias. Anyway,
pop culture on Wikipedia is one of our greatest assets - it attracts a
lot of new users who would not otherwise read encyclopedia articles.
It also attracts deletionists who would otherwise have nothing to
bitch about, or would they find something else? *shrug*
I don't think deletionists come to Wikipedia to delete. Perhaps they
have a strict idea of what should be in an encyclopedia (based on
print encyclopedias), and since pop culture does not fit into this
model, they wage war against these articles?
What ever it is, they do great damage to Wikipedia and make the
project look very hostile - particularly to non-Wikipedians and new
users. Where we could allow these articles in the knowledge that they
bring people to the project who would otherwise not be here, at the
minimal cost of disc space. Instead we scare these users away. This
particularly affects young users, who might go onto edit other parts
of the project and become respected Wikipedians.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)