[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: Warehouse or Pyramid?

Sat Jul 26 11:58:00 UTC 2003

Hi all,

I am fairly new to Wikipedia and I would like to ask the advice of some
of the more experienced wikipidians.

To begin with, I am impressed with the high quality of the writing of
some of the articles. But there are also plenty which need lots of
work, and I enjoy wrestling with these ungainly creatures, restructuring
them, chopping out redundancies, tightening up the prose, adding
sub-headings and good intros, improving transitions, etc. etc. etc.

Of late, however, I have been coming into conflict with another user,
whom I will refer to as X.

X is a prolific contributor to Wikipedia with a proclivity for gathering
large amounts of information about fairly obscure topics, such as
provincial towns and cities, transportation networks, and the like.  It
is perhaps an extreme example, but I even encountered a entry he had
written on a metro system currently under construction in a major
European capital, listing all of the proposed subway stations.  All well
and good; it is all valid information, except that this metro system
won't be operational until 2011 (!).  It made wonder about X's
priorities.

And herein lies the crunch. To begin with, X favors wikifying words, such as

  beach
  theater
  city hall
  performance
  pool
  reflection
  beach

in situations where there is no high-level thematic relation; they are
simply used as common English words. In my view, such items shouldn't be
Wikified. In support of my view, I found the following Wikipedia page:

  Make_only_links_relevant_to_the_context

(I have also noticed other users unwikify contextually insignificant
words so I know I am not alone.)

X wrote on a Talk page that he thinks they all belong, that people can
ignore them if they are not useful, that they alert people to
other articles in the encyclopedia.

OK, no big issue.

More critical for me, however, is that X adamantly opposes removing ANY
information from Wikipedia: everything that goes in cannot go out.
X doesn't oppose my copyedits -- fortunately, because he is no stylist
-- but if I remove so much as a single factoid from an article he has
edited, X replaces it within fifteen minutes or so.

In brief interchanges via Talk pages, it is becoming clear that X and I
have diametrically opposed philosophies on how to create encyclopedia
articles. X appears to believe that all information is of equal value
and all should be collected in the encyclopedia, what I would call the
"warehouse" approach.  I feel an encyclopedia is more like
building a pyramid, developing hierarchies, prioritizing
information, developing a critical eye for what should be included and
what not, all with the aim of producing well-organized, well-written,
balanced articles containing the right amount and right kind of
information.

Up until a short while ago, X rolled back deletions I made one by one,
which didn't please me, but I could live with it.  However, yesterday he
reverted an entire article in which I dewikified a couple of common
words, thereby junking other edits I had also made.  It was a short
article, not particularly important to me, so I let it be.  But there
are other more substantial articles dearer to my heart (that X has also
worked on) which I feel need work, but I don't feel that now I can
comfortably do so.

I respect X's formidable information gathering skills; raw data is of
course indispensable in the construction of an encyclopedia.  But he
doesn't appear to respect me as an editor interested in presenting
information in a useful way.  I would be interested in suggestions
anyone may have for resolving my predicament, as I would very much like
to continue to contribute freely to Wikipedia.

-- 
  Viajero