[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia: Warehouse or Pyramid?

Sun Jul 27 13:58:10 UTC 2003

Hi,

viajero at quilombo.nl wrote:
> 
> except that this metro system
> won't be operational until 2011 (!).  It made wonder about X's
> priorities.

We are all volunteers; nobody gets paid to contribute. Therefore, I 
don't see how anyone should impose any priorities on somebody else. In 
other words, if someone wanted to work on obskure and insignificant 
topics, there's nothing wrong with letting them; there is no way of 
forcing them into other topics that interest them less. Who knows, maybe 
in 2011 we won't find someone to write out the list of stations, so it's 
good to already have one.

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

The question what words are relevant to the context and which aren't is 
purely subjective -- unfortunately. I understand from my own experience 
that it can often feel to you like it's completely obvious that "beach" 
has no relevancy to an article on the [[Sun]], say. But it's not 
actually this obvious. Someone else might feel this link is relevant, 
and they might feel that this is completely obvious.

We cannot formulate a rock-solid policy that will dictate which words 
should be wikified and which ones shouldn't. We have to live with the 
fact that there are, and always will be, disagreements about this. 
Probably the best way to handle it (for both you and "X") is to try not 
to have too strong feelings about it.

> More critical for me, however, is that X adamantly opposes removing ANY
> information from Wikipedia: everything that goes in cannot go out.

Well, I would agree to that. Of course you can refactor articles and 
perhaps move little insignificant factoids to the bottom, but seeing as 
one of Wikipedia's goals is to record as much of human knowledge as 
possible, why should any of it ever be removed?

For example, I'm pretty certain that somewhere in Wikipedia it says that 
humans at some point in history used to be under the impression/belief 
that atoms are unsplittable (as evidenced by the word's etymology). You 
see, even if some ground-breaking research brings to light new facts 
that contradict existing information in the Wikipedia, perhaps it's best 
*NOT* to remove it, but only prefix it with "It used to be believed 
that" and add "until in [[2003]] an experiment by [[John Doe 
(physicist)]] proved that ......"

> developing a critical eye for what should be included and what not,

Everything should be included ;-)

> However, yesterday he
> reverted an entire article in which I dewikified a couple of common
> words, thereby junking other edits I had also made.

This is, of course (not taking into account possible bias due to your 
point of view) not very nice, but the best you can do about it is 
reinstate your other edits. Of course, you could also revert his revert, 
and if it ends in an edit war, then a sysop will take care of the 
article and (hopefully) keep your useful information in while making an 
educated decision regarding the linking of common words.

> 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.

Indeed I am starting to suspect that this is one common reason people 
leave us before we ever see substantial contribution from them. We have 
a page telling people to be 'Bold in editing pages', but some people are 
bolder than others. Especially when an existing contributor ("X" in this 
case) is being bold in reverting, it is relatively uncommon for the 
other party to initiate an edit war (a revert war) if they're a newbie 
(you in this case).

Greetings,
Timwi