[WikiEN-l] Culture glut

Fri Mar 11 12:39:10 UTC 2005

Brian M wrote

>But
> when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
> problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
> all.

As far as I can see, WP doesn't have a sense of proportion.  It has a sense 
of mission.  The mission is not proportionate to anything conventional.

It would certainly be quite wrong to read anything into relative coverage. 
I think the positiion is like this: after a certain point pop culture can 
become spam.  Just like a bot creating a page for each prime number would be 
spamming WP, after a certain point.  We have no idea where that point would 
be - it's a judgement call, it makes little odds to the merit of WP one way 
or another.  Information about the uninteresting is not the threat that 
disinformation about the interesting is - by a factor of at least 100.  We 
don't need to have a page about every Magic the Gathering card, but if they 
proliferate it would be much better to purge them en masse some day, than to 
clog up VfD-type processes.

Charles 