[WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article

Wed Mar 30 13:02:33 UTC 2005

--- Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Grrr. Please stop declaring "how things will be" unilaterally, it's not very
> Wikipedia-like. 

It would be very un-wikipedia-like to intentionally mislead readers given our
goal of informing them. The fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia is
non-negotiable (although in truth we are redefining what an encyclopedia can
be) no matter how popular notions to the contrary are. 

> Moreover, I don't really think an April Fool's hoax on the main page is quite
> "subverting the goal of creating an encyclopedia". It's certainly tangential,
> but what harm are you seeing here? It's a minor diversion, not a major
> subversion.

Given the traffic we get on the Main Page, this is anything but minor. It
serves as a very bad example. The suggestion by Stan of creating hoax articles
in a contest that people would need to spot on the new page list really went
over the line. Many of these articles would not be cleaned up afterwards and
would persist in the article namespace. 

> Don't be so patronising! I'm sure everyone is quite as aware of the goals of
> this project as you are. 

Old hands yes, new hands have to be often reminded that we are first an
encyclopedia project and the community aspect is aimed at supporting that. 

> I just think it's quite unfortunate if Wikipedia
> takes itself so seriously that it fears to do what institutions like, say,
the BBC
> are quite happy to do.

Again, I have not seen a single example of a respected encyclopedia doing this.
Give me one example and I’ll stop complaining. Wikipedia in particular needs to
be sensitive to this type of thing due to our high profile and given the many
misgivings about our reliability. 

-- mav

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