[WikiEN-l] Afd nominations

Mon Oct 3 03:06:50 UTC 2005

On 10/2/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com>
> >
> >Before yesterday, I didn't know what a SPUI was.  Now I have a good
> >general understanding of a SPUI.  Now, some may say, no one but a
> >traffic engineer would be interested in that!  NN, DELETE!  Why
> >shouldn't we serve the traffic engineer as well as we serve the Dr.
> >Who fan, or the environmental scientist, or the pop culture buff?
> >It's all POV when you start throwing terms like "notability" rather
> >than relying on third party verifiability.
> >
> >Wikipedia IS an encyclopedia, but because it's the most comprehensive
> >encyclopedia ever, it's actually many encyclopedias.  It's an
> >encyclopedia of Dr. Who, an encyclopedia of U.S. history, an
> >encyclopedia of British colonies, an encyclopedia of schools, an
> >encyclopedia of Egyptian regents, an encyclopedia of construction
> >equipment, an encyclopedia of Mariah Carey recordings, etc...   and we
> >don't have to limit it arbitrarily for some group of editors's POVs
> >regarding "notability".
>
> And yet, there are definitely notability clauses within various policies.
> "What Wikipedia is not" implies notability, as do the requirements about
> biographies, reliability of sources, etc.  And, of course, Jimbo's statement
> about "extreme minority opinions" as regards NPOV is also all about
> notability - if notability (and editorial discretion regarding it) were not
> present, then all we'd really need would be the NPOV policy, and all it
> would have to say was "all opinions are represented, and must be attributed
> to their source".
>
> I view the claims that Wikipedia has no notability requirements as an
> extreme position, and one incompatible with creating an encyclopedia (as
> opposed to a giant repository of all known facts).  While Wikipedia has no
> *explicit* notability policies, I think notability requirements are implicit
> in both its existing policies and its fundamental mandate.

I think notability requirements have served well thus far to get where
we are, building a sturdy frame of credibility and a solid base of the
expected "typical encyclopedia" set of articles.  It's kept people
on-mission to date.  But I don't think they have anything to do with
Wikipedia's "fundamental mandate".

In my opinion, the root of the problem is that people have never seen
anything like Wikipedia prior to its creation, even those who started
it, so they fully don't know what to expect of it.  So they try to
impose their view of paper encyclopedias on it, without ever realizing
just how broad we can afford to be without the limits of paper.  Or in
thinking of it, they think that inclusivity precludes the ability to
remain an encyclopedia and therefore necessitates a mutation into a
"giant repository of all known facts" when in fact, one does not
necessarily follow the other.  It's a specious argument; an appealing
logical fallacy.

Yes, you are correct in that having no notability policies is
incompatible with a traditional encyclopedia.  This is not a
traditional encyclopedia.

Have you ever browsed the encyclopedia section of a major library? 
How about searching on Amazon for "encyclopedia".  Sure, there's
Britannica, but there's an "Encyclopedia of Yacht Racing", an
"Encyclopedia of New England", the "ESPN College Football
Encyclopedia",  "The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding", "The
Encyclopedia of Window Fashions" and thousands of others.  We can be
all of these, and more.

If this project and its participants were content to simply mimic and
expand Britannica, I wouldn't be interested at all.  Yet that's what
many people at AfD are trying to do: confine a far more powerful
concept into their preconceived notions of what they expect from a
single encyclopedia.

And finally, regarding extreme minority opinion; we shouldn't fail to
cover the modern equivalents of phrenology, whatever they are.  We
should just leave those out of the mainstream articles and bury them
in obscurity at a depth proportional to the public acceptance of their
views.  If someone specifically searches for them here, they should
find them, perhaps in an article titled "non-mainstream views of X". 
This is where editing skill is really most valuable: sorting the data
appropriately, not simply rejecting the uninteresting or unfamiliar.
--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused